C.L.I.T.festing

I've spent a big chunk of the weekend at CLITfest in Wellington, and now I feel fed, not just by the incredible presentations - though I didn't go to one session which didn't stretch my thinking in one way or another - but by the time and space to explore ideas between sessions with other people interested in talking and thinking about oppression and social change.

It's been a long time since I've been to a conference so thought-provoking.  The organisers did a wonderful job of creating a safe place to explore complex, difficult issues, which no doubt were uncomfortable at times for many/most/all of us attending, without that feeling, in my experience at least, overwhelming.  I want to give them a huge thank you, because I know how much work it is to try and create that kind of space.

So this is kinda going to function as a review as well as a pat on the back, for those of you who couldn't get there and were interested.  Bearing in mind I missed some sessions because of other life stuff, so there are holes.

Indigenous feminisms and social movements featured Marama Davidson, Shasha Ali, and Erina Okeroa.  Erina spoke first, examining Māori women's connections to Black feminisms internationally, through kaupapa Māori research and interviews.  Marama presented on the centrality of Māori women to caring for the Earth and kaitiakitanga, given how poor a job we're doing now.  Shasha talked about connecting indigenous struggles from different places, and the disconnect this created when you were not indigenous to where you were living, but identified as indigenous in another colonised land.

Takataapui, Pasifika ways and beyond queer theory included Fetu-ole-moana Tamapeau of BOX events, Maihi Makiha from NZAF and Kim Mcbreen of He Hoaka.  It's hard for me to give a favourite, but if I absolutely had to, it would be this one.  Fetu and Kim focussed on the disruptions colonisation created for Pasifika and Tangata Whenua understandings of sexuality and gender, and why queer theory cannot undo colonisation because it still comes from western understandings.  I've thought a bit before about how good English is at categorising - so lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex - and judging differences.  Disconnecting, some might call it.  And I've noticed that takataapui appears to do the opposite, appears just to connect non-heterosexual people, but Fetu's metaphor of queer being the island, and Pasifika understandings of sexuality being of the ocean is still rocking my wee Pākeha brain.  Work in progress.

Intimate partner violence in queer and gender diverse relationships, hosted by Te Whare Rokiroki Māori Women's Refuge and Wellington Women's Refuge with support from the extraordinary Mani Mitchell was something I was involved in, so can't really "review".  It was amazing to see between 40 and 50 people in the room, and important to think about how this work can progress, given international research is showing lesbians and gay men are experiencing rates of intimate partner and sexual violence comparable to straight women and men; bisexual people are experiencing much higher rates; and intersex and trans* peeps rates, from early indications, are much higher still.

Body politics: food, health, fat, disability, class and moral virtue featured Cat Pause, Ali Nissenbaum, Robyn Kenealy, Esther Woodbury and Grace Millar.  Between them, they took apart body politics and put them back together again, dismantling neo-liberal pushes for individualising responsibility for bodies while they pointed out some of the things the western world at least holds dear just may not be true.  Probably the comment that made me saddest was about needing to not be around women when recovering from anorexia, because of the extraordinary amount of social time women spend policing one another's - and our own - food intake and bodies.  It just rings very true to me, and is something I struggle, constantly, to know how to respond to respectfully.  I'm slimmish, and love food, and constantly deal with people telling me how "lucky" I am I can eat so much.  I haven't yet found a way through that misogynist mess.

The Underclass panel was incredible, Nic Dorward, Ruth Amato, and Hana Plant sharing their own personal experiences of class and marginalisation, tied in with colonisation and racism, gender inequalities, class oppression making us unwell, and social institutions responsible for "caring" for vulnerable people being both inadequate and chock-full of classist assumptions about families and people. 

And finally (for me) desire as social currency and how desire is constructed around stigmatised and non-normative bodies focusing on trans* experiences. Dee Dewitt and Wai Ho talked about how difficult it might be to separate personal preferences from socially constructed desires, and the painful fetishising that creates for non-normative bodies.  Beautiful and brave.

Hoping there's another CLITfest on the horizon. And a nod too, to the beautiful artwork on the flier, which is now decorating my room.

That Sam Judd Article - A Dissection

Does it ever make you cringe when you see someone who is overweight gouging themselves on takeaways?

No, no it doesn't actually. I rarely take any notice of what people I don't know are eating - and if I do it's usually because it looks good and I wonder where they got it or how they made it. If they're someone I know, I'm probably more interested in them. Odd how I have better things to do with my time than hanging round judging random people on the street. (Look at me not focusing on the word 'gouging' because there's so much else to rant about.)

It is not just the health problems that irk me 

Oh, you're concerned. How caring of you.

many environmental problems stem from an unhealthy diet also. 

You know, I'll be expecting some pretty significant evidence for this, and a definition of that 'unhealthy diet'.

Just take a walk in the central city early on a Saturday morning and count how many fast food wrappers you see in the drains.

Oh! So it's about rubbish on the streets!  Well there's a detailed macro analysis of the environmental problems we face.

I believe there is an inextricable link between people who don't look after their own health and those who damage our environment.

That would be... governments and multi national corporations, right? No? Oh, you're talking about individuals? Mysterious fat individuals who drop rubbish, despite the fact you don't appear to have seen this actually happen, only surveyed the streets on a Saturday morning. See, you keep talking about fat people and you talk about there being excess packaging on food you perceive as unhealthy, but you fail to make any actual connection between the two, other than the fact that the two together make you cringe. I'd suggest the problem might be one of your perception. 

Single use convenience food packaging and sugary pre-mixed bourbon and cola drink containers are constantly proving to be the biggest source of rubbish on our streets and beaches. 

Bourbon and cola? Really? Not lime baccardi breezers or vodka fuse? I'm happy you can be this specific. Clearly bourbon's the problem - and if we all switched to other drinks the problem would be solved.

New Zealand has the 7th worst obesity rate in the world.

You do realise that obesity is a meaningless construct, right? Oh...

[...]

Can our terrible eating habits be blamed on urbanisation? 

Well, you might want to establish what our eating habits actually are first.

As more people flock to newly developed apartment dwellings in cities, they give up the opportunity to have a garden and teach their kids how to grow food. 

Yeah, where you live is entirely a choice and has nothing whatsoever to do with money, availability, transport, access or anything else.

