Tag Archives: health at any size

Debbie says:

etta_candy

Etta Candy deserves an entire blog post of her own, but the only things I know about her come from Rob Bricken and James Whitbrook’s piece at io9:

Created by William Moulton Marston only an issue after Wonder Woman’s debut, Etta Candy appeared like she should be the heroine’s comic relief. She was a goofy cartoon character who loved candy (carrying it everywhere), and she shouted strange catchphrases like “Woo woo!” and “For the love of chocolate!” But if you thought for a second that Etta was merely a joke character, she would have quickly corrected you, probably by punching you in the face.

Lucy Davis will play Etta in the upcoming Wonder Woman movie. If she’s portrayed one-half as bad-ass and radical as she is in the panels Bricken and Whitbrook show, she will completely eclipse Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman — and I’ll be in line to watch her do it.

Laurie and I both blogged about the 2008 Newsweek cover showing Sarah Palin’s real (or nearly real) skin, and it’s interesting to see that people are still talking about it in the context of women running for office. Julia Baird takes it on in the New York Times:

The real question here is about perfection: the standards by which women are judged, and the seemingly ever-present, imposed need to airbrush the images of women. Even vice-presidential candidates. This is something we must ask if we want to shrink the too-long list of things that distract people from what women actually say when we try to speak in public.

Perfection is also at issue in the discussion of Zoe Saldana’s casting as Nina Simone . Samantha Cowan at TakePart examines the controversy:

A new official poster and trailer for the movie shows Saldana wearing a prosthetic nose and dark face makeup, reigniting the controversy surrounding the decision to cast Saldana as the titular character in Nina. Saldana has faced criticism since news surfaced in 2012 that she would replace Mary J. Blige—who had to drop out owing to scheduling conflicts—to play the High Priestess of Soul. Saldana addressed the situation in 2013, telling Allure, “It doesn’t matter how much backlash I will get for it, I will honor and respect my black community because that’s who I am.”

Saldana, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, has alternated between saying that people of color don’t exist and identifying as a black and Latina woman. Regardless of how Saldana identifies, many believe the role should have gone to an African American woman—or at least a woman with a darker skin tone and features that more closely resembled Simone’s.

When everyone is talking about how people (but mostly men) use Tinder and its ilk for faceless sex, a completely different kind of anonymous sex designed for women is apparently a new craze in London. Dominique Sisley reports at Dazed:

The process is simple. You head to the class, strip off from the waist down, and lie across an unknown, fully-clothed man while he strokes your clitoris. The aim? A shared meditational experience, and “the deeply human, deeply felt, and connected experience of orgasm”. …

Although [orgasmic meditation] is mostly marketed towards “free, hip, powerful” women, TurnON Britain (the official UK branch of the movement) also offers classes to men who feel a “willingness and desire to know the feminine” – or in other words, guys who could do with a little more guidance in that area. As the course summary eloquently puts it, “learning how to handle her pussy is equally important as learning how to handle the rest of her. Imagine what would be possible if you learned to do both?”

Leaving aside the unfortunate choice of “handle” in that quotation, this sounds like something from the 1970s, come back in a new guise. The article says that tens of thousands of young Londoners are participating; I hope they’re having fun!

In a completely different aspect of human sexuality,  uterus transplants are now a thing, and a good thing.  The procedure is designed for women with uterine factor infertility (UFI). I can’t help but wonder if and when it will become part of the suite of trans surgeries, and change the landscape of how pregnancy relates to gender.

etta_candy_2

We have, of course, been railing about BMI for decades. I’m still fond of my description of it as “braindead, meaningless, insidious” from 2007. Premiere statistics and data site fivethirtyeight.com is jumping on the bandwagon with this article by Katherine Hobson. Hobson is  too focused on “waist circumference” for my money, and I think she’s still deep in the belief that fat is bad for you, however it’s measured. Nonetheless, she goes against the grain of journalists everywhere by ending with a fat-positive quotation:

There’s another camp that doesn’t care about finding a better measure of excess body fat at all but would prefer to move beyond metrics of extra fat. “Sure, waist circumference is better than BMI, but the focus on fat and on body size has done us a disservice,” said A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at UCLA and first author of the recent International Journal of Obesity study on BMI and health indicators. “It’s thrown off the focus on actual health markers.” And, she said, it has contributed to a stigma against the overweight.

