Khloé Kardashian Urges Bullied People to Hand Over Their Lunch Money

Khloé Kardashian has a new show called “Revenge Body.”  The premise is “Let’s make our haters our biggest motivators” and to that end people who have been bullied are given a team of trainers and “beauty experts” to help them go to drastic measures to look like people they assume their bullies would not have bullied which, for Khloé, passes for “revenge.”

While people are allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies for whatever their reasons, this, to me, is no kind of revenge.  This is spending a ton of time, energy, and money to give the bullies exactly what they wanted, and then asking for their approval.  It’s like saying “give the bullies your lunch money, that’ll show ’em!”

We don’t owe our bullies anything, least of all manipulation of our body size, eyebrow waxing, or uncomfortable shoes – however “fashionable” they might be.  Oppression takes a lot of different forms, and oppression against people who are believed to be able to move out of an oppressed group often leads to people feeling vindicated in their suggestion that the best way to solve social stigma is for stigmatized people to change ourselves.

As a queer woman I’ve been told that if I don’t like being the victim of homophobia I should date a dude. As a fat woman I’ve been told that if I don’t like being the victim of fatphobia I should become thin.  In both cases it doesn’t actually matter if it’s possible to change myself, because the cure for social stigma is ending social stigma – not for stigmatized people to try to squeeze ourselves in a mold someone else created for us.

I will not try to manipulate my body size for some kind of twisted victim-blaming concept of “revenge.” I will wield my beautiful fat body like a weapon.  I will love it, I will care for it, I will move it, I will show it in public, I will viciously defend my body against anyone who seeks to classify it as anything but amazing. The problem here isn’t how we look, it’s that people bully us for how we look. I don’t care about revenge, but I do demand social change.

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Kintsukuroi Repaired with Love

You may have seen this image floating around the last little while:

The philosophy here is as beautiful as one of the pieces; Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage."

While chatting with Ryan last night I came to fully understand and embrace a concept that I've been learning slowly for years; being broken, and repaired, is OK. I'll often say when feeling sad or depressed or triggered, Sorry, I'm broken. Or sorry I'm broken. (Punctuation is important!) I know where my fault lines are, where I've been shattered apart and rebuilt and despite it being corny or dramatic, I realize that those cracks and scars have been repaired with love. They glitter with that most precious of things.

Every time I break it's love that repairs me; the love of my children and mine for them, the love of my wonderful husband and mine for him, and the love of my extended friends and family. It pours, drips or trickles in as I allow, when the jagged edges are prepared to be joined again. Love sustains and heals and strengthens me until not only am I stronger than before but also more beautiful-not in a shallow, skin deep and fleeting manner but deeper, more interesting. My mental and emotional scars allow me to shine a golden and compassionate glow on others, to channel empathy and understanding. Only through being broken and repaired can I understand another's pain and need for healing.

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It’s Not Logic, It’s Fatphobia

The Toronto Transit Commission created a campaign about public transportation that juxtaposed public transportation backgrounds with dancers from the National Ballet of Canada.  Fat activist Jill Andrew pointed out that the campaign falls short on inclusivity and representation when it comes to who uses the TTC. She explained:

We can’t deny that there is a lot of body-based discrimination that happens … within our moves around the city…My experience as a racialized woman, as a fat woman, I’ve been called an f-ing fat black b—- on the TTC, is this video really moving me? Is this video at all depicting me on the move?  The body types of most ballet dancers do not adequately represent those of most Canadians and, I dare say, most TTC users. This is simply an opportunity to reflect on who is being left out by an ad campaign such as this.

Predictably someone wrote an article to whine that Jill is being “too sensitive” (with thanks to the always amazing Tigress Osborn for making me aware of this.)  That someone is Erin Davis who wrote about this for Notable.com in a piece in which she prefaces an attempt to discredit the words of a fat activist by saying “I am all for the ever-important body positivity movement.” Right. Out of curiosity Erin, what would this piece have looked like if you weren’t “all for the ever-important body positivity movement?” You know what, never mind.