But Statistics New Zealand figures say that, although the percentage is rapidly rising only around 20,000 of our 4,000,000-odd people lived in apartments in 2006.
Most kiwis want to have their own slice of outdoor space...
So it seems that most of us have the space to grow food, but we are too lazy to do it. It is easier to pile yourself into a car and burn fuel to visit a shop where unhealthy food (likely to be wrapped in single use plastic packaging) awaits our lazy bellies.

Here's the thing. Even when there genuinely is the space - and a lot of residences that aren't apartments don't have it -you may be working long hours. Your landlord may forbid you from modifying the garden. You may not have the startup cash. You may have the startup cash but not be able to take the risk that if you fail you won't have any food to eat. You may be disabled in ways that make this impossible. You may work long hours and have childcare issues and just be plain exhausted. You may have to move between rentals every year and there's never chance to get anything going.
But thanks for making people feel bad for doing what they need to survive, demeaning them and making broad assumptions about their resources. I hope that makes you feel really awesome.
And I still have no fucking idea what this has to do with fat people.

[...]
It is healthier, cheaper and better for the environment to eat fresh food that can be grown at home. 

Not... necessarily. Healthy depends on how well it's grown and what your dietry needs are. Cheaper depends on your resources, economies of scale and what it is you need to grow. And better for the environment really depends on the policies of those growing food on a wider scale - perhaps you should talk to them. Nevertheless...

When we are educating school students about using less waste, one of the best examples that we can use is growing it yourself.
And it really isn't that hard to start. If you don't have the space, or wouldn't know the difference between clay and topsoil- there are many community gardens out there, where people can usually learn essential gardening skills and share a space. You can check out this handy guide here.
Some school students are lucky enough to be getting gardening skills already through the Enviroschools network and other fantastic organisations like The Garden to Table Trust, which is working with Waterfront Auckland on an edible garden by the sea on the north wharf.

Aside from another assumption about difficulty levels, there's actually some good stuff in here.  If your aim was to encourage people to grow their own food, you could have provided these resources and some people may well have used them. But instead you've fuelled fat hate and made people feel like crap for their limited resources. I'm sure this has made people (particularly fat people) who would like to grow their own food more (incidentally I'm one of them) but don't find it easy really receptive to your message. Go you!

Jennifer Lee on the case for Fat Activism

Great piece by Melbourne academic Jennifer Lee: A big fat fight: the case for fat activism 

My left-wing, friendly and kind GP says, “You’re bigger than you were last time so it’s harder for me to get this in place,” as an apology for groping around during a pap smear – an apology that blames my body for her less-than-perfect technique. 

That’s a subtle example, because I try to choose my medical professionals carefully to avoid the standard fat prejudice. It demonstrates that sometimes we are hit with fat prejudice in the most vulnerable or intimate situations. Why aren’t medical students trained to deal with fat bodies? Why isn’t medical equipment generally made for different kinds of bodies – fat ones included? Fat people are sent constant messages that they are wrong, that they need to change, that the world around them is fine and doesn’t need to cater for them.

...

Still, in some moments I do find myself wishing I were thin. But I catch myself and think, “Why do you want to be thin in this moment?” The answer is inevitably about thin privilege. If fat was the sought-after attractive body in the media, if doctors separated fat from disease, if big clothes sizes were available everywhere, would I ever want to be thin?

When I speak about thin privilege, I am talking about the advantages that thin people in Western culture experience, such as being assumed healthy and having a wide array of clothes available, as well as a body that aligns with dominant ideas of what is attractive. It’s time to acknowledge thin privilege the way the Left has acknowledged white privilege, class privilege or straight privilege.

Guestie: I am not a suitcase

Very happy to bring you another guest post by hazel. Her flatmate reacted to this rant with a concerned "have you been reading the comments on Stuff again?".

On being told that fairness in air travel would consist of everyone paying one fare for person + packages, so that fatties like me don't get more than my fair share of the space:

I am not a suitcase. I am not the floral bouquet you take to your mother when you visit on her birthday. I am not the box of illegal copies of movies you bought from a street vendor in Bangkok. I am not your luggage; I am not your third-best pair of jeans or your stained underwear or the pair of shoes you just couldn't pass by. I can't leave bits of me behind in the hotel room when I check out; I can't abandon myself in a convenient rubbish bin outside the airport. When I go I take all of me (and frankly I'd rather not have you either, but I put up with it). I do not fit into a test compartment by the check-in counter; and unlike your box of condoms and your shampoo I care about whether or not I am weighed in public. The span of my hips is not for public consumption.

And your grand plan for social equity won't solve the dilemma of you being pressed up against my thigh; I can't put my left calf above your head shut away for three hours as we cross the Tasman. The seats aren't bigger because I've paid for my tits, lady, for my nose and my size 10 feet and my wide wide shoulders level with your eyes.

I know you are angry. I know you suffer, crushed up against the thickness of my waist for this trip we share. I know it is very hard for you, trapped in a claustrophobic tube eight miles high floating above the clouds and caught between the screaming baby three rows back and the air hostess asking if you want milk in your tea; and me, my shoulders (level with your eyes) and my fatness and the bright pink of my dress and the way the seatbelt presses into my flesh: it offends.

I just don't give a shit.

That's a lie - I totally do, because then you talk at me in newspaper columns wide-eyed and earnest as though you have solved the world's problems with your perfect logic and stellar pragmatism. Because you want to take your mother a floral bouquet on her birthday; and you do not see why I cannot put my left calf above your head shut away for three hours as we cross the Tasman. And if I question your perfect logic and stellar pragmatism you ask me if I am not maybe just a little bit it only seems the sensible thing concerned about my health.

missing the point

i was watching 7 days on friday night, as i do when i get the chance. well, wouldn't you know it, one of the news items was auckland feminist action's campaign against the tui breweries ads. as would be expected, the feminists were put down and the ads were supported. if you want to watch the episode, head over to the tv3 website.

funnily enough, the guys weren't saying too much. it was the woman comedian, urzila carlson, who really got stuck in. there were a few issues with what she had to say. her main point seemed to be that the young women in the ads must have worked hard at a gym to get the kind of bodies they have, and if she had such a body, she would be busy flaunting it.

there's some unpacking to be done here. first is the notion that people who have slim bodies work hard to achieve them. well that's true of some people but not true of others. some people just have a metabolism which means they don't have to work too hard to keep to the beauty ideal. other people have metabolisms which mean that they could work a couple of hours every day, and still find it almost impossible to get to that ideal.

