Self-Compassion is NOT a Diet

I saw an article posted on Facebook called “The Big Problem With Oprah And Other Celebs Who Tout Diets”  I started reading the piece and it was pretty good. The author, Jean Fain, who identified herself as “a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders” was doing a decent take-down of the celebrity diet culture including the quote:

From where I sit, clean eating, lifestyle plans, weight management programs, juice cleanses, support systems… they’re all diets, and they’re all bound to fail. But with their intoxicating blend of impossible expectations, misguided authority and restrictive guidelines, celebrity diets are predestined to fail spectacularly.

Yes!  This all day! The article was going great until it hit this:

Self-compassion also means never going on a diet. When you’re self-compassionate, there’s no need to count points or calories or carbs. That’s because you generally appreciate your body and the food you feed it. You naturally eat less and weigh less without dieting.

What? I couldn’t believe it (that’s not true – I could believe it because we live in such a screwed up diet culture, I just didn’t want to believe it.)  It turns out that the author of the article is also the author of the book called “The Self-Compassion Diet.” The irony of her claiming that diets don’t work – except her diet – and that “Self-compassion means never going on a diet…you naturally eat less and weight loss without dieting” while marketing her book “The Self-Compassion Diet” was not lost on me.

I left a comment in the Facebook discussion:

I think that this is seriously problematic, especially in an eating disorder context. She conflates weight and health, and then she says “When you’re self-compassionate, there’s no need to count points or calories or carbs. That’s because you generally appreciate your body and the food you feed it. You naturally eat less and weigh less without dieting.” While I’m sure saying that helps her sell her diet book, it is completely unsupported by evidence.

She replied:

Ragen, there actually is a study that says just that. I don’t have the citation handy, but if you email me I’m happy to send it to you after vacation.

 

So she sent me the study that, remember, she claimed showed that “When you’re self-compassionate… You naturally eat less and weigh less without dieting.” Let’s take a look, shall we:

• The entire sample was 159 college students from 18-25 years old (9 were omitted from the final results by the study authors for being “outliers”) so the sample is not exactly robust.

• 74% of the subjects were “normal weight” to start with so, even using their own messed up ideas about weight and weight loss, we’re down to 39 of the participants having “weight to lose”

• BMI was only taken only once, by self-report. They did not track a change in BMI or a change in weight at all in the study, so the data are silent on whether self-compassion leads to weight loss.

• In fact, it’s a study of “associations.” That means that the study is completely correlational, and causality cannot be drawn at all. That’s why the word “may” occurs 53 times in 10 pages.

• There seems to be quite the hurry to suggest, based on correlation, that having self-compassion leads to a lower BMI.  But it’s just as (if not, perhaps, more?) likely that having a lower BMI in a thoroughly sizeist society may lead to greater self-compassion, since a person with a lower BMI will likely have less experience being ceaselessly barraged with an epic ton of sizeist shame, stigma, bullying, and oppression, while living in a world that isn’t built to accommodate them, all of which gives fat people the message that we aren’t worthy of any compassion – self or otherwise. But sure, it could be that having higher self-compassion causes a lower BMI….  Regardless, that conclusion is beyond the scope of this study.

I asked Deb Burgard, a PhD, eating disorders specialist, and psychologist to check my work just to be sure, and she generously agreed and provided this excellent analysis as well:

The actual hypotheses come back as:

Self-compassion will be positively related to mindful eating      

Yes (college students who are exposed to one are probably more likely to be exposed to the other)

Self-compassion will be inversely related to eating disorder symptomatology

Nope (only dieting)

Self-compassion will be inversely related to BMI  

Yes  (but we don’t know if thin privilege makes it easier to have self- compassion or if dieting is actually the moderator here since the process of dieting is a mindfu*ck that creates a barrier to self-compassion, or if weight stigma creates the barrier, or something else)

Mindful eating will be negatively related to eating disorder syptomatology

Yes   (This is pretty much a tautology since the operational definition of one is the opposite of the other)

Mindful eating will be negatively related to BMI                                            

Nope

Mindful eating will moderate the relationship between self-compassion and eating disorder symptomatology

Nope

Mindful eating will moderate the relationship between self-compassion and BMI

Nope

Here is what I find most interesting:  (From the discussion:) “This study found that self-compassion negatively predicted eating disorder symptomatology and dieting-related eating disorder symptomatology specifically . . .” (p 234).     Actually, self-compassion was unrelated to actual ED symptoms (bulimia, food preoccupation, oral control) and only to the dieting subscale (which was not one of the hypotheses).

So you can imagine that people who are thinner are less likely to diet and also less likely to be exposed to cultural expectations that one is a loser if one can’t “successfully” diet/be thin.

The fact that these researchers are touting mindfulness or intutive eating or self-compassion as a way to be thin is an expression itself of weight stigma.

There are numerous examples in the text of the assumption that higher BMI people must eat more, eat in a more disordered way, etc. but their own finding is that mindful eating is unrelated to BMI!

In any case, this research says exactly zero about the idea that if a higher-weight person has self-compassion, they will lose weight. In fact, that idea may itself be an example of how stigma and oppression make it harder for people to feel supported in practicing self-compassion, since the fact that their bodies don’t stay thin must mean they do not really deserve self-compassion, or they must not be doing it right, or whatever specific f*ckery is on today’s menu.