When requests for inclusivity and representation are met with shouts of “oversensitive” and “too-PC” it’s a pretty good bet that it’s being done by someone who is not thinking critically. As if to make it crystal clear that she just doesn’t get it, Erin makes the common mistake of confusing logic for fatphobia when she “explains” the lack body diversity of the ballet dancers in the ads saying: “Dancers look the way they do because they’re dancers.”

Except that’s not actually true at all. The truth is that dancers look the way they do because if they don’t look that way they have almost no chance of being employed regardless of how talented they are because of the rampant fatphobia that exists in the dance world.

So Erin has actually been duped by the very lack of representation that Jill Andrews is pointing out and that Erin is trying to shout down as being “over-sensitive.”  Priceless.

Representation is important, and it’s important to think about who creates the images that we see in the media, what their own prejudices and/or profit motives might be, and it’s important to question that lack of representation not just of fat bodies, but also of People of Color, disabled people/people with disabilities, and other under-represented groups and those with multiple marginalized identities.

So while I don’t love Erin’s article, I do appreciate the great job that she did of proving my (and, as far as I’m concerned, Jill Andrew’s) point: Representation Matters.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com

If you are uncomfortable with my offering things for sale on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

 

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So Your Friend is Suddenly a Weight Loss Genius

I got this question from a blog reader:

How do you cope with people who have lost significant amounts of weight, and who suddenly seem to think that they have all the answers? I have seen this recently with a few acquaintances, one of whom has lost a massive amount of weight and now seems to spend most of her time criticising others for being unable to do the same. I’ve expressed my concerns to her- firstly that she’s using [a commercial weight loss program], which means she may well put all the weight back on again- but also that her manner has become incredibly toxic and fat phobic. She is not the only one, though.

I suppose what I’m saying is, how can people who know what its like to be the subject of fat-shaming and discrimination suddenly forget all that and perpetrate it against it others once their circumstances change?

This is something that has happened to every fat person I know.  We have a friend who experiences short term weight loss and suddenly they are a Weight Loss genius and expert on why everyone should be thin.  Often it doesn’t matter if they themselves struggled for a long time, or even if this isn’t their first ride on the diet roller coaster.  Of course, people are allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies, but that doesn’t make it ok for them to add to the oppression of fat people by diet culture.

Let’s start with some of the reasons this happens (of course your mileage – and everyone else’s – may vary so these things may or may not be true for your newly minted weight loss genius friend.) I think it’s a confluence of things having to do with our culture’s obsession with weight loss and thinness:

They have, for the moment anyway, moved themselves out of a stigmatized social class. They are like the kids who suddenly became popular in high school and then join their new “cool” friends in teasing the kids who used to be their friends in junior high.  They are enjoying their new-found privilege and acceptance and they feel like they need to use the language of the people who used to oppress them to keep it, so they now sound like a walking, talking weight loss add complete with before and after pictures and weight and measurement changes that they tell anyone who will listen.

This often comes with a double dose of anything from advice to scorn for the people in their lives who are fat, and especially those of us who aren’t engaged in weight loss. This is because the “cool” kids are only powerful if everyone else wants to be them, so if they are resting their self-esteem on thin being more valuable than fat, but we don’t buy into that and we don’t think that thin is any more valuable, that challenges everything for them from their self-esteem to their social status.

The second issue is the way that we are taught to credit everything good to thinness/weight loss and everything bad to fatness.  There is a more complete explanation here, but the basic issue happens when people make behavior changes and they experience health changes and weight loss (at least for the short term) as a result.  Instead of seeing both the health changes and the weight loss changes as side effects of the behavior changes, they give all the credit to the weight loss.

Often people will credit weight loss with better treatment socially, when the fact is that they have, at least in the short term, solved social stigma by changing themselves to appease their oppressors. Basically they’ve given the bullies their lunch money and, at least for the moment, the bullies have stopped beating them up. It’s important to make the distinction because otherwise they are oppressing fat people by blaming our bodies when the actual problem is the stigma, bullying, and oppression we face because of weigh bias.

And then, sometimes, it’s just blatantly done for profit.