it buys into the notion that fat people have the bodies they do because they are simply lazy. which she must know is crap. plenty of people who don't have the "ideal" body size are actually active and fit. some of them aren't because they can't be - due to health issues, or time and energy issues (possibly because they are working 2 or 3 jobs plus managing a household, and don't have the time/energy to put into exercise). and of course, some people who are thin aren't particularly healthy.

then there's the self-deprecation. ms carlson is implying that her current body shape is not attractive - seeing as how she isn't flauting it in quite the way she described on the show, she would seem to think it isn't worth flaunting. which again reinforces the notion that bigger bodies can't possibly be beautiful. her body shape is something that she does use to get laughs - i've seen two stand-up routines now where she starts off by saying that she's in the show to be the "eye-candy". which gets a laugh because we're in a society that accepts that someone with her body size and shape can't possibly be worth looking at.

i can only go by what i see, but she seems to be quite comfortable with this state of affairs ie that only thin women can be attractive, that fatness is a thing to be ridiculed at laughed at. and because she ensures that the laugh is on her, more than it is on anyone else, it doesn't seem so bad.

the only problem is that there are women who don't want to live in such a world, and who want to change this notion that only a certain size and shape of woman can be considered attractive. we want to live in a world where fat isn't evil, and people don't make lazy assumptions about fat people which they use to justify the general abuse and ridicule they choose to direct at such people.

now, i'm certainly not saying that ms carlson has to take on that fight. certainly not, and not when she's working in an industry that is particularly difficult for women. what i am saying is that she might consider that other women do want to take on this fight, and maybe she could just think about the possibility of not giving them her contempt or putting them down. it wouldn't be hard - she could have just gone with a comment about how she disagreed with their stance, but accepted that they have their own point of view. see, i'm not even expecting solidarity or any kind of support from her. just a lack of the ridicule and contempt that so mirrors what we're seeing from the dudebros across the internet.

and finally, ms carlson did seem to miss some of the point of the AFA protest. it's not just the sexualisation of the women in the ads, but also treating women as if they are stupid and/or not to be taken seriously, as well the clear misogyny of some of the billboards. it's the whole package. see, ms carlson's defense of the women in the ads seems to imply that it is those women who are somehow under attack. this is not the case. it's the people who make the ads - come up with the concepts, decide that it's ok to depict women in this way (and again, talking about the whole package) who are the target here. as well as the people who authorise and pay for the tui campaign. it's the people who make the decisions and who can choose to change the way they market the product who the protesters is speaking to.

on the other hand, shelley bridgeman gets it (as usual, avoid the comments). make of that what you will.

Lazy

There have been a few things that have inspired this post. I've really appreciated the voices emerging from the fat positive/size acceptance movement challenging the idea that anyone has any obligation to be healthy. Amongst others, there are some excellent posts on this is at The Fat Nutritionist and Raising My Boy Chick. But there is little equivalent of these when it comes to that other stereotype attached to fatness: laziness.


Then there's this image which has been going round on Facebook, which reads as follows:

IT’S PRETTY AMAZING THAT
OUR SOCIETY HAS REACHED A POINT
WHERE THE EFFORT NECESSARY TO

EXTRACT OIL FROM THE GROUND
SHIP IT TO A REFINERY
TURN IT INTO PLASTIC
SHAPE IT APPROPRIATELY
TRUCK IT TO A STORE
BUY IT AND BRING IT HOME

IS CONSIDERED TO BE LESS EFFORT THAN WHAT IT TAKES
TO JUST WASH THE SPOON WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT.

(This image annoys me a lot).


There's personal experience also. I have a disability which makes certain tasks either extremely difficult or very slow. Particularly as a child, but sometimes still, I've been called lazy as a result of that. And on the flip side of that, I found some activities so incredibly easy that I could do them in half the time others did and spend half of that time staring in to space - and worried that I must be being incredibly lazy as a result. I have something of a terror of being seen as lazy, and at times have pushed myself to injury by taking on unsustainable amounts of work to avoid that.


And then there's the speculation on why the turnout at the election was so low. There have been a number of comments along the lines of "I don't mind people who make a conscious decision not to vote but I do when they're just too lazy."


When I started to think about laziness, I struggled to understand what exactly it was. It's something we talk about all the time, but none of the definitions I could find really made sense. Dictionary.com is probably as good a starting place as any:

lazy [ley-zee]   Origin la·zy    [ley-zee] Show IPA adjective, -zi·er, -zi·est, verb, -zied, -zy·ing. adjective
1. averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent.
2. causing idleness or indolence: a hot, lazy afternoon.
3. slow-moving; sluggish: a lazy stream.
4. (of a livestock brand) placed on its side instead of upright. 

I think we can safely ignore 4 for the purposes of this discussion. 2 and 3 (and I know these are not specifically applied to people, but the associations are still there) have real value judgements implicit in them. 3 is related to speed. There are a lot of values we attach to speed (remember that 'I want to punch slow moving people in the back of the head' facebook group). Speed of movement, speed of thought, speed of learning. Huge issues there when thinking about disability.

When it comes to 1, here's the definition of idleness (and I promise I won't spend all this post quoting dictionary.com:

idleness [ahyd-l]   Origin i·dle    [ahyd-l] Show IPA adjective, i·dler, i·dlest, verb i·dled, i·dling, noun adjective
1. not working or active; unemployed; doing nothing: idle workers.
2. not spent or filled with activity: idle hours.
3. not in use or operation; not kept busy: idle machinery.
4. habitually doing nothing or avoiding work; lazy.
5. of no real worth, importance, or significance: idle talk.

Everything there screams judgements on the value of work or activity. And we've all heard those before. Women's work vs men's work. Paid work vs unpaid work. Paid work vs unpaid work vs non work activities. Etc.


I think the first definition of lazy is the most interesting. It refers to not wanting to work, the favourite trope of beneficiary bashers everywhere. But if the definition of work is relatively complicated, that of activity is even more so. Not to be facetious, but what is not an activity? Watching television is as much an activity as running a marathon but only one of those activities would led the participant to accusations of laziness. So the way I'm looking at this is in terms of allocation of resources (and yes, I do find it deeply ironic that the image I posted referred to spoons). Laziness is a value judgement on how we, usually as individuals, allocate our personal resources. 