I think it’s worth delving deeper into that last bit, because it’s easy to think “Hey, even if the weight loss doesn’t happen, the person still ends up with more self-compassion right? So isn’t that a good thing?”

The problem is that’s there’s every chance that when you tell fat people to believe that self-compassion will lead to weight loss, then those people are likely to end up believing that they are not doing self-compassion “correctly” and/or that they don’t deserve self-compassion if they aren’t simultaneously becoming thinner (which they are unlikely to do, especially in the long-term.)

At the same time, you suggest that other people can judge by someone’s body size whether or not they have self-compassion, which just adds to the tremendous stigma and stereotyping that fat people deal with.  And that’s oppressive.

 

So I think that, however well-intentioned she may be, Jean is harming people. From my perspective, she is co-opting the idea of self-compassion in order to make a profit by misleading fat people into buying a big book of magical weight loss beans. Regardless of her intentions – which, again, may well be good – I think that the impact of her work is harmful, and her belief that this study supports her claims is nothing short of disturbing, as is the idea of someone who conflates self-compassion with body size (and markets the diet book she wrote) identifying as a specialist in working with people who have eating disorders.

To be clear, what she is doing is legal – people are (for now) allowed to try to sell promises of weight loss, however unlikely they are to be successful. But we don’t have to buy what they are selling – and we have every right to expect that they will be able to provide evidence that actually backs up their claims.

Regardless, the bottom line here is that we are all worthy of compassion, including self-compassion, at any weight. The only outcome we can currently prove about developing more self-compassion is that it will increase the amount of compassion we have for ourselves (and I’m a fan of that.) I think that self-compassion is not a diet; and anyone who says it is, is trying to sell something.

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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!

In training for an IRONMAN triathlon.  If you’re interested, you can find my training blog here

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

 

 

 

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They Want Fat People to Swallow Balloons Now

A bunch of you have asked me to blog about this new weight loss trend.  I think it says a lot about this that I couldn’t remember the clinical name so I googled “balloon you swallow to lose weight” and it came right up.  So, you know, yikes.

The basics: Orbera is a balloon that a doctor places into the stomach and then fills with saline.  It then floats around the stomach, taking up space.

Let’s see what we can learn from their own website:

During the first two weeks you can expect:

Placement of the balloon within the stomach produces an expected and predictable reaction characterized most commonly by a feeling of heaviness in the abdomen, nausea and vomiting, gastroesophageal reflux, belching, esophagitis, heartburn, diarrhea and, at times, abdominal, back or epigastric pain and cramping. Food digestion may be slowed during this adjustment period. These symptoms can be treated with antiemetic, antispasmodic, and anticholinergic medications

But hold on because there’s more in store for you:

• Gastric discomfort, feelings of nausea and vomiting following balloon placement as the digestive system adjusts to the presence of the balloon.

• Continuing nausea and vomiting. This could result from direct irritation of the lining of the stomach or as a result of the balloon blocking the outlet of the stomach. It is even theoretically possible that the balloon could prevent vomiting (not nausea or retching) by blocking the inlet to the stomach from the esophagus.

• A feeling of heaviness in the abdomen.

• Abdominal or back pain, either steady or cyclic.

• Gastroesophageal reflux.

• Influence on digestion of food.

• Blockage of food entering into the stomach.

• Bacterial growth in the fluid which fills the balloon. Rapid release of this fluid into the intestine could cause infection, fever, cramps and diarrhea.

• Injury to the lining of the digestive tract as a result of direct contact with the balloon, grasping forceps, or as a result of increased acid production by the stomach. This could lead to ulcer formation with pain, bleeding or even perforation. Surgery could be necessary to correct this condition.

 

• Balloon deflation and subsequent replacement.

And there are at least a couple of ways that it can kill you:

• Death due to complications related to gastric or esophageal perforation is possible.

• Death due to complications related to intestinal obstruction is possible.

In their own study the 160 people who got the balloon experienced a total of 810 “device-related Adverse Events.” in six months or less.

 

And what are we risking this for?

The average participant lost 21.8 pounds in the six months they spent having adverse events (that, luckily, didn’t kill them) from a silicon balloon floating around their stomachs.  The control group lost 7 pounds.

Six months later, our balloon swallowers had regained 5.6 pounds (25.69%) of the weight that they lost in the first 6 months which puts them right on track to have gained back all of their weigh (with some regaining more than they lost) within 5 years. The control group had regained .7 pounds (10%,) also on track for the weight regain that the long-term studies of weight loss tell us to expect. Of course, like almost all weight loss studies, at this point they simply stopped following the subjects.

The only possible “good thing” about this that I can see is that some people whose doctors might want to amputate their stomachs might stick a balloon in them instead.  It’s still terrible, but at least it is reversible and fewer people will die, or live the rest of their lives  with horrific side effects, as a result.

So, basically, once again, they are asking fat people to risk our lives (not to mention quality of life) for nothing. Welcome to the “War on Obesity” which wants us thin or dead, and doesn’t much seem to care which.

