Running, squatting, power-walking, spinning, yoga-ing, and rolling around on large balls. All kind of cool in moderation and healthy except when you see the desperation and panic on ppl's faces as they are literally trying to run away from themselves - leaving any hint of fat in their dust.
When I see mothers with their newbies balanced on their legs as they do backwards squats against a park bench, I think it is safe to say we have collectively lost it as a culture. The public display that should be humiliating is a badge of honour stating "I reject fat and sloth - see....look.....I've had a baby but I am working out at every possible opportunity to ensure everyone knows how committed I am to not getting fat". Instead of revelling in the nubile fecundity of motherhood, the post-partum fear of body change has older demographic moms transforming into stick people with bauble heads. Reminiscent of vintage car deoderizers that adorned the back of my mother's Pontiac Parisienne. I see these gals everywhere in yuppie-villes around TO. Almost prehistoric looking in their scrawniness. The natural extension of this weird phenomenon is contempt for the fat. "For those who refuse to surrender to the hamster wheel lifestyle will be shunned!"
Gone is any tolerance or understanding of diversity in body types. I often flash back to walking down the hall of my suburban highschool looking at the multitude of body types - and realize the landscape has changed so dramatically that most of these bodies have disappeared. It's uni-body time - there is one prototype and if one fails to comply, well you know the drill.
Perhaps undereating and exercise bulimia will keep women more sexually attractive, more loveable, happily partnered, younger, healthier and ultimately immortal, but what a way to live. I know many of these folks whose partners fuck around on them regardless of how nuts they are about staying small! A terrified frenzy is embedded in current fitness rituals under the guise of zen, mindful, yoga-ness. It's all the same crap just packaged differently to appeal to a savvier market. The internalized horror of losing one's partner, social network and/or social position if they were to become fat, is the unspoken rationale for all the dashing about in ill-fitting yoga pants.
How does one reconcile living with their life partner while knowing that if they were to get fat they would leave them. As a feminist, humanist, anything-ist, it is downright gross - to use Grade 7 language. I am not naive, but cannot accept sizism as a necessary element of society. I would prefer to continue to schlep along in fatty fringe-land and know that those who love me are authentic.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
Is Fat the New Poor?
I am a Toronto veteran - born and raised. The reason I have stayed is b/c historically you could be who you wanted to be - more or less - blend in and find a scene. Knowing we are always a mini and Canadianized NYC of sorts it really shouldn't be a big surprise that just like Manhattan, and similar boroughs, it really is not okay to be fat unless you are pretty down and out. I suppose this has been an insidious process. "Post-feminist" women have grown up and infused culture with a different sensibility and the correlation between health and size is the most powerful attack on large people I have seen in my life time. Talk radio and tabloid venues regularly schedule call-ins asking if fat people should be taxed more than their more deserving, svelte co-citizens among other hate-promoting misguided notions of why all people are not small. It is a eugenicist's dream. A form of discrimination not tolerated in any other realm or attached to any other 'ism. In fear of being ostracized, women in particular do anything - regardless of how unnatural or painful - to ensure they do not make it to the list of the fat.
Where fat is not disallowed in the same way is among the less advantaged. We issue pardons to those who are free from the yoke of sizism on account of their empty pocketbooks. We already segregate ourselves from this cohort so effectively and this is one more way of ensuring we recognize and avoid society's poorer, fat folks. I always think of Oprah as a ever-morphing public display of this - a woman who grew up in abject poverty, made it and now humiliates herself on a daily TV basis growing and shrinking trying like hell to be small. Even one of the richest women in the world cannot remain tiny if it is not her genetic destiny. We know that too and that is why millions tune in to watch her suffer in spite of her wealth. Weird!
What is fascinating in all of this is the unconscious acknowledgement that smaller bodies are bought and maintained and not natural at all. From higher end food, gym memberships, time to get thinner (while others do their dirty work), and more bought overall activity in general on the one end of the spectrum, to cosmetic surgery on the other. What the more affluent fail to realize in the class piece to size is that the visuals of being smaller are just that - an illusion that somehow they are physically superior or different. This illusion can fade away as quickly as one's investment portfolio and the recession has already revealed this as the wealthier are being forced to give up fat-prevention luxuries. Perhaps one of the good things embedded in financial strife is a levelling that at the end of the day illustrates we are all just people - some luckier or thinner than others depending on which way the socioeconmic wind is blowing.
