Clarity in the Check Out Lane - Contributor Post

Today, I'm lucky enough to share a post from Pollychromatic who had a sobering experience at a grocery store that cemented a realization that so often floats around our collective peripheral vision.

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I was standing in the checkout line waiting my turn. Bored. Looking at the magazine covers rather than making eye contact with the other people in line.

As you do.

I was doing this, and something really clarified for me.

See, there was this horrible rag cover. Globe or National Enquirer, or Star, or something. It had the title of “Worst Beach Bodies.” There’s Kim Kardashian’s butt, front and center, titled “Double Wide.” Ha! Ha! Because Kim Kardashian has a butt that is wide, you see. Oh, and we all agree that big butts mean fat, and fat means ugly err, I mean not healthy. So we can all make fun of her butt being big because really we’re just concerned about her health and fuck if she doesn’t deserve it because what the hell is she doing thinking her big butt is okay to show off to the world as desirable! How dare she?! The nerve!

NEEEEEXT!

People I don’t know, people I don’t know, people I don’t know and… what? Is that the little person from that tv show? Amy Roloff? What in the actual fuck? They’re making fun of her? Because her body is different? And she dared to show it on the beach?

Are you fucking kidding me?

You know that point when your ears start to make that whooshing sound and your vision narrows, and you realize that you might just actually be one ragequit away from a for real stroke because you actually got that pissed off?

I was there. Right there.

And I want to use nicer language. I want to not use curse words, because I’d like for you to pass this around, and I know that using curse words makes that harder for you to do. I know that curse words are the retreat of a small vocabulary and that it takes finer skill and creates more power to write without them, but I am so enraged by this.

But it made something clear.

See, I’ve grown desensitized to the fat shaming. Every now and then it’ll get my ire up, but I have come to expect it. It’s what our media does. It’s what people in our culture do. It’s what our coworkers and friends and family do. Not all of them, sure, but enough. We can spread the body positivity from here to eternity, but the streak of shame and blame that we place on people, and ourselves, for fat, for daring to be fat? That’s wider than all the fat combined. It’s heavier, meatier, and I am here to tell you uglier.


Gabourey Sidibe can make her speeches about living past the hate and finding her own beauty, but at the end, we know, we all know, there are a world of comments that will come after about how she should still lose a few pounds. At the least, “for her health.”

And we’ve come to expect that, if not accept that. We don’t, as a culture, accept that fat is a genetic difference, we don’t, as a culture, accept that fat is just another one of the facets of beauty that exists in our species.

But.

I did not expect that to be put on a little person. I didn’t expect the highly critical eye of the media to turn to a person who was born with the genes that express themselves through one of the many varieties of drawfism. Amy Roloff is a little person. Her body is different. Making fun of her body for being different makes as much sense as making fun of Stephen Hawking because he’s in a wheelchair.

Here’s another horrible part of this. They cropped the picture carefully. They didn’t make fun of her husband for daring to be a little person on the beach. All the hate was reserved for her. Because that’s what we do.

And I really should have known better. Because we know better, don’t we? Of course the media is going to make fun of Amy Roloff. Just like they make fun of Gabourey Sidibhe. And it really is all the same. And it isn’t about a focused set of standards of beauty. It isn’t about the overuse of photoshop. It isn’t about fashion. It isn’t even about attraction, or health.
It’s about being bullies.

We’ve accepted a culture that bullies, especially, women. We take part in it. We consume it and regurgitate it and spread it far and wide on Tumblr and Pinterest and blogs and Instagram.

And god. I sort of want to thank that horrible magazine for clarifying it for me. Because damn if another picture dissecting what parts of whichever actress they took apart this week for being too fat was going to get through to me.

If you are a woman, you are less than. You are a consumable product. Here are your array of products and services to purchase so that you can be consumed. And you will consume it. $20 billion a year on the diet industry. $34 billion a year on beauty products and services (I’m sure there’s some overlap there on beauty services/products and the diet industry, but you get the idea). There’s a lot of money to be made by telling you that you look like crap. And when you get fed up and feel down and depressed about it, there’ll be a whole row of magazines at the grocery store, and entire blogs dedicated to ripping apart actresses and female celebrities who didn’t live up to the expectations that you haven’t been able to live up to either. And maybe you’ll rip them apart, too. So you can feel better about how shitty you feel about yourself, inevitably.

And maybe it’s time that we see that we feel like shit because we have been consumed and processed through a machine that digests us to turn us into ready consumers for their products and services. Maybe it’s time we realize that this media machine is not celebrating the beautiful life, but the impossible life, simply so we will consume it and be consumed by it. That the reason will feel like shit is because we have been shat.