If you enjoy this blog, consider becoming a member or making a contribution.

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!

In training for an IRONMAN triathlon.  If you’re interested, you can find my training blog here

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

 

 

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Missiles and Futility

This week’s attack on Syria seems like the ultimate in futility.  We didn’t damage much of anything, except whatever tattered shreds of credibility we might have had left as a nation. We showed off that we have lots and lots of Tomahawk missiles, and the ability to blow shit up whenever we’re so inclined. We didn’t affect Assad’s ability to carry out chemical attacks in the future, beyond providing a deterrent.

But, then, I’m becoming jaded enough to think that none of that was the true purpose.  Doing something that Russia publicly disapproves of both provides an argument against Trump being Putin’s puppet and distracts from the ongoing investigation.  And the media lapped it up.  Oh, look how Presidential he is.  He’s leading with his heart.  Yeah, and he’s got ocean front property to sell you in Arizona.  Truly fabulous, great ocean views, right in Arizona. Really just the best.

It’s probably too uncharitable for me to say that I have not yet seen evidence that our President has a heart, much less that he leads with it. But it would do a lot more to convince me that this action was out of compassion for murdered Syrian children if he was willing to allow some of them to resettle here.

Nikki Haley’s justification for this blatant hypocrisy is that we just want *vetting.*:

What this president has done is said, ‘Prove to me that you are vetting these people properly. And if you are vetting them properly, then we will resume where we are. But until then, you have to prove to me that these people are being vetted in a way that we’re not putting American citizens at risk.

That would actually have some credibility if the administration had come out with any sort of plan for improved vetting, requirements for what “proper” vetting consists of, or specifics on what’s insufficient about the most extensive vetting of any means of getting into the country.

It would also be more credible if any refugee had at any point carried out a terrorist attack in the US, and if we weren’t currently in the midst of an epidemic of violence carried out by white, ostensibly Christian, native-born citizens.  If you check out the gun violence archive, we rarely go more than 2 or 3 *days* without someone shooting up a school, mall, or place of business. We’ve become so inured to these constant, near-daily acts of terrorism that they don’t even make the news unless there’s a body count in the double digits.

America is driving down the road doing 30 miles over the limit in a rainstorm, with bald tires and dodgy brakes, cell phone in one hand, cigarette in the other. But we refuse to stop for a terrified, desperate hitchhiker, because she might be dangerous.

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Not Now, Not Ever

Sigh… my dear fellow fats, there’s something you all need to know…

You don’t owe anyone jack shit.

No seriously, you don’t.  You don’t owe anyone any of the following:

• An excuse for your body/health/size/weight.
• Justification for your existence.
• A “debate” (or argument, whatever they want to call it).
• Justification for your fatness.
• Proof of your “health”.
• Proof of what you eat, or what physical activity you do.
• Apologies for taking up the space your body happens to take up.
• Answers to any of the private information people demand of you.
• Proof that you are “happy”.
• An education into the human rights of fat people.
• Corrections for dodgy science.
• Politeness or respect when they demand any of the above.

Further to Lindy West’s excellent piece in The Guardian this week, where she quite rightfully points out that after having answered the same question publicly for six years, she’s no longer going to bother responding to it any more, I think it needs to be expanded upon to include refusing to engage in any of the above activities with people who demand you jump through hoops for them, and then completely disregard your response anyway.

We’ve just got to stop doing this.  And we’ve got to stop tiptoeing around the people who demand we do this.  We’ve not only got to start saying “No.” but also we’re completely justified in telling them exactly where to shove their intrusive questions and demands.

Oh I know, those same people demanding you do all of those things will say “Well you’ve clearly got no argument then.”  Or they’ll say “I’ve approached you respectfully and now you’re being RUDE to me.” while clutching their metaphorical pearls in horror.

Here’s the thing.  Demanding fat people justify our existence, asking intrusive personal questions, trying to force us to “debate” them about your rights as a human being, and expecting us to educate them are all acts of violence towards fat people.  These intrusive, disrespectful behaviours are deliberate attempts to push us into a “lesser” category of humanity, to waste our time in repeatedly answering their demands with absolutely no intention of either believing us or allowing us to move on and to generally just be disrespectful.  It is NOT polite or respectful discourse to demand or expect you to respond to these things, and therefore you’re not beholden to some kind of polite response.

Tell them where to shove their damn demands for you to justify your existence.  Because the truth is, even if you were to respond, you’re not going to change their mind anyway.  Trust me, I’ve been doing this for YEARS now, rapidly approaching a decade, and I have never, ever had anyone who came at me expecting me to either justify my existence or prove my life to them in any way, actually change their mind and start recognising my right to exist in this world as I am, a fat woman.

The people who are genuinely going to change their minds actually just listen – they don’t demand you jump through hoops for them.  The people who are going to respect you are going to take their time to do their own reading/research.  They’re going to listen to you when you speak in the first place.  They’re not going to demand you politely respond to their intrusive grilling of your right to exist fully as a human being.  This constant waving of “Well I WAS going to consider your argument but… “ under our noses as though if we just answer them the right way, and show them the right aspect of our humanity, they’ll treat us with respect, is so false.  You’re not going to get respect from anyone who expects that of you.  Not now, not ever.