The image I posted earlier, the one that berates people for not washing the spoons? Think for a minute about what types of work are involved in washing a metal spoons versus manufacturing a plastic spoon. One is individual, the other is part of a process involving many people, which theoretically allows for types of work to be allocated according to people's abilities, for predictable shifts, sick leave. It may not in practice, but the idea is not alien. Washing a spoon isn't a big deal - unless turning on taps is painful or impossible. If you take lunch to eat outside the home and there are no washing facilities, it should be easy to take it home and wash it. If you don't have memory impairments that mean chances are the remaining yoghurt on it will end up going mouldy in your bag. If you have a car to put it in rather than cart it round with you all day, that makes things easier. If you can afford a dishwasher, that makes things easier. If you are responsible for a number of people, you're going to have more spoons to wash. And it's not going to be just spoons - the same extends to plates and forks and cups.

So there are two things going on here. One is presenting washing a spoon as an activity which takes a universally equal and minimal amount of effort, rather than a task that can be difficult or impossible or cause a whole series of problems, depending on the individual and their resources. The other is to compare two ideas of work: one linked with individual unpaid labour in the home; the other paid employment in often traditionally male occupations. The former is a trivial activity; the latter hard and excessive work.

Voting is an allocation of resources also. I think in this country voting, for most people, uses less resources than it does in most others, and I'm happy about that. But it still requires resources, mental and physical. To complain about someone not voting, you're claiming the right to a say in how they allocate their personal resources. And that may well be in ignorance about factors which either cause them to have less personal resources, or to have more demands on those resources. I know people are frustrated about the result of the election, and see - rightly or wrongly - a low turnout as partly responsible. But if increasing the turnout is a primary goal for you, berating individuals is not the way to do it.

Of course, as I indicated at the beginning of this post, laziness is implicitly linked to fat. 'Fat and lazy' is such an automatic phrase I had to stop and think about why they are associated. Of course, there's the obvious belief that lack of physical activity causes fatness - or fatness causes lack of activity - or... oh dear god people, please make up your minds. In any case, it comes back to the privileging of one activity (physical exercise) over others. But there's more to it than that. By being fat, there's an implied judgement that you have allocated resources incorrectly - you have consumed too much and you have worked too little. Accusations of laziness are simply the next strand of that. Your allocation of resources is a moral failing on your part.

We all have things we should do. But that is not the same as giving some activities inherent moral worth (as opposed to moral value attached to what happens as a result of these, which is a different question entirely) over others nor is it demanding a certain level of exertion, physical or intellectual, for a person to be considered worthy or 'not lazy'. I think judgements such as these are very common in activist groups - I'm sure I've made them myself and I've certainly had them made against me. But laziness is, when it comes down to it, full of implied fatphobia and makes - often heavily gendered - statements about what work is and isn't valued, something I've had more than enough of.

Taking up Space

An Auckland public transport blogger - I'm not going to link, you should be able to google it if you want - has just posted about teh horrorz of fat people on busses, taking up seats from thin people. I pretty much headdesked all the way through, not knowing whether to be very, very slightly relieved or really fucking angry that the pictures of Random Fat People on Busses actually included faces. I thought of my own commute - I'm fat by any estimation, and I've had people larger than me sit next to me, and neither of us have been uncomfortable, because the bus I get is the one that eventually goes to the airport, and has larger seats, and wondered - again - why it is so much of an ask to expect busses, buildings, anything to be designed round people, rather than asking people to fit it. I remembered how at my previous bus stop the seats were replaced with ledges that were too high for me - a shorter than average woman, but not unsually so - to sit on (great article about gender and town planning here).

But what really got me was a comment (yup, I read the comments section - many of them are horrendous):

I am very conscious of this issue on the bus, and I make an effort to take up as little room as I can – I put my bag on the ground between my feet when standing, or on my lap when sitting. I move over as close to the edge as I can, and I keep an awareness of my surroundings. I move to areas where I have more room to get out of the way and I genuinely think that my girth does not impact negatively on those around me in most cases.

...realise that some of us know perfectly well how large we are, and that we attempt to be as considerate as possible.

I'm not against consideration in public spaces. I've squashed up to help other people on, or given up seats on trains to those with clear difficulty standing (I have a level of difficulty myself, but I usually found I could sit on the steps with no problems). I'm wary of judging how people are positioned, because I don't know the reasons for this, but I have no doubt that some are just being plain inconsiderate.

But it's much more than that. I've recognised this tendency in myself, and in others, to apologise for your size, to make yourself as small as possible. Clearly if a seat is too small for the people sitting on it, in the short term both are going to be in some discomfort and, all else being equal, it's up to both of them to absorb some of that discomfort - but it should be about just that, a mutual effort to deal with a problematic situation, not the onus being on one to not inconvenience the other. But I've myself as small as possible to try and prove I don't need the whole seat, even when there is plenty of room. I've been reluctant to spread myself out on long haul flights when there's been a vacant seat next to me, in case someone thinks I can't fit in the seat.

Consideration for other passengers is one thing, but this isn't about that. It's entirely about self worth and whether we feel we have the right to expect public transport that accomodates the size and shape of our bodies. Or our disabilities. Or doesn't take the average male body as the default. Maybe if those who feel squashed on bus seats could recognise it as a design issue, and become allies, they'd achieve a whole lot more.

Trying to talk about my body

I'm not sure how to even start the internal conversations I want to have about my body. I always seem to be on the defensive, trying to prove myself one way or another. I guess it comes with the territory of being fat, being female, and a whole host of things that put me in a constant war in which my body is weapon, territory and battleground, usually all at once.

I've been thinking about a lot of things around this; about why I feel so strongly that my arms up to at least my elbows, and my whole legs, should be covered - and this isn't any kind of religious or moral principle, and I'm pretty sure it's not a phobia or an anxiety thing, it just is. I've been thinking about my utter lack of awareness, where I've done things like stood on a nail and known I was in pain but had no idea which part of the body the pain was in, and what this says about my relationship with my body.

If you read my posts regularly you'll realise that I tend to give a lot of examples with no real point. If there is a point in this it's that my body and the way I think about it are really fucking complicated. I'm not sure if it's any more complicated than anyone else's because hey, half my point (yes, I've gone from no real point to between 0.5 and 1.5 points, what of it?) is that I don't tend to express this often. And lately I've been finding that a lot of the fat acceptance/HAES type models that have done so much to change - arguably save - my life, really limiting.

