Clearly, I've got too much time on my hands. If I didn't, I wouldn't be so familiar with the talkshows. I know I shouldn't be so interested in people's infidelities, make overs and cosmetic surgeries gone wrong, but I just can't look away. I even find myself shouting advice to the hosts: things like 'You go girl!', and 'Sod off, you smug Texan loser!'.
The perennial theme of talkshows is personal appearance, and more particularly, weight. During my formative political years, feminists tended to mock the societal obsession with weight. We saw the pressure to be slim as rooted in a profit-driven beauty industry which is hostile to women, deliberately making us feel inadequate to convince us to buy ever-changing products.
My talkshow homegirls, Tyra and Oprah, tread an interesting line between rejecting and embracing the beauty industries. Both have gained and lost weight over their lives, and been pilloried for being fat. Consequently, both spend a lot of time proclaiming the importance of accepting the way you are in the face of pressures to be ever thinner. Tyra gives exuberant makeovers to women of various shapes and sizes, and gives a great deal of attention to eating disorders and other harmful consequences of the pursuit of beauty.
But there's a limit to how fat you're allowed to be. It's important to be comfortable with yourself – but don't get too comfortable. The talkshows remind us that, once your weight moves above a certain point, there is no room for you on the spectrum of beauty. It's not an aesthetic thing, though; nothing to do with fat people being wobbly or looking bad in bikinis. It's about 'self-respect', and self-respect leads to empowerment. Oprah recently featured on her show a beautiful, slim family with an 'ugly duckling' daughter. The daughter, who had been large since her childhood, wept as she told the audience how unhappy her father's disappointment in her had always made her. With the sensitivity of paint stripper, the girl's father confirmed that her weight was not acceptable to him. Oprah thanked him for his candour. The solution? One year and a gastric surgery later, the daughter returned to Oprah, weighing a little over half her earlier weight. She told everyone how happy she was, now that her family liked her. Oprah and the audience applauded her for having the courage and self-respect to turn her life around, empower herself and become beautiful.
As many feminists have noted, being fat has been turned into a moral issue. If you're too big, it's because you lack motivation or self-respect. I agree with this critique. It's far easier for us to tell ourselves that our cultural dislike of fat people is nothing to do with how they look: we just want what's best for them. And what's best for them, according to the beauty industry, is an array of expensive dieting and other products.
Even if we acknowledge that the beauty industry exploits the unhappiness of consumers – fat and thin – to make a buck, does it necessarily follow that it's OK to be any weight at all? This is where it gets tricky. I lost a heap of weight following a diagnosis of gestational diabetes and a radically overhauled diet. And I'm sad to say that the cheesy infomercials are right: losing weight does boost your energy, make it easier to care for your kids and increase your quality of life.
Quality of life, and particularly good health, are important issues – and they're political issues. Who can afford nutritious food, who is at risk of diabetes, who gets the leisure time to exercise, is partly determined by class and race. Health is a resource which is not shared equally in our society, particularly at a time when soaring food prices means lots of kids aren't going to school with lunches, let alone getting their five plus a day. Cheap, fatty, high-carb food and erratic eating patterns can mean a bunch of weight-related health problems and, ultimately, a reduced life expectancy for the poor.
As a feminist, I'm not sure where exactly I should stand on the issue of weight. What I do know is that harassing overweight people – even in the new guise of 'self-respect' – is an inadequate answer to a complex social problem.
7 comments:
Excellent, well-written and well-argued post. I feel similarly conflicted...over the course of a few years I've lost over 40 pounds and I feel so much better, and quite frankly, happier - but I wouldn't want to push my thoughts on the subject onto someone else - but at the same time, well, the argument can go one of many ways, but I feel everyone has a right to have access to their best health possible. When you see who the obese truly are in our country, they are poorer people often, without access to proper nutrition or knowledge about food - making it more than just an issue about "fitting in" to certain standards of beauty...eh....I have to think this through some more...
Great post Anna. Fat is a femminist issue and a class issue and a health issue.
I'm appalled at the fat girl's family's attitude to her, and even more appalled that the extreme measures she took to conform, were so applauded. She should not have had to do this, just to make her family accept her.
Great post Anna, thanks for contributing it. I always find this stuff difficult because I have thin privilege in spades. And for me some of the time I find I feel better when I weigh more, not less. At the moment I'm trying to put weight on, to feel less skeletal and have more energy. I've already written about how peeved I get when people comment on my thinness, particularly in the context of becoming a mum.
That Oprah story is really sad. I get a bit sceptical sometimes about talkshows (and whether they are real or not) but that does have a ring of truth, unfortunately.
One thing that irritates me about a lot of the dietary information out there is that it is based on BMIs, which are a very very crude instrument. In some cases the figures quoted as "acceptable" are based on American research that is a) several decades old; b) excluded women; c) mostly excluded those of non-White backgrounds and d) doesn't recognise that sometimes someone is thin because they are sick, or has a high BMI because they are super fit. I heard someone point out on the radio recently that most of the All Blacks would have BMIs in the obese range...
I really feel that all the anti-obesity stuff is barking up the wrong tree - looking at a symptom rather than the root problems. Surely it makes more sense to look at "life-style factors" like diet, exercise, smoking etc than condemning someone for what size jeans they fit.
I am a plumply person but my lifestyle is much healthier now than it was when I was skinny.
That's true hungrymama - it's a mistake to assume that a skinny person is healthy or has a good diet. I was at my skinniest when I was a student and smoked like a train, ate way too much junk food and had permanent respiratory problems from living in a mouldy house. I look back on it and it gives me the willies.
Anna, great post :) and even though you mentioned not being exactly sure where you stand on these issues, i think you're doing the 100% right thing by thinking through them here and leaving comments open for conversation and thought :)
Found you via Feministe :)
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