What you do owe is to yourself.  You owe living your life to the fullest you can, in whatever circumstances you find yourself in.  You owe yourself kindness and value for your body, even if it doesn’t always look or behave the way you want it to.  You owe yourself the right to exist in the world, as you are, right now, no matter what changes might or might not come in the future.

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the HAES® files: Confessions of a Dietitian

by Nicole Geurin, MPH, RD

It’s easy to make assumptions about me because I am a dietitian.  You might think that I carefully manage my calorie intake and that I tell my clients to do the same.  Let me set the record straight.

Part 1: Why I am actually thin.

Unlike many people mistakenly assume, I am not thin because my nutrition knowledge has enabled me to master the ‘perfect’ diet.  (There is no ‘perfect’ diet, nor do I strive to achieve one.)  I am also not thin because I enjoy playing tennis and being active.  While I enjoy these lifestyle habits because they help me to feel well, they are not the reason that I am thin.  (Nor are they are moral imperatives for others to adopt, regardless of size.)

The overwhelming reason that I am thin is because my genetic code decided that it would be so.  I inherited my body size and shape from my mother.  We are the same height, with the same small bones, long fingernails, and body shape and size.

Another reason that I am thin is likely due to my socio-economic privilege.  Because I was born to educated, upper-middle class, white parents, I had access to many resources. These resources include nutritious food, safe places to play, and quality healthcare and education.   My mother’s pregnancy and how I was raised during my first few years likely also contributed to the programming that determined I was going to grow into a thin adult.

Part 2: Why I actually decided to become a dietitian.

I usually tell people that I decided to become a dietitian because I love food, science and working with people.  This is all true, but it’s not the whole story.

When I was a pre-teen, I began to fear the natural, normal weight gain that comes along with puberty.  I believed that it was my job to prevent this weight gain through ‘healthy eating.’

At the time, I believed this meant low fat foods, for this was the diet craze of the 1990s.  I began to shun all dietary fat.  I ate bagels without the cream cheese.  I switched our family to skim milk.  I avoided nuts and avocados.  I asked my parents to buy fat-free Snackwells cookies, fat-free Cool Whip and fat-free Yoplait yogurt.  I begged my dad to leave the oil out of our homemade bread.

This is not a healthy way to eat.  Dietary fat is essential for healthy cells and helps our bodies to absorb essential nutrients.  But, for several years, I stayed thin, which reinforced my idea that I was doing the ‘right thing.’

I also didn’t go through puberty.  (Spoiler alert: this was the real reason I maintained my thin, child-like body all those years.)  When my worried mother finally took me to the doctor, we found out that I had a (presumably unrelated) condition that was preventing me from going through puberty.  I was put on medication and viola! Puberty arrived.  I gained weight.  It was normal.  It was natural.  It was inevitable.  There wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it.

Perhaps surprisingly, this transition enabled me to become more relaxed about my eating.  Without anyone explicitly telling me (although that would have been nice), I realized that it was not my job to try to manage my weight.  I couldn’t control it.  I just needed to accept my size and respect my body.

Nevertheless, my obsession with ‘healthy eating’ during my tween years led me to believe that it would be a good idea to study nutrition in college and become a dietitian.  So that’s exactly what I did.

Luckily, I have maintained the relaxed, balanced approach towards eating that I returned to after puberty.  I eat plenty of full-fat foods and enjoy them without fear or regret.  I feel very fortunate that my disordered eating habits did not develop into a full-blown eating disorder.

I thank my parents for instilling a relaxed, intuitive approach to eating in me from a young age. I blame a diet- and thinness-obsessed culture for temporarily leading me astray. And I recognize that my thin privilege made it easier for me to bounce back, reject dieting and accept my body.

Part 3: Everything I thought I knew about weight management was bunk.

In school (while studying to become a dietitian), I was taught that weight management was a matter of personal responsibility.  I was taught that diets don’t work, but lifestyle changes do.  I was led to believe that if everyone would just eat fruits and vegetables and exercise, then we would all be thin.  I now know that this is a load of crap.  Healthy lifestyle habits may support health, but they do not guarantee thinness.  But, at the time that I learned this misleading information, I was young, impressionable and naïve.

When I became a dietitian, one of my first jobs was with a medical weight management program.  There, I was taught that weight management is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out.  Eat 500 fewer calories than you burn; lose a pound per week, I was told.  The best way to do this, my employer insisted, is to encourage patients to count calories and micromanage their food and activity.  Never mind that this behavior might be considered disordered if performed by a thin person.  Most of the participants lost weight and fought mercilessly as they inevitably regained it.  I now understand that this is because the body is designed to protect its set-point weight range and defend against starvation.  I am so sorry that I led anyone down this path that made things worse instead of better.

And to the clients that I taught not to diet, but to embrace healthy lifestyle changes, I am also sorry.  I still dangled the promise of weight loss in front of you, rather than helping you to respect your body at any size.  I wish I had known better.