As far as how to handle it:

I suggest that you resist, with conviction, the urge to tell them how good they look now – it sounds like you are saying that they looked bad before.  If we want to opt out of a world where some bodies are seen as better than others, then not suggesting that somebody’s body is better because it’s a different size is probably a decent place to start.

Often when this happens people are really excited and expecting a compliment. I know that there is an extremely high chance that they are going to gain the weight back.  For that reason I try to comment in a way that will lessen the self-esteem hit if they end up in the vast majority.

By the way, if they don’t bring up the weight loss I don’t bring it up. Weight loss isn’t always welcome – it can be from medical issues, medication, stress, grieving etc. and I don’t want to bring up something painful. Plus this conversation is awkward enough, I’m not going to go through it if I don’t have to. (If you’re dealing with unwanted weight loss compliments, or want some suggestions for talking about your weight loss without hurting fat people in the process, I have some suggestions for you here!)

If they bring up weight loss what I tend to say is something like “I’m glad that you are happy” or “You were beautiful before and you still are” or something that is as neutral as possible.  While it’s important to me that people be allowed to make choices for themselves including the choice to attempt weight loss, it’s also important to me that I not perpetuate and praise diet culture or make it seem as if I think a body is more valuable or in some way better if it is currently smaller than it was before. Other people feel differently about this, choosing to celebrate other people’s weight loss and of course that’s their right.

If you are uncomfortable with the amount/frequency of diet talk and weight loss talk, you have several choices. You can decide to just live with it (in this case having a mantra that you say in your head like can be helpful – I use “hey, that’s bullshit!”)

You can try responding to diet and weight loss talk with Size Acceptance and/or Health at Every Size talk (ie: Them: “I ate super clean today and I’ve lost however many pounds this week” you: “I just feel so much freer, happier, and healthier not moralizing food or talking about my weight!”).

You can change the subject. My friend Jeanette (aka The Fat Chick) told me about a friend of hers who memorized a bunch of facts about monkeys and every time someone brings up diet or weight loss talk, she uses one of her random facts to change the subject to monkeys.

It’s also perfectly ok to set boundaries. Something like “I respect the choices you make and how you feel about your body, but I’m not interested in diet or weight loss talk so if we’re going to hang out we need to find other things to talk about.”

However you decide to handle it, it’s also totally reasonable and ok to be disappointed and hurt by your friend’s actions, and remember that however you choose to deal with it on any given day is totally valid, as are your choices to not be part of diet and weight loss culture.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com

If you are uncomfortable with my offering things for sale on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

 

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How to Get Through This

In the comments, megpie71 linked to her extremely helpful post: How to Get Through This: Tips From a Lifelong Depressive.  It shares coping strategies that mentally healthy people may not have needed until now.

Acknowledge what you’re feeling is genuine. Don’t tell yourself you’re “over-reacting” or “being over-dramatic” or “being silly”. Especially, don’t try to tell yourself that you’re “fine” (unless you actually mean, “freaked out, insecure, neurotic and emotional” when you say that). What you’re feeling is what you’re genuinely feeling, and it’s something which deserves to be acknowledged. Don’t try to make yourself feel happier or better. Just accept you’re feeling bad, and you’re allowed to feel bad.

I particularly like this part, because those of us who are devastated and terrified by Trump’s win are under a lot of pressure to “get over it” and pretend everything is normal.  Everything is not normal.

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Buckle Up

Hi everyone! It's JeninCanada and I wrote something I felt I just had to say out loud. It's been quite a week, hasn't it? Leonard Cohen died, I'm being transferred (by my request) to a new branch, my mom and sister in law were in town this weekend for a visit and Donald Trump is president elect of the United States. Enjoy the text wall, or watch the video below. Sorry for the weird sound quality.

There's a lot I could write that's already been said by others, and probably more cohesively and with greater eloquence, about that garbage nightmare Trump's win. Election night, like many of you, I said watching the results roll in; first with elation, then with trepidation. I went to bed sometime near midnight after a couple of rum and cokes and cried my heart out. I prayed to Ma'at and Athena for justice, for civilization and basically for the future. It was for naught. I woke in the morning, got the kids out the door to school, and went back to bed for another two hours and cried some more. Hillary Clinton, despite being one of, if not THE most qualified candidates in history, would not become the next president of the United States.