She’d prefer to see a strategy that focuses instead on changing behavior. “If you’re eating healthy, exercising and sleeping well, I don’t care how much fat you have,” Tomiyama said.

And in that context,  Hobson should read Linda Bacon on fat ambassadors, allies, and detractors. Sadly, Bacon wrote this column because of how hard Sarai Walker, author of Dietland, is finding her new life as a fat ambassador.  Bacon has nothing new to say about allies and trolls: she just tells the truth well and clearly.

… a message to those who persist in “concern trolling” about health: Recognize this: respect should not be contingent on health or health habits. Educate yourself. Weight stigma and discrimination are much more health-damaging than fat tissue can ever be. If you are truly concerned about the health ramifications of someone’s large body, be part of the solution, not the problem: show others respect and compassion, rather than shaming and blaming people for their weight or suggesting they change it.

Lisa Hirsch sent us the Sarah Palin link. Otherwise, all are links from my regular reading, which includes Feministe, Shakesville, Sociological Images,, Feministing, io9, and TakePart, along with other sources. No, I don’t know why the background of this post is black; it happened during drafting, and my html skills don’t seem good enough to fix it.

Want to Reduce Risk of Dementia? Don’t Diet!

Debbie says:

I know I’m not alone in being more frightened of old-age dementia than any other thing that could happen to me. Everyone is different about these things, but for me, my mind is me, and without it I do not want to survive.

That fear, a lifetime of body image activism, and my hatred of junk science combine to make this the best science news possible.

The analysis of nearly two million British people, in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, showed underweight people had the highest risk. …

Dementia is one of the most pressing modern health issues. The number of patients globally is expected to treble to 135 million by 2050.

At least by basic criteria, the science is impeccable. There were 1,958,000 subjects.

Compared with people of a “healthy weight,” underweight people (BMI <20 kg/m2) had a 34% higher (95% CI 29–38) risk of dementia. Furthermore, the incidence of dementia continued to fall for every increasing BMI category, with very obese people (BMI >40 kg/m2) having a 29% lower (95% CI 22–36) dementia risk than people of a “healthy weight.” These patterns persisted throughout two decades of follow-up … [quotation marks added]

In other words, it’s not just that low BMI correlates with greater dementia, but higher BMI, well into the categories that modern medicine continues to describe as “morbidly obese,” correlates with even less dementia. The difference between having an “underweight” BMI and an “obese” BMI is a 54% (!) reduced risk of dementia. That’s a gigantic number.

Of course, BMI is and always has been a bullshit benchmark. Also of course, the scientists are thrown for a loop by their own findings, because they went in assuming that fat would fry your brain, just as their counterparts continue to insist (against evidence) that fat destroys your body. They really have to grasp for their “faith sentence” here, and what they came up with is:

… the findings were not an excuse to pile on the pounds or binge on Easter eggs.

“You can’t walk away and think it’s OK to be overweight or obese. Even if there is a protective effect, you may not live long enough to get the benefits,” he added.

We know from other large-population studies and analyses that this isn’t true.

Of course,  no one is suggesting that these results suggest that low-BMI people should try to gain weight. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that either; people find their own weight and everything, including dementia risk, has multiple complex factors. But you do know what they would be saying if the study had gone the way they expected!

For me, I will continue to live the way I live, to follow my doctor’s advice (“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it”), to appreciate my fat body, and I will breathe just a little easier when fear of dementia sneaks up and ambushes me.