In 2010, I read Dr. Linda Bacon’s book, Health at Every Size.  It resonated with me, but I lacked the confidence and courage to go against ‘conventional wisdom.’  It wasn’t until two years ago, in 2015, that I finally felt ready to embrace this approach wholeheartedly.  For this I thank Linda Bacon, Sandra Aamodt, Evelyn Tribole, Elyse Resch, Dawn Clifford, Michelle Neiman-Morris, and all of the members of the Association for Size Diversity and Health.  I plan to spend the rest of my career making amends with a compassionate, socially-just, Health at Every Size® approach to nutrition.

 

---

Nicole Geurin, MPH, RD is a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor with a master’s degree in public health nutrition.  She works as a corporate nutrition consultant in Sacramento, California.  She is also the author of a new e-book, titled 5-Minute Meals: It’s Not Fast Food, It’s Real Food…Fast!  Visit Nicole’s website and nutrition blog at http://ift.tt/2cDZbrb.  Contact Nicole at ngeurin@yahoo.com.

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Gazing at Males: Magic Mike (2012, dir. Stephen Soderbergh), Magic Mike XXL (2015, dir. Gregory Jacobs), and the Fat Female Audience

Embarrassing confession time:  I have been picking away at this article for way too long.  Patrick had suggested Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL a while ago, and they are chock full of great discussion material, especially regarding the shifts between the original and the sequel. I was fascinated by a mainstream Hollywood movie that plays fast and loose with the gender roles of its straight male protagonists; then, there’s also the obvious topic of the noticeably more inclusive casting of audience members in XXL.  But how did they connect?  Though initially struggling to form a cohesive argument, I finally relied on this one weird trick:  I re-read the most famous essay in feminist film theory.  And amazingly, it was very helpful.  

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is the genesis of the term “male gaze.”  Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory to describe a common dynamic in classic Hollywood film, in which the audience derives a dual and seemingly contradictory pleasure in the voyeurism of watching the people on screen (separating the audience and the character), but also seeing the characters as idealized versions of ourselves (bringing audience and character together).  And as the films utilizing this dynamic are produced in a patriarchal society (i.e. prioritizing the wants and experiences of men), female characters are on display for the audience’s voyeuristic pleasure, while male characters are powerful protagonists with whom the audience identifies. Often, these two dynamics synthesize in the romantic union of the male and female characters, creating the fantasy of being a powerful person who possesses the object of desire.  And true, none of the main characters in either film are fat.  Magic Mike, especially XXL, disrupts these dynamics that Mulvey describes.   

Most of the fat characters I write about on CPBS aren’t protagonists.  While there are exceptions, as evidenced by most of the films in last year’s series on fat men and thin women, fat characters are usually minor supporting roles in a handful of scenes; this is especially obvious if you look at the writeups I’ve done of film festivals and monthly roundups.  It would be overly glib to say that there’s one reason why, but stemming from Mulvey’s theory of the audience seeking pleasure through identification with a protagonist, the common assumption is that audiences can’t/won’t empathise with a character who doesn’t embody certain social privileges.  Mulvey focuses on gender; but of course this struggle encompasses many identifies.  At the writing of this article, whitewashing is again a popular topic of discussion, as the remake of Ghost in the Shell starring ScarJo just hit theaters.  But, as always, body size and composition is the spectrum we’ll be focusing on here.  None of the films’ main characters are fat; rather the fat characters of particular interest in Magic Mike and XXL are the fat women in Mike’s (Channing Tatum) audience.  

I didn’t find or make screencaps of the fat audience members, please accept my apology in the form of Joe Manganiello in a sexy firefighter costume

Magic Mike starts with a flipping of the male gaze’s gender dynamic by establishing the relationship between female audience and male performer. Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) titillates the audience by playfully reminding them that it is against the law to touch the dancers’ bodies (but then observes “a lot of law-breakers” in the audience); the women sitting in the dark respond with excited cheers.  This mirrors a common paradox that attractive female characters must embody of being on display for the audience’s visual consumption but not too actively sexual as to land on the wrong side of social judgment (or break the fantasy of being controllable).  Mike deals with this very judgment from the two main female characters, Brooke (Cody Horn) and Joanna (Olivia Munn).  Through their relationships with Mike, we see his need to move on from his current profession.  Joanna is willing to have casual sex with Mike and join him in orchestrating three-ways, but she isn’t willing to talk about her personal life with him and unceremoniously abandons him by revealing that she is engaged, which coincides with the completion of her PhD.  Brooke is consistently judgmental of Mike’s profession throughout the movie; although he accuses her of reducing him to his job, eventually both his bff Adam (Alex Pettyfer) and his boss Dallas screw him over, proving that her disapproval is merited.  Mike abruptly leaves the Kings, as Joanna left him, and shows up on Brooke’s doorstep.  His happy ending is the approval of the “normal”  character. His arc isn’t too different from the pattern I saw in films featuring fat men paired with thin women; Mike’s maturation make him attractive despite his excess (here his decadent profession as opposed to his body) and when he abandons that excess, his reward is the love of a good (thin) woman.  This is a neat gender inversion of the story arc that Mulvey describes, wherein a female character who “falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her… show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone.”  