Despite being Canadian, I feel like someone has died. Election night, as Kat was getting ready for bed and the dream was still strong, I told her: When you get  up in the morning, a woman like me and you is going to be in charge of the most powerful country in the world." Florida made me a liar. Goddamn you Florida, can't you ever get it right? Seriously though, I am in mourning as so many other women and men are. We needed Hillary to win. We needed to see that the world would continue onwards and upwards, hope and change, spinning forward into a better, brighter tomorrow. But it didn't. It's four years of backsliding into 1942 and how quickly and ugly it is is breathtaking.

My heart breaks for all of the people who are now, more than ever, living in fear for their safety and security, and even their lives. It breaks for the children being told by their peers they're going to be 'sent home' to a country they've never even been too, or that their parents are going to be taken away from them. It breaks for the people of faith, Muslims and Hindus (because who can tell them apart, amirite? They all wear that thing on their heads! Send 'em all home!) who are going to be further targeted for hatred and violence. The suicide prevention lines for LGBTQ people have been jammed and trans suicides spiked. What hope is there for them when Mike Pence, Mr. Gay Shock Therapy, is the Vice President?

What hope is there for our land and water when you have a climate change denier in a top post? What kind of world will my grandchidren grow up in? What hope is there for education when Trump's gone and put a creationist in charge of education? SARAH PALIN IS HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR. Drill baby drill! She can't see Russia from her house any more but she can see dollar signs in Yosemite park.

It's a frightening time to be alive for Americans. For the rest of us, we're thankful to not be, but as I share the longest undefended border in the world with them, and our economies and yes, even culture, is so interwoven, it didn't take long for the hate to bubble up here too. Like the faint gassy smell of Toronto's downtown, racism and white supremacy has always been a thing in Canada but now those folks, the Soldiers of Odin and the Conservative Party of Canada, look south and say "See! SEE! If they can do it, we can do it!" An Ottawa elementary school had a swastika spray painted on it over the weekend, with a KKK beside that for good measure. One of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservatives actually, and with out irony, praised Trump's win and said we need to bring his kind of anti-elitist politics here.

Over my dead body.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders aren't giving up. The Democrats are an absolute mess right now but I believe that they'll sort themselves out, learn from this embarrassing and disasterous defeat, and address their failings in time for the 2018 elections. When I told Gabe that Hillary didn't win, and asked him what we were going to do, he said "Move to the United States and help out so things aren't too bad there?" I was so proud of him. Then I said "No way in hell. But we ARE going to do everything we can to make sure that a person like Trump NEVER gets close to running Canada."

I hope the Liberals and the NDP take note as well; white, rural Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump for a variety of reasons; Prejudice has always clung to the edges of the map-cities are the great melting pots of a country. If you've spent your whole life in Small Town USA and never interacted with a Muslim or an African American or a lesbian except what you saw on TV, heard on talk radio or learned from your Small Town Parents, then you're going to believe Trump when he says Mexican are rapists, Blacks are thugs, and Muslims are terrorists. Being a rural American also means having watched as your government bowed to the will of massive multinational corporations for generations and shipped all the 'good jobs' overseas, destroyed the unions that made your grandfather's quality of life possible, and ruined the environment. These awful changes affected the cities as well, and it should go without saying but it still needs saying anyway, and affected women and minorities worse than anyone else, but did those groups vote for Trump? NO they did not. They voted overwhelmingly for Hillary.

The difference is women and minorities don't have a convenient scapegoat; they ARE the scapegoat. They get thrown under the bus of white male anger and Trump becomes president elect. And the same types of problems exist in Canada-rural Canada is very Conservative. They like their rifles and their atvs and their small town living and they don't like anyone who's different. They like the good old days when jobs were plentiful and paid well and the world at large wasn't so damn scary and messed up. The Baby Boomers ruined the economy and now they've voted in some more of the same to try and fix it? That's the definition of insanity.