I understand why people find it so important to talk about bodies as neutral - sometimes it's a shorthand for morally neutral, which I utterly agree with - and sometimes it's creating a space away from the constant shit about how seemingly everything isn't acceptable. And I understand why people want to celebrate them, as a reaction against the constant shit. And I understand that many people simply feel that their bodies are neutral, or awesome and something to be celebrated.

Bodies as neutral is a good starting point. But for me my body carries a lot of history, the evidence, both positive and negative, of a lot of my life, in all kinds of different ways. I gained a lot of weight in my teens dues to medical error - and not the sort of "crap I measured out the wrong dose" error that we all understand how we could make, but a series with a deep institutional basis, a whole heap of prejudice, and an utter disrespect for the autonomy of, and unwillingness to listen to, a teenage girl who didn't interact with them as teenage girls should. There have been other, unpleasant factors outside my control that have influenced my weight as well.

I'm trying to work out a way to acknowledge this. To acknowledge the physical effects of having bodily autonomy removed without going back to hating my body. To talk about this in appropriate spaces without coming across as being a good fatty because I have an excuse, unlike everyone else (I very much doubt I'd have been skinny anyway, but this isn't the point). I'm not even sure there is a way, in the context I live in, to acknowledge the link between my body and hurt without buying into a societal disapproval directed at myself, but it's an attempt I'm beginning to make anyway.

Two ARGHs in one morning is two too many

ARGH the first, was the news, via Russell Brown on twitter (@publicaddress), that Bronagh Key is down on the royal wedding invite list as "Mrs John Key."  I don't know who is responsible for this but it really bugs me that anyone gets to be differentiated from their partner by only one little "s".

If that's genuinely what Bronagh wants to be referred to then that is her choice, and I'll shut up about it (publicly, no doubt I'll mutter into my cereal about it privately).

But if it's been imposed by anyone, or just assumed, then that sucks.  Russell thought it was better than being John Key's +1, however I'm not so sure.  Both seem to me to indicate she's just an appendage, not a person in her own right.

ARGH the second, totally didn't have to be an ARGH.  The Unnecessary ARGH if you will.  Dr Tiso pointed me to an awesome set of bathroom scales (right) which are not only pink (win), fluffy (extra win) and decorated with a shiny star (ultra mega win), they also don't feature numbers but instead wonderful friendly words like "Perfect", "Hot" and "Ravishing."  The Yay Scale is the work of Marilyn Wann, a body acceptance activist who wrote Fat? So! and has done some great stuff with Healthy At Every Size (aka HAES).

So where's the ARGH in that, pretty awesome right?  Sadly this isn't the order I read about this Cool Thing in.

First I stumbled into a savage "review" (who reviews bathroom scales?) all about how the Yay Scale was apparently not so yay because it was Encouraging Unhealthy Eating Habits.  The reviewer has been put right in comments, although there's no response to the well made points about the positive nature of the scales.

I was particularly galled by the idea that those who wanted to know their weight might inadvertently purchase the Yay Scale and have to live in ignorance of their mass!  ZOMG False Advertising the Like of Which Has Never Been Seen Before!  Except if you count almost the entire fashion and beauty industries, basically.  But I digress.

Now I'm hoping for an ARGH-free Monday.  Might be lucky and get away with a few minor GRRRRRRs.

Hating on teh fatties

Cross posted

Professor John Birkbeck has surfaced in New Zealand newspapers again, telling fat people that it's all their own fault that they are fat. The New Zealand Herald devoted not just one article to him, but two - one a fairly standard profile of a retiring academic: The truth is - size matters, and another seizing the opportunity to berate fat people: Expert - it's your fault if you're a fatty. Some choice tidbits from the articles:

"While acknowledging that some may have a genetic propensity to obesity, he said: "You can't get over-fat without eating more calories than you expend."

Birkbeck even cited concentration camps to illustrate his point.

"You do not see fat people in concentration camps. Why? Because they get hardly anything to eat and they have to do a lot of work."

"In a dictatorship, you say 'everybody that comes back in a year's time with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 will be shot' - and you'll find hardly anyone has a BMI over 30.

"But you can't do that in society, so what we have to do is find a way to cajole and coerce. And I don't think they've done enough of that."

"I think where we can make things uncomfortable for the seriously fat, we should do so with a clear conscience."

Umm.... wow. Let's put this into one sentence. We can rid society of the evil of obesity by putting people in concentration camps and starving them or by killing them if they don't lose weight.

(The NZ Herald links it to women, of course. Take a look at the photos they use to illustrate their articles.)

Leaving aside the ghastly offensiveness of using Holocaust victims to make an unrelated point, that's an awful lot of fat hatred going on there.

Then one of the most-read political bloggers in NZ* chimes in:

I find it outrageous to have Leigh Sturgess [Obesity Action Coalition director] saying it is society’s fault - rather than my own. Bullshit - it is nothing to do with society or the environment - and everything to do with personal choices.

Of course, it's okay for him to say this, because he's a fatty too (self-described, in the post).

Right.... it's everything to do with choice, and absolutely nothing to do with environment. Funny that. I would have thought that Professor Birkbeck's analogies and arguments work exactly the other way, to show that the environment is critical in determining how much food people eat. And of course, unless you are Thomas Hobbes, a coerced choice is no choice at all.

Aside from that, what Professor Birkbeck and his cheer leading squad don't seem to understand is that food affects people differently. I'm a skinny - I can take food or leave it, and if there's a cake on the table, well, whatever. I don't desire it, and often enough, it doesn't really even impinge on my awareness. This is not due to any moral virtue (or lack of it!) - I was just born that way.

Other people tell a different story. A cake on the table commands their whole attention:

Recently I was sitting at a friend's house with a group of mates when someone put a plate of banana cake on the table. For me, being in the presence of a cake is as attention-grabbing as being in the presence of a thermo-nuclear device. I am a cake whisperer – they cry out to me in the night from the darkness of the pantry – and within seconds I had assessed the relative merits of every slice of that banana cake. Yet my friend genuinely seemed unaware it was there: she continued wittering away about whatever it was that we had been discussing, seemingly oblivious to my glazed expression.

Linley Boniface - Listening to the cake whisperer

Add to that the knowledge that willpower doesn't come cheap. Psychologist Dr Cordelia Fine researches and writes about willpower. One of her key findings - if you devote your willpower, your mental and emotional energy to one task, then it is simply not available for another task. So if you are frantic at work, stressed and worried by finances and issues at home, struggling just to keep your head above water, then the last thing you have the resources to do is exercise willpower to resist that piece of cake that is whispering so temptingly to you.

