WHAT WE'RE ABOUT
We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
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We are not health professionals. Any and all advice provided on this blog is supported only by our own research, studies, and personal experiences; nothing more.
This blog is part of the Safe Space Network.
This is a very good article. An excerpt:
But weight loss products and schemes have an added bonus. When faced with the obvious indications that the products and services DO NOT WORK, the consumer blames him or her self. Yep the consumer, not the product, is blamed.
This is why weight loss schemes are a capitalism wet dream. Theshame and stigma sells. Allergan just succeeded in expanding its market 173.33% because the fear of fat is so pervasive and the blame of fat people for their fatness is just as pervasive.
The money shows us that weight loss is big business and that when money is involved, media and government tread lightly in attacking or restricting that big business.
Allergan uses the stigma, shame and fear of being fat and/or relies upon the unrealistic expectations of “normality” to promote the surgery that uses their device. The money also shows us that stigma pays. The more the message that fat is bad gets out, the more likely people will continue to seek remedy through the surgery.
But the surgery doesn’t solve either the health problems or the stigma and there is no financial incentive to do so. The system profits from the fact that the system doesn’t work and the consumer is blamed for the defects. Again stigma pays.
Finally, the financial, governmental or media support for scientific research that doesn’t fit the stigma or the system is withheld.
Only a savvy consumer who breaks free of the stigmatized understanding of the data can hear what the money is saying. It is time to tell the truth and not just let moneyed interest set the agenda.
EXOTIC DANCERS IN 1890 AND THE PLUMP BODY IDEAL by Lisa Wade
I recently had the pleasure of reading Peter Stearns’Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. The book chronicles the shift in American history from a plump to a thin ideal. The beauty of Stearns’ book is his resistance to reducing the shift in norms to a simple cause. Instead, he traces the changes to conflicts between capitalism and religion, the backlash against women’s equality, industrialization and the devaluation of maternal roles, fashion trends, the professionalization of medicine, our cultural relationship to food, and more.
Stearns is quite specific in timing the change, however, pointing to the years between 1890 and 1910. In these 20 years, he writes:
…middle-class America began its ongoing battle aginst body fat. Never previously an item of systemic public concern, dieting or guilt about not dieting became an increasing staple of private life, along with a surprisingly strong current of disgust directed against people labeled obese.
I thought of Stearns’ book when I came across a delightful collection of photographs of exotic dancers taken in 1890, the year he pinpoints as the beginning of the shift to thinness. From a contemporary perspective, they would likely be judged as “too fat,” but their plumpness was exactly what made these dancers so desirable at the time.
As a white and relatively able-privileged (usually hidden disabilities) cis person, I want to be clear that this discussion extends only to the discussion of fat safe spaces, and I am in no way drawing parallels, comparing to, or commenting on other safe…
Obesity, Health and Metabolic Fitness by Glenn Gaesser, Ph.D.
Definitely read the whole article, it’s wonderful.
It makes me so sad when people say things like this.
Love yourself. Fuck everyone else.
Thank you to those who participated in my survey. Here are some highlights from the “final thoughts” section that I really enjoyed. If you’d like to participate, click here.
- The media screws everything up. I want facts, not weight loss “miracles”
- Don’t care about fitting a standard, I just want to be as healthy as I can be.
- These studies are underpublicized and no one believes it even if the numbers are in front of them because their own trained disgust reflex at the larger than societally acceptable body gets in the way of any potential rational thought.
- I want to be perfectly beautiful.
- “Clean up your own backyard, Oh don’t you hand me none of your lines. Clean up your own backyard, You tend to your business, I’ll tend to mine.” Elvis Motherfucking Presley
- People don’t actually understand the whole deal about health and weight. It’s too oversimplified and full of lies.
- Fuck the beauty industry.
- I wish more attention was paid to people’s minds and less to their bodies.
- I think using “healthy” as some sort of thing that must be achieved is really dismissive of the many things that can go sideways in the human body.
- Those with a “war on fat” have their targets set wrong, it should be a war on perpetual laziness concerning major facets of our lives.
- Everyone is beautiful but everyone also has the potential to be more healthy.
- Body image is a tricky thing. I know in my head that I am healthy and that according to most people, I am not fat. In comparison to the media, however, I feel like I’m enormous and unattractive. It’s so hard to balance all of the different messages being fired at us every day.
- It is not anyone’s obligation to be thin, pretty or healthy. When this becomes a major expectation and part of public discourse and decision making, it negatively affects a lot of people.
Conducting more research and looking for some new perspectives. Please reblog and spread the word!
Doing some preliminary word mapping, came up with the following themes to focus on for possible interactive installations to portray the messages I want to get across. Will be defining these messages more clearly once I decide on technology and visuals I want to pursue.
- body-shaming
- judgement
- fat hate
- health in relation to body size
- fear sells
- shaming
- perfection
- criticism of visual culture
- visual culture in general
- history of shaming in visual culture (advertising)
- ineffectiveness of dieting
- manufactured meanings via media attached to language (words fat/skinny)
- connotations (challenge connotative meanings of different words)
- unnecessary desires
- word reclamation/association
- assumptions
Feel free to suggest themes you feel I should cover.
WARNING: THIS IS VERY TRIGGERING.
If you were wondering about my stance on diets etc, you can read this: http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2009/08/open-letter-fat-positive.html
Only skimmed so far, reblogged to remind myself to read later.
Someone recently asked me what is the difference between the size acceptance and the fat acceptance movement, if they’re separate or are two faces of the same coin, and I was wondering how you would answer that question.
Anonymous
Hm, I would say on a basic level they’re the same thing, but FA puts emphasis on the acceptance and promotion of fat bodies which are more marginalised than thin ones, and kind of ignores thin bodies (not in a negative way, just in an “fat is our priority” way) whereas SA is a more general approach to respect forall shapes and sizes. So, they’re not really separate, FA is just a more specific area of SA :)
A question I had as well, thank you for the clarification!
- Collect anything and everything.
- Ask questions, propose answers.
- Consider how I, as a graphic designer, can alter or impact visual media through the messages I want to get across about body image.
- Discover other designers who have succeeded in these areas.
- Discover my own voice. I am not a preacher, I don’t pretend to know more than anyone else. I do know what I believe in and I have strong opinions but have been timid with them in the past.
- This is my chance to stop being timid, but I don’t want to intimidate.
- I will refrain from using tones that are judgmental or pretentious, accusatory.
- Use language that is authentic and positive.
- Promote messages that will cause my audience to question and ponder their own beliefs without beating them over the head with some sort of lecture.
- To be continued.