As opposed to typical scenes featuring female dancers, where the male audience is a source of some menace (I haven’t seen the whole of Striptease, but two of the dance scenes on YouTube include Demi Moore being grabbed inappropriately by audience members, as well as Burt Reynolds sitting in the corner and making creepy comments about how she’s an “angel”), the relationship between male dancers and female audience in the Magic Mike movies is free of tension.  The pleasure the audience receives from direct attention from the male entertainers is genuine, even sheepish at times, as select VIPs allow the dancers to pick them up, lie them on the floor, tie them in sex slings, etc. without any attempts to go too far.  The exotic dancing is described as a service in both films, either embodying the fantasy of a one night stand, as per Dallas, or helping a woman find her “smile,” as per Mike.  If anything, Adam is the only character to really transgress professional boundaries, as he kisses an audience member during his debut dance and give a tab of ecstasy to a sorority sister during a house call.  

Magic Mike is focused on people struggling to realize their professional goals (or just make ends meet) in an unforgiving economic structure.  The stripping, while surely an entertaining spectacle for at least some of the audience, is almost incidental to the film’s themes.  As Magic Mike centers on Mike’s struggle to be a successful entrepreneur, the audience’s shrieks of delight and dollar bills symbolize the tyrannical demands of the market, showering him with money when he dances, while an apologetic bank employee (Betsy Brandt) withholds it when he tries to secure a loan to start his furniture business.  And although the women themselves have no nefarious motives, they provide the money and attention that draws Adam into the life of a debauched party boy.  XXL, on the other hand, focuses on Mike reconnecting with his friends, helping them move onto the next steps of their lives after Dallas abandons them, and coping with the stress of his new job and newly single status.  He does all these things by rediscovering the joy of stripping, namely, helping his audience find their “smile.”  Where the first film finds Mike concerned that Brooke only sees him as a “30 year old male stripper,” XXL states explicitly (ha) that Mike and the other Kings can use stripping to explore and assert themselves as individuals.  Mike strives to impress the female characters in XXL, but unlike the judgment of his profession that he meets in Magic Mike, he instead interacts with women who are mostly involved in exotic dance in one way or another along his journey to Myrtle Beach, and has to charm them into providing assistance to get him and the Kings there.  The political pathos is removed from Mike’s relationship with stripping in XXL, giving the viewer license to find pure erotic enjoyment in his performances.  And yet, XXL breaks even further away from the “show-girl” trope Mulvey described, in which “a woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined.”  Both films invert the roles that each gender plays in the dynamic, but in XXL, Mike’s friends assign personal meaning to male entertainment that gives more depth to their characters than they had in Magic Mike.  The sequel gives us more of the personalities of the Cock Rocking Kings of Tampa and allows them to wax philosophical about the male entertainment industry, which is celebrated as an opportunity for all women deserve to have their fantasies indulged and to be “queens,” as opposed to the first film, which presents a glittery sandpit that is controlled by deceitful owners like Dallas and eats naive young men like Adam for breakfast.  

A few different scenes in XXL explore the Kings’ relationship to their work, including one in which Ken (Matt Bomer) bonds with Andre (Donald Glover) over the meaning they find in male entertainment.  “These girls have to deal with men in their lives every day who don’t listen to them,” Andre observes.  “They don’t even ask them what they want.  All we gotta do is ask them what they want.  When they tell you, it’s a beautiful thing, man.  We’re like healers or something.”  A subsequent scene shows this philosophy in action when Ken meets an older woman (Jane McNeill) who confesses her husband won’t have sex with the lights on; he responds by telling her how beautiful she is, how she deserves to be happy, and sings her the song that she and her husband would listen to when they were first falling in love.  The moment is bittersweet (“I don’t think Hank can do that!” she tells him when his performance ends), but shows more depth to what the audience seeks from the performers than the “free fling of a fuck” Dallas describes in Magic Mike.  The Kings want to be the most effective entertainers possible and while the film plays out with the intent that the film audience sees ourselves more as an extension of the Kings’ audience, there is joy in seeing the exhibition of their creativity and the gradual reveal of their personalities as much as there is of their oiled-up bits.  The culmination of XXL finds Mike and his friends (now calling themselves “Res-erection”) fully in their element and fully belonging to the audience; as emcee Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith) describes them, “a special kind of beast that can bring all the beauty out in you.”

Even if the dancers aren’t normatively gendered in how they function in the films narrative, they are in physical presentation.  The implication is, of course, that the man capable of “fulfilling every woman’s wildest fantasies” is relegated to one body type.  And commonly, when men in movies are depicted as irresistable, the women chasing them are normatively attractive.  The fantasy is specifically that of a man’s wanting to have numerous beautiful women chasing after him.  However, the world of Magic Mike flips that to focus on the fantasy of a fun night of oogling hunks (without the drink minimum) by including a range of women in the audience.  The first movie falls short.  Notably, there are some audience members who are older women, but all are feminine and white.  The only fat woman in Magic Mike is chosen for VIP treatment by Richie (Joe Manganiello), but he “humorously” hurts his back when picking her up and has to stop his routine, leaving her standing awkwardly by herself on the stage.  XXL does an admirable job of diversifying the audience.  Not only do several scenes include fat women getting individual attention from the male entertainers, but there is a specific focus on black women.  We meet Rome, who calls her mostly black clientele “queens” and repeatedly tells them that they are beautiful and deserving of attention from her sexy staff.  We see many fat women in the audience, including an extended scene with a fat black woman receiving attention from a male entertainer who picks her up with ease (and is played by former pro football player Michael Strahan).