As this and many similar studies show, if you draw on your reserves to achieve one unappealing goal - going for a jog, say - your moral muscle will be ineffective when you then call on it to help you switch off the television and start essay-writing.

Or in the case of Dr Fine's father, an academic philosopher:

Fortunately, there is also an attractive quick-fix approach to the problem of limited willpower. This is to use your moral muscle only very sparingly. My father, a professional philosopher, has a job that involves thinking very hard about very difficult things. This, of course, is an activity that consumes mental resources at a terrific rate.

The secret of his success as an academic, I am now convinced, is to ensure that none of his precious brainpower is wasted on other, less important matters. He feels the urge to sample a delicious luxury chocolate? He pops one in his mouth. Pulling on yesterday's shirt less trouble than finding a clean one? Over his head the stale garment goes. Rather fancies sitting in a comfy armchair instead of taking a brisk jog around the park? Comfy armchair it is. Thanks to its five-star treatment, my father's willpower - rested and restored whenever possible - can take on the search for wisdom with the strength of 10 men.

(PDF - 105kb)

The take home message from all this? When it comes to what you eat, or don't eat, your mileage may vary, considerably, depending on how you react to food. On top of this, you simply may not have the available mental and emotional capacity to resist that lovely, chocolately, creamy, oh so gooely rich piece of cake. Contra Professor Birkbeck, and contra the "fat people choose to be fat" crowd, it's not just a matter of making a simple choice not to eat.

* - DPF's readership is about the size of a small NZ town newpaper's circulation, and he tops the (somewhat dubious but nevertheless fun) monthly rankings of NZ political blogs.

Fat hatred

Cross posted

Global warming is all the fatties' fault! Of course!! And even better, in addition to paying for indulgences, we've now got a scapegoat as well.

Some researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine have compared fat people to gas guzzlers, and opined that being fat is bad for the environment. According to their nifty calculations, fat people produce one tonne more of carbon dioxide each year than slim people.

FFS! Let's put that in perspective. Taking the UK as vaguely representative of developed nations, and because the researchers are based in the UK, then each citizen of the UK on average is responsible for 10 tonnes of emissions per year. So even if the researchers' numbers are correct, then being fat only adds about 10% more emissions than being slim. The problem is not being fatter, but existing and consuming resources at an excessive rate at all. And as it turns out, all citizens of developed countries do that.

This "research" is mere fat hatred, in fancy guise.

H/T: Stuff

Disclosure: As it turns out, I'm quite slim. This is nothing to do with me personally, and everything to do with scapegoating a certain part of the population.

ANTM debrief #2: A 'big' girl made it

And so ends another gripping season of ANTM. During the final, three things in particular struck me:

- Tyra's face actually appeared superimposed on an image of the Mona Lisa. Does it get more egotistical than that?
- Paula's input into the show consisted entirely of being mean to the models for no real reason.
- A so-called plus-sized model made it.

In past 'cycles' of ANTM, the judges have been quite open about the fact there's not a big market for 'big girls' in the modeling industry. I always got the sense these models were included as a form of tokenism. I wonder what's changed?

The cynic in me suggests that ANTM is trying to 'push the boundaries' in some feeble way - a trend to be continued in the next cycle, which features a transgender model. If I were even more cynical, I might suggest that Tyra has been led to endorse larger, curvier women because she's become one herself. (ANTM's commitment to diversity doesn't run too deep, I suspect. There's still no place in it for older women, for example, and I don't imagine we'll ever see a model in a wheelchair or one who looks like she's has children.)

The thing that disturbed me most about the cycle of ANTM is that Whitney actually began to look large to me, particularly when she was counterposed against the tiny Fatima. When the vast majority of women you see on TV are very thin, it warps your perception. If that's happening to self-aware, cynical old feminist me, what's it doing to my seven-year-old daughter?

Quick hit: BMI a factor in refusing residency

Idiot Savant noticed this in today's Herald and emailed it through. Basically an American couple have been refused residency in NZ mainly because of the Body Mass Index (BMI) of the wife, who weighs 135kg:

While the unnamed couple did not have job offers and indeed had no connection with the country, they scored well on other aspects of their application.

The husband was a butcher with an Arts degree and culinary qualification, and the wife who had business qualifications also had 17 year's experience in design.

INZ concluded that although the couple "had the potential to have a relatively significant contribution to New Zealand through their skills and experience, it was not compelling enough to outweigh the potential cost (the wife) was likely to impose on the NZ health service", the board said.

Ye gads, I hope no one ever calculates my potential cost to the health system to establish where I get to live!

Abstinence only dieting

I see there has been a bit of a stash between the usual suspects about Anne Tolley's decision to remove a national directive requiring all schools to serve only healthy food and beverage options. The argument basically boils down gunning down the evil lunchbox nazis versus the evil corporations trying to make our kids blow up like blimps in order to turn a quick buck.

Stuck in the middle of this are the parents who trying to do their best for their kids. I was one of those annoying kids who wouldn’t eat the ‘healthy lunches’ my mum packed. At one stage I had a whole month's worth of fruit in various states of decay under my bed which was the breaking point for my mother. I made my own lunch from then on except for the a once-a-week treat of buying from the school tuckshop and yes, I usually ordered a pie or something equally 'bad' to eat. So I'm hazarding a guess that many parents particularly those dealing with fussy eaters really don't want to deal with any more shit about their kids' eating habits. Having lived with a fussy eater to end them all, getting the kid to eat SOMETHING let alone eat all the right things is so torturous that you would rather walk buck naked down Queen Street doing the chicken dance I've got to side with them.

My question is why did what we eat and in particular what kids consume become such a source of conflict? It totally baffles me as to why such a pleasurable activity as eating should be creating so many headlines and angst. Undoubtedly my experience colours my perspective. Eating meals together as often as possible was always big thing growing up and with a big family it was always case of eat or be eaten. More recently I've lived with the Suit where we have attained such a level of food geekiness that alongside 'regular cooking' homemade breads, pizza, pasta noodles, sorbets are often found in my kitchen.

I'm sure I'm not alone. I once read somewhere that when people emigrate to a strange land the last of the traditions of the 'mother country' to die is always the food. And that makes sense. Food marks our big occasions. What is a birthday or wedding for that matter without some form of cake? Graduation always seem to include a lunch/breakfast on the parents' dime. Christmas has a whole raft of foods attached to it and you betcha I'll be chowing down on my chocolate bunny at Easter. But somewhere along the line these foods became bad.