Just to be clear; a vote for Trump because a person thought that he'd fix the economy was also very much a vote for racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia. A vote for Trump was a vote for letting big business and white supremacists into the White House. It was a vote for setting back the clock to 1942. The next four years are going to be a VERY bumpy ride. Buckle up, folks.

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That Fat and Fingernails Thing

Every once in awhile a meme starts going around social media that says “You are not fat.  You have fat.  You also have fingernails.  But you are not fingernails.”  I’ve seen this in plenty of versions and I think it’s problematic on a lot of levels. It must be going around again because I’ve been getting a bunch of requests about it, so I’m re-posting my response.

First of all, as regular readers have probably already sussed out, I would be much more comfortable if this was written from the perspective of how someone feels about/for themselves instead of dictating to others how we should feel (ie: “I’m not fat, I have fat” instead of “You are not fat, you have fat”.)  People are allowed to look at their bodies this way because, hey, underpants rule.  That said, I think it’s an idea worth some exploring.

Let’s consider some other examples – can you imagine Facebook memes that say “You are not brunette, you have brown hair” or “You are not tall, you have above-average height.” When I’m flying in for a speaking gig I often tell the person who is responsible for picking up that I’ll be the short, fat, brunette -in the blue dress or whatever.  People often respond by telling me not to call myself fat, nobody in my life has ever told me not to call myself brunette.  Therein lies my problem with this – it seems to me that the reason to draw a distinction between being fat and having fat is that we are considering being fat to be a negative thing from which we want to disassociate, and/or we want to see it as so temporary that we don’t want to be identified as fat.

I don’t think the research suggests that most fat people will remove our fat.  Regardless, knowing that it’s possible that time and circumstance might change the size of my body, I don’t think that’s a reason to not identify the way that it looks now. I call myself a brunette even though it’s basically a certainty that I will someday have hair that is gray and not brown. So even though there’s the possibility that my body may someday not be fat (through illness etc. – it’s certainly not a goal of mine) I’m definitely fat right now. So why would I want to find a semantic way out of it?

The actual problem is the way that people with fat bodies are stigmatized, stereotyped, bullied, marginalized, and oppressed. I’m just not sure this can be solved by “having” instead of “being” fat. To me the fact that identifying a body as fat is considered an insult is a symptom of a problem, not the actual problem – so this can’t be solved through wordplay.  If brunettes were being oppressed I don’t think there is much to be gained by saying that I’m not a brunette, I just have brown hair.

Similarly, since fat people are being oppressed, I don’t think there is much to be gained by saying that I’m not fat, I just have fat.  Mostly because no matter how I describe myself, people can still see me, and these oppressions are based on how I look to others, not on how I describe myself.  I also understand that the word “fat” has been used as derisive and I understand that not everyone is into using it as a reclaiming term and everybody gets to decide that for themselves.  For me, using the word fat to describe myself without apology tells my bullies that they can’t have my lunch money any more, and avoids pathologizing my body in the way that terms like “overweight” and “obese” do.

It’s possible that people would give me slightly better treatment (however begrudgingly) if I said that I’m not fat – I have fat, or if I characterized myself as being overweight in a way that indicates that I believe there’s a problem with my body.  I’m ok with passing on that “approval”, because  I am far more interested in fighting stereotyping, stigma, bullying and oppression, than I am in trying to avoid it through wordplay or concessions that I can make to my oppressors.  Other people may see this differently and/or make other choices than I do and, of course, that’s completely fine. But as for me, I am fat because I have fat and I’m fine with that.

Like this blog?  Here’s more cool stuff:

Become a Member! For ten bucks a month you can support fat activism and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.  Click here for details

Book and Dance Class Sale!  I’m on a journey to complete an IRONMAN triathlon, and I’m having a sale on all my books, DVDs, and digital downloads to help pay for it. You get books and dance classes, I get spandex clothes and bike parts. Everybody wins! If you want, you can check it out here!

Book Me!  I’d love to speak to your organization. You can get more information here or just e-mail me at ragen at danceswithfat dot org!

I’m training for an IRONMAN! You can follow my journey at www.IronFat.com

If you are uncomfortable with my offering things for sale on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

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