Rome, the queen in her castle, and Magic Mike (fka “White Chocolate)

A pivotal moment in XXL hinges on an audience comprised of one fat woman:  Richie’s dance in the convenience store.  Richie (rolling on molly) wants to bring his wedding fantasy routine to fruition, but is insecure about his skills as a dancer.  Mike wants his friend to understand that (also rolling on molly), in an attempt to make his friend understand that their work is less about impressive dance moves and more about making women happy, dares him to walk into a convenience store and make the bored-looking cashier (Lindsey Moser) smile.  Richie balks, not because the girl is fat, but because she “looks like she’s never fucking smiled a fucking day in her entire life.”  And, because it is that kind of movie, Richie’s beloved Backstreet Boys start playing on the store speakers the minute he walks into the store.  Unlike the women who make up his intentional audience– and unlike the common perception of fat women as desperate for sex– the cashier doesn’t immediately notice him (much to his pouty disappointment).  He has to dramatically tear open a bag of Cheetos just to get her attention, and she doesn’t even smile until the end of his routine, when he cracks a joke.  Richie goes on a minor character development arc over the course of the scene, where he has to get in touch with his confidence and sense of presence to prove to himself that he doesn’t need Dallas’ direction to be a successful male entertainer.  And the sign of his success is the approval of a fat, female audience, as well of that of his friends (all of whom are rolling on molly).  

The other fat presence in the films must be mentioned, even if he doesn’t quite fit in with the discussion:  Tobias, the DJ (Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias).  He is a corrupting influence for Adam in the first film, giving him his first taste of GHB (or, as he calls it, “hey juice”) and supplying him MDMA to sell once he’s established himself as a dancer at Dallas’ club.  Adam foolishly loses $10,000 worth of pills that he and Tobias were supposed to sell.  This leads to two thugs trashing Mike’s apartment looking for restitution, while Tobias helplessly watches and Mike ultimately forks over most of his savings to save his protege.  However, to the more mature Kings who are presumably a bit wiser in their choices, he is more of a helpful support.  In Magic Mike XXL, he drives the food truck to take them on their road trip to Myrtle Beach with the intention of being their emcee at the stripper convention–until he drives off the road while rolling and suffers a concussion.  In both films, Tobias is vaguely coded as queer. In Magic Mike, we are introduced to him using stereotypically gay mannerisms to make a joke.  In XXL, Tobias gets on stage dressed like Carmen Miranda at a voguing contest at a gay club; and considering that he wins the $400 prize after the Kings upstage the club’s regulars, he had better fucking be queer because that is the only way that such and incredibly cringe-worthy scene could be salvaged.  At the afterparty following the scene at the gay club, he sits at a campfire with the club’s fat drag queen emcee (Vicky Vox), while the other Kings are paired with thin, (presumably) cis women.  (Including a scene in which Mike meets Zoe [Amber Heard] and they bond over having “inner drag queens;” ick ick ick.)

Dallas and Tobias watch the boys do their thing

The aspect of XXL that is quite unlike any mainstream film I’ve seen in recent memory is not only the focus on the importance of pleasure (both giving and receiving) to a fulfilled life, but that pursuit is reinforced as egalitarian.  And combined with Mulvey’s theory about the gaze, you get something pretty amazing.  Instead of women performing as erotic spectacle for a male audience, you have men performing for an audience comprised not only of women, but of older women, fat women, and women of color.  So the entity in the film that we, XXL’s audience, is intended to identify with are those people:  older women, fat women, women of color.  And it’s not for the purpose of learning something or becoming aware of an issue or struggle;  it’s just to have some fun and feel sexy for a bit.  It’s a subtle part of the movie, but it’s normalizing of these groups of marginalized women in a way that we rarely get to see.  Even if XXL doesn’t answer Mulvey’s call to break down the “cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures” that enable the male gaze, it’s a significant bending of that system.

See Also:

Fluffy on being cast and performing in Magic Mike

AV Club:  Offscreen dialogue is key to one of Magic Mike XXL‘s most revealing scenes

Parabasis:  On Magic Mike XXL: Entertainment, Art, Fulfillment, and Big Dicks

A scene from Magic Mike where Channing Tatum dances to “Pony”

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This is a Story All About How

My life got twist, turned upside down. Let me take a minute, just sit right there! And I'll tell you how I came to have over $55,000 in defaulted student loans.

Once upon a time, back in 2003, I graduated highschool with honours. I received a small entrance grant to attend my local university where I began a 4 year BA in English in order to eventually go to teacher's college. This grant, plus money I had saved up myself and a bit from my parents, paid for my first year of school. The following year I moved out of their home, got an apartment with Ryan, and started receiving from the Ontario Student Assistance Program aka OSAP. Part of the loans are federal money, part of it is provincial but generally it's just known as OSAP. I ended up taking a year off mid-program, then another year as Gabe came along where I didn't receive any government funds as I wasn't in school. I graduated with my BA in the spring of 2009, the first person in my family to graduate from university. Yay!