Of course the 'obesity epidemic' is the reason there is so much hysteria around promoting 'healthy' eating patterns. One critical component missing from this discussion is the other end of the weight spectrum were anorexia and bulimia are still taking (predominately) young girls' lives with no concern to their well being yet these eating disorders take lives and a lot more quickly than a size 16 ass.

Moreover not letting kids have the slightest opportunity to make their own decisions about food turns food into a control issue. Kids who are surrounded by adults angsting about their eating seem to develop two coping strategies. 'Bad food' immediately becomes forbidden fruit that they gorge themselves on the minute they can get away from the domineering adults or they just stop eating as a way to stick it to their parents. Neither of these outcomes actually promotes a positive relationship with food nor does it aid kids to develop good eating patterns as adults.

Because lets face it this angsting over food isn't something that magically goes away when you’re an adult. The big fast food chains with their fries that on a bad day I swear are laced with heroin are always there to tempt you while the anti-obesity scare factories that we are too fat and just a few chocolate cookies away from death's door. Add in the body bashing that makes up the bulk of the content in most women's magazines not to mention the odd article in serious publications and you find many adults struggle to maintain a 'healthy' relationship with food themselves.

In many ways the anti-junk food movement reminds me of those anti-sex education campaigners who think the very mention of anything reproductively related around children will turn them into sex-crazed maniacs. Both groups do children a huge disservice by sheltering them from every evil in the world. Like it or not decision-making is a skill that is learned with practice and I firmly believe children should be practicing it from the time they are small. I would hazard a guess that the same people who want to ban junk food from well everywhere are generally the same people who don't let their kids play outside for fear of skin cancer/bee stings/accidents/abduction etc.

I realize that for most parents these fears are very real as too is the burn of being labeled a bad parent for not watching over your kids 24/7. But I wonder if this increase in our collective asses, particularly of kids, has come about by removing the freedom for them to run around and burn off some of those pies. Not to mention letting our bodies and brains rather than industries, fast food or otherwise, guide us as to what we should put in our mouths. Because like sex, food is something to be enjoyed not to be ashamed of.

MCP Watch: Farrar blows the fat lady alert whistle

I feel like David Farrar and I have been playing blog-chicken for a while. Sooner or later one of us was going to have something on our blog that would result in a direct response by post from the other. I wondered if Jacinda Ardern's great guest post earlier this week might have got the usual linkage that Farrar gives to any MP blogging anywhere. As it didn't, I guess I am cracking first.

Because putting up this post yesterday, with the picture he used, was always going to get a comment thread full of misogynists sharing their lady-hate, with some added bonus Fat People Suck on the side.

Some lowlights:

d4j:Is that what the Mob call a hot spare tyre around that things waste line? Yuck bro!

side show bob: She was barking you say, funny, it doesn’t look like she has worms, maybe it’s distemper.

KiwiGreg: Fat, ugly and insane. Any 2 of those 3 will make you hard to employ.

Glutaemus Maximus: Hadn’t realised that it was Mob ‘Bikini Season’

mara: I have unseemly visions of the straining button popping off the waist of the jeans and all the suety stuff falling to kneecaps level. Aren’t policemen supposed to carry blankets in their cars anymore? If not, why not?

Patrick Starr: I’m more stunned that somebody got pissed enough to get it pregnant

The post is ostensibly about whether the woman in question, Victoria Stevens, should be entitled to an Invalid's Benefit. Because we can all make a medical diagnosis just by reading one article about a person, and viewing one photograph, Farrar determines that it's a fail for Work and Income. Steve Pierson at The Standard has called him out on the ridiculousness of this (unfortunately the comment thread is not so enlightened). And when a reader on the Kiwiblog thread does the same, this happens:

billyborker: There are many reasons one can be on an invalid pension, and bot all of them relate to a physical ailment. Perhaps she sufers froma mental disorder, thus making her fair game for the Rottweilers of the Right.

[DPF: There really is no limit to what you will defend is there?]*

There are many many things you can be on an Invalid's Benefit for and still be physically active, as Steve and billyborker both mention. The lack of decency on the thread Farrar started shows some serious hate towards not only women, not only those of heavier weight, but also beneficiaries, the poor, parents whose children stuff up, and generally anyone who isn't in a high tax bracket. There's a total lack of compassion or understanding, from most commenters, of how someone can end up on a benefit, or involved in crime, or the extreme stress of facing the fact your son is on trial for murder. (I'm not offering excuses; I believe that if we can't understand why someone is doing what they are doing then we will fail to come up with any effective way to change that behaviour.)

Farrar's been running Kiwiblog for a long time now, and he knows well what to expect in his comment section. Rather than write a post about what Victoria Stevens had done, why she was in court, he focused on her beneficiary status, and put up a picture bound to result in a comment thread full of nasty comments about her size. Sad, sad, sad.

* This indicates that Farrar edited billyborker's comment to add this bit in himself.

Quick hit: Overweight = abnormal, apparently

From Stuff's lifestyle section, AUT research reckons:

Many girls who did not see themselves as overweight were trying to lose weight anyway, the study found.

Of the 945 girls, 76 assessed themselves as underweight, 648 said they were normal and 221 said they were overweight.

"In our sample, 23 per cent of girls considered themselves overweight, whereas around 46 per cent are trying to lose weight," the study said.

The "relatively high degree of weight misclassification" was of concern.

Girls who incorrectly perceived themselves to be overweight might face a higher risk of eating disorders, the study said. "Conversely, overweight girls who are unable to recognise their condition are unlikely to initiate the lifestyle changes required to obtain a healthy body weight."

While both situations were bad, underestimating "excessive body fat" was a greater public health risk. Interventions and educational campaigns to help girls recognise a state of excess body fat should be a priority, the study said.

When it comes to body shape surely there is no normal? The choice of Stuff to focus it's coverage on the overweight end is predictable.

Mixed messages

Spotted this ad in an NZ Women's Weekly (I think, one of those mags) on the weekend.

So on the one hand NZ Women's Health says it's good to be you, but on the other hand NZ Women's Health will help you get your fittest body (presumably not the body you have now). The "Get-Back-In-Shape" issue pre-supposes that there's something wrong with the shape you're in now. I guess the 'Secret Weight Loss Weapons' will help with that?

Don't even start me on the rather unrealistic cover shot.