Where fat is not disallowed in the same way is among the less advantaged. We issue pardons to those who are free from the yoke of sizism on account of their empty pocketbooks. We already segregate ourselves from this cohort so effectively and this is one more way of ensuring we recognize and avoid society's poorer, fat folks. I always think of Oprah as a ever-morphing public display of this - a woman who grew up in abject poverty, made it and now humiliates herself on a daily TV basis growing and shrinking trying like hell to be small. Even one of the richest women in the world cannot remain tiny if it is not her genetic destiny. We know that too and that is why millions tune in to watch her suffer in spite of her wealth. Weird!
What is fascinating in all of this is the unconscious acknowledgement that smaller bodies are bought and maintained and not natural at all. From higher end food, gym memberships, time to get thinner (while others do their dirty work), and more bought overall activity in general on the one end of the spectrum, to cosmetic surgery on the other. What the more affluent fail to realize in the class piece to size is that the visuals of being smaller are just that - an illusion that somehow they are physically superior or different. This illusion can fade away as quickly as one's investment portfolio and the recession has already revealed this as the wealthier are being forced to give up fat-prevention luxuries. Perhaps one of the good things embedded in financial strife is a levelling that at the end of the day illustrates we are all just people - some luckier or thinner than others depending on which way the socioeconmic wind is blowing.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
On Becoming a Middle-Aged Heavy Girl
Although I was never a hot commodity in the way society categorizes women’s beauty, when I launched Heavy Girl Press, I was considerably younger, tauter and not the victim of aging I am now beginning to be. To quote the band Cub “Everything is beautiful when you’re young and pretty.” There was an optimism to HGP and an F you undertone that has morphed into a middle aged socialist feminism. Make no mistake though – I remain committed to the truth about the policing of women’s bodies and the junk science that fuels and justifies an ever growing demonizing of the fat.
So here I am 46, the mother of a 9-year-old boy and have weathered the storm on several fronts. As I sit in the woods in northern Ontario, it is not an exaggeration to state this is the first time I have had the semblance of mind to think of the next generation of Heavy Girl Press.
There is never any shortage of fodder in the popular or more academic press related to sizism – not to mention my personal journey as a fat woman. Motherhood and working in the paid labour force has not given me the opportunity I had as a woman with limited responsibilities to produce an edgy publication. In retrospect, HGP had some frivolous elements but was likely necessary for me to get to where I am now.
Where is that? In 2009 I’ve landed as a devoted mother to a spirited and exceptional boy who also has forced me to revise my feminism. Not only the nature/nurture piece of gender but the phony clichés I bought into prior to having my son. Maxims such as “it takes a village” and other empty sentiments that I thought would kick in after Moulay was born. Sure, once in a while friends and family have been there but overall my experience has a sole parent is – you’re on your own toots!! This too informs and weaves itself into a sensibility that may have pushed me a bit more into the centre politically – this in the absence of evidence that Margaret Mead’s disciples are anywhere to be found ☹
It’s not all doom and gloom though. As Moulay gets older and more independent, I see opportunities to re-enter the world of fat activism on a planet that has become more hostile to the fat. It is probably not a coincidence that I feel and have become more invisible as a middle-aged fat chick. It really is time to revive the verve that was HGP and reclaim it as “The Fat Frontier”.
So here I am 46, the mother of a 9-year-old boy and have weathered the storm on several fronts. As I sit in the woods in northern Ontario, it is not an exaggeration to state this is the first time I have had the semblance of mind to think of the next generation of Heavy Girl Press.
There is never any shortage of fodder in the popular or more academic press related to sizism – not to mention my personal journey as a fat woman. Motherhood and working in the paid labour force has not given me the opportunity I had as a woman with limited responsibilities to produce an edgy publication. In retrospect, HGP had some frivolous elements but was likely necessary for me to get to where I am now.
Where is that? In 2009 I’ve landed as a devoted mother to a spirited and exceptional boy who also has forced me to revise my feminism. Not only the nature/nurture piece of gender but the phony clichés I bought into prior to having my son. Maxims such as “it takes a village” and other empty sentiments that I thought would kick in after Moulay was born. Sure, once in a while friends and family have been there but overall my experience has a sole parent is – you’re on your own toots!! This too informs and weaves itself into a sensibility that may have pushed me a bit more into the centre politically – this in the absence of evidence that Margaret Mead’s disciples are anywhere to be found ☹
It’s not all doom and gloom though. As Moulay gets older and more independent, I see opportunities to re-enter the world of fat activism on a planet that has become more hostile to the fat. It is probably not a coincidence that I feel and have become more invisible as a middle-aged fat chick. It really is time to revive the verve that was HGP and reclaim it as “The Fat Frontier”.
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