Off I went to teacher's college in Thunder Bay where I crashed and burned hard at the end of my first semester, but that's a story for another day. That one semester added nearly $10,000 to my loans thanks to living away from home, travel costs, tuition and books. I ended up back at the local university doing a certificate program, from which I graduated in 2011. We moved to British Columbia for 2 years, then back to the Soo for 3 and were homeless and broke for 2 of those years, and now we're in Sudbury, always chasing better jobs for something resembling financial security. Following me around has been $55,000 in slowly growing (they're not interest free) student debt.

This past fall the federal Liberal government announced changes to the OSAP program that would allow students wanting to go to post-secondary education a break; more grants instead of loans, and maybe even free tuition if you were low enough income. That's fantastic and much needed for sure. Unfortunately, a part of those changes of who is low income enough or not affected my repayment assistance plan, making me ineligible, after nearly 6 years of paying $0.00 a month (because POOR) for that $0.00 payment. Suddenly I was 9 months behind and owing $1100 and change. How did THAT happen? Here's where it gets really fun:

We moved to Sudbury in April of last year. I applied, as I usually do every 6 months, for my repayment assistance, in May. I knew I was getting close to the end of my available months but wasn't sure *how* close. I sent off my online application and waited for the letter that would say I was approved for my $0.00 monthly payment. It never came. Canada Student Loans, the folks who run OSAP, started calling and let me know they still hadn't received anything so I submitted again online. They didn't get it. Now I'm 2 months behind. So I ask them to mail me a paper application, which I also didn't receive. Three months behind. Finally get the paper copy, fill it all out, mail it in with pay stubs for me and Ryan. Now I'm four months behind and starting to panic a little but Canada Student Loans reassures me that when my repayment is approved it will be back dated 6 months and I can immediately reapply for my final 6 months of assistance at which point, if I'm still poor (which I can practically guarantee them I will be) I'll be able to start Phase 2. Yay! Phase 2 is a little known thing about student loans; if after 5 years (60 months) you're still unable to repay your student loans, the government starts helping you out. You pay whatever you can of the asked amount, and the government kicks in the rest. Eventually your loan is paid off and you can become a functional member of adult society. WIN.

By this time it's mid-September, and one of the pay stubs that Ryan has submitted with my paperwork is his final one from EasyHome. He was no-fault fired and given severance pay. We included a letter explaining that his September pay is NOT a normal one and does not in any way indicate what was his normal income, and oh yeah, HE WAS FIRED and going forward had $0 coming in for gods knew how long. Also, did you know Canada Student Loans only cares about your GROSS income, not your net? And they don't ask about household expenses? They don't care how much daycare is, or your rent or hydro bill, or groceries or anything. They just want a percentage of your gross monthly income each month and apparently think that you can get blood from a stone.

LONG story short, my repayment assistance of $0.00 was not approved. They wanted over $400 a month, back dated to the spring, up front, ASAP, thanks to Ryan's severance pay and the federal changes in November. I don't have that kind of money, and no-one I know does either. If I could get them the money they'd continue working with me and maybe I could start Phase 2 of repayment assistance. My only other option was to appeal, which I did. I sent in a year's worth of pay stubs for each of us, and another letter explaining his firing and our life expenses. In mid-March my appeal was rejected, after which they sent my loans back to the government. Now the Ontario Ministry of Finance wants $11,000 up front before they'll even talk to me about making minimum monthly payments of $1000.00, and the federal folks want $545 a month, starting May 30th. It was supposed to be $900 but I talked them down somewhat. If I couldn't make $400 a month way back when, what on earth makes them think I can do $1500 now? And forget about Phase 2. That's completely gone.

Expenses
Rent	$   1,500.00
Groceries	$       600.00
Utilities	$       350.00
Internet	$       130.00
Childcare	$       224.00
Phones	$       300.00
OSAP	$       104.00
CIBC	$       100.00
Car	$       418.40
Insurance	$       285.00
Gas	$       120.00
Repayment	$       520.00
Total	$   4,651.40

So right now I'm trying to think of ways to raise $11,000 before the Ontario Ministry of Finance starts garnishing my wages; Stripping? Prostitution? Sell a kidney? I can't become a surrogate because my uterus is broken. Egg donation is legal in Canada but complicated and time consuming with no guarantee of solid financial return (unlike in the States where I could get good money for all these eggs I'm not using.) I suppose I could go to the competition, like MoneyMart, and get a large loan (since the banks wont touch me w my bad credit), use that to pay off some of what I owe, then just pay MoneyMart back at a much higher interest rate for the rest of my life, plus pay the rest of my student debt. Somehow. Ha. Ha.

At this rate I will never have any savings for emergencies, buy a house, send my kids to post-secondary education, save for retirement, or do all of those other Adult Things that help our economy. My university degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and going to school is one of the biggest regrets of my life.

Some nice people have suggested I start a crowdfunding thing like Patreon or GoFundMe. It's a thought.

 

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