The message I'm getting? Changing your body by plastic surgery or botox is bad, but changing your body by diet and exercise is good. And yes, you do need to change your body.

The strange art of cheerleading

Yesterday, my family and I went to the local Santa parade. It was kind of lacklustre. Highlights included a disgruntled middle-aged guy on a small, comical bicycle and a greyhound wearing festive shoes. Enough said.

But what really gave me the willies was a large troupe of little girl cheerleaders, forty or fifty of them, aged from about seven to twelve. They were a slightly sad spectacle. The baking sun meant that very few of them were able to go about their cheerleading with any enthusiasm during the laboriously slow parade, which lasted over an hour. A couple of them looked distressed, as if they might faint in the overwhelming heat. Many will have formidable doses of sunburn. Climatic conditions aside, though, there was something more than a little unsettling about a bunch of little girls dressed as adult women, flouncing past with their knickers and midriffs showing to the crowd.

I can definitely see the appeal of cheerleading for girls, little and big. With its mix of dance and gymnastics, there's no doubt that it involves a lot of skill. It's a chance to hang out with other females and be girly. In fact, it's the sort of thing I would have begged my parents to let me try, had the opportunity been available when I was a kid. (In those days, though, cheerleading was regarded as something mildly ludicrous. Perhaps it's the evolution of professional sport which has brought it to our shores since then.)

What I don't like about cheerleading, however, is that it is such a nakedly (pun intended) sexualised activity. Very few people (or men, at least) watch cheerleaders to admire their skills. Allowing little girls to enter into this sort of activity seems like giving them an apprenticeship in being treated primarily as sexual objects. There are a bunch of activities girls can do to express their athleticism and dance ability - why choose the one that seems to come from a high school social caste system that sets out to divide the popular and pretty from the rest?

It's not the potential sexualisation of kids that worries me here. It's a mistake to attribute adult understandings of sexuality to children - the little cheerleaders may not perceive what they do as being sexual at all, and I've no reason to believe that the adults looking on saw the girls in a sexual light. Rather, I feel concerned by the message it sends girls about what adult female sexuality is. Inducting kids into this sexualised activity suggests to them that female sexuality is about being looked at, putting yourself on display to be appraised by onlookers. The skill you bring to your cheerleading doesn't much matter to bystanders at a sporting match - it's about your body.

And to be attractive, to be worthy, to enjoy sex, your body must be perfect. That, to me, was the saddest thing about watching the little cheerleaders pass. With their bellies and thighs showing, they'll be learning to scrutinise their bodies, fretting about their bums being too big, the boobs they don't yet have being too small.

Amongst the girls in the parade, there were a couple who were quite chubby; whose bellies protuded between their tank tops and the waist bands of their short skirts. I knew that some onlookers in the crowd would be sniggering. It won't be long before these little ones become old enough to understand that cheerleading - and the ideal of female sexuality it promotes - is not for girls like them. 'Imperfect' girls need not apply.

In memory of Lauren

There's a spectrum of feminist responses to the beauty myth. At one end, there's the dour ladies who feel that any concession to the idea of beauty compromises women. And at the other end, there's the idea that women should be able to do with our bodies whatever we wish - whether that be wearing lip gloss and labels or having hairy legs and jackboots.

I have to admit that I'm much closer to the dour end of the spectrum than the do-as-you-please end, although I mean no disrespect to those feminists with other beliefs. It's not that I don't support women's right to autonomy over our bodies. Rather, it's because women and men alike can use our individual rights and autonomy in ways which cause harm to others. I feel that if we as feminists focus too much on securing women's personal freedoms, we might lose sight of the collective issue - in this case, how our individual actions feed a beauty culture which is unhealthy for women.

Case in point. In my early twenties, the chronic despression which has been a permanent feature of my life landed me in the acute psychiatric ward of the local hospital (another post for another day, perhaps). I shared my ward room with three other women; each of us had a quarter of the room surrounded by a curtain. One of my roommates was a woman in her mid-twenties called Lauren.

Lauren was terribly ill with anorexia. She had deprived her body until she was pencil-thin and shapeless like a twelve-year-old boy. During mealtimes, she and the other patients with eating disorders - all of them young women - sat in their own segregated area, where their eating was scrutinised by a nurse. Each of these women had a tray containing the sort of lunch you might feed a preschooler: tiny sandwiches, a miniature package of fruit juice. Eating was a source of anguish and humilation for these women. They sat hunched miserably over their children's servings, with their bony spines and ribcages protruding, hoping I think that the nurse might relent and leave them be. They looked like they felt they were being tortured.

I had an altercation with Lauren one day. I'd decided that I needed to add orange hairdye to the greyness of my life, and left a godawful mess in our shared bathroom. Lauren told me angrily to clean it up. Later, she tried to apologise. This wasn't easy for her, not for reasons for pride or anything like that, but because she was so consumed by the pain of her illness that communicating coherently with others was truly difficult for her. I knew what she meant, though, and she gave me the only smile I ever saw from her.

From that point, Lauren and I had the closest thing to a friendship which I believe a person as ill as her could possibly have. One night, as each person was in bed in their curtained quarters, Lauren asked me calmly if I would call her a nurse. I knew something was horribly, terribly wrong. After fetching the nurse, I listened fearfully from behind my curtain. The nurse attending Lauren called out to another, 'It's in almost three inches - call surgery'.

I later found out that Lauren had taken a pair of scissors and silently tried to cut away the 'fat' from her emaciated stomach. That's how much she hated her own body. Miraculously, she had missed her internal organs.

It's too simplistic to say that the beauty industry causes eating disorders, but I don't believe it helped Lauren to live in a culture in which dissastisfaction with ourselves is mandatory for women. Feeling beautiful and sexy can be fun, an aesthetic thing to be enjoyed and celebrated. But I feel strongly that beauty is harmful when it sets women in competition with one another, or with ourselves, in a race towards goals which stay ever out of reach. Who hasn't said to themselves or others, 'If I just lose a couple more kilos I'll be happy with the way I look', 'Oh my God - look at her hair', or 'I may be a bit chubby, but at least I'm not as fat as her'. Because, as Lauren's story shows, every competition must have a loser.

A couple of years ago, I opened a newspaper to find a story about Lauren. She had succeeded in starving herself to death in her mid-thirties. The sadness I felt was not for her death, but for the unhappiness and self-hatred of her life. Mostly, I felt relief that her suffering was over.

Good things come to those who weight watch

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.