And maybe we need to step away from the bullies and stop giving them our voices and ears to use. We need to stop consuming this. There’s just no world where it is acceptable to make fun of people’s bodies for being different. We need to turn it around on ourselves. There’s just no world where it is acceptable to make fun of our own body for being different.

Dammit, we are the expression of a beautiful conglomeration of millennia of evolution. We are life. We are living, breathing, thinking, dancing, rolling, wrinkling, jiggling, taut, stretched, bunched up, beautiful life. In myriad forms. We are life.

And that is beautiful.

Using Babies for Adult Messages: Don't Do It, Part I

Something crossed my tumblr yesterday that really bothered me. It took me a while to place what my problem was, since I agreed with the overall message, assumedly being that women shouldn't concentrate so hard on being thin. Whoever posted it wanted women to know that stick-thin is not beautiful. More precisely, that extreme skinniness is not as sexy as having a little extra weight.

And there's nothing wrong with that message. Especially if it will help young women with their self-image and self-worth. Fighting the exagerrated and impossibly unattainable societal view of sexy is something I support, moreso than ever since I have three-year-old daughters, who soon are going to have to be strong enough to love themselves inside and out, regardless of what they see in the pages of magazines.

But this public service announcement really rubbed me the wrong way, and here's why.

It used babies.

There was one adorable roly-poly little guy, and one adorable skinny minny. An arrow pointed at the bigger one. "This," it said, "is sexier than this." The phrasing ended at another arrow that was pointing at the thinner baby. I have the pic saved on my hard drive, but I don't know where it came from, so I'm uncomfortable reposting it.

First of all, I'm just uncomfortable with people calling babies sexy. I don't think the poster or the rebloggers are perverts or anything, but sexy is simply a term that shouldn't be applied to infants. On the one hand, I can see their point, trying to enhance the message changing the situation around it, by placing it squarely in the lap of innocence. On the other hand, just no. The inappropriateness of the message vs. the photo outweighs the message itself and all its purported nuances.

Secondly, if the bloggers think that babies are uneffected by the weight/beauty debate, they're mistaken. How many posts do we see where parents are worried about their children's weight. Either for legitimate health reasons, or, more unfortunately, because other people are telling them that their baby is too fat, too thin, too something. They are babies. There is no sexier than, there is no too fat, there is no too thin. Each baby is different, grows differently, stores nutrients differently and needs different fat levels to be healthy and happy. The children pictured were so young that they were only eating breastmilk or formula at the time the picture was taken. It's not like they were making bad life choices. By bringing attention to the way their bodies process food, the bloggers are undoing their entire intent. They're essentially saying, "hey, this little guy has a slower metabolism than this girl. He's chubbier and she's skinnier through no fault of their own and through no fault of their parents. Let's stare and pick it apart anyway!" And isn't the point not to judge people about their looks? Good job.

I personally have an issue with the picture because it straight up told me my girls weren't pretty because they were skinny. Well, actually, I don't have an issue with it because it didn't say pretty, it said sexy, and just ew. But assuming the deeper message meant pretty, then my kids got the short shift.

We took them home at 3.5 pounds. It took them two months to fit into newborn clothes. They were then 6 or 7 pounds. At two months. It was all we could do to get them to eat. Every ounce was a battle, every one gained, a victory. Pointing at a skinny baby and implying there's something superficially wrong with her makes light of some very real and serious issues that these parents may be facing. And if the babies are not struggling to avoid "failure to thrive" and they're just naturally thin, well, there is still nothing wrong with that.

The babies are at least two months old here. Those are newborn clothes.

These kids have their whole lives to be judged by strangers. Let's not start it at three months or six months by splattering their image across social networking sites and labelling them sexy or not sexy.

Babies and social experiments just don't mix well together. Don't do it. Think of the kids.

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Baby Fat

“The Michelin Baby” is grabbing headlines everywhere, and I can’t be the only person asking, really, news organizations? “The Michelin Baby?”

I realize that in order to get the public to read your articles and look at your photos, you need a catchy headline – something that people can easily recognize and remember. I fail to see how that need translates into using an offensive comparison to label such a young baby. Yes, his rolls make him look like the Michelin Man – I get it – and maybe my time on the internet has led me to become hyper-sensitive to insult and shaming to the point where I imagine it. Can you even shame a 10 month old? Is it shaming to his parents? Should it be?

Cheng Qingyu says her son’s favorite thing to do is eat, and that “no matter whatever he grabs, he unconsciously puts it in his mouth.”

That sounds like a typical 10 month old to me. Maybe Qingyu has been misreading Lei Lei’s signs of teething for hunger, maybe Lei Lei has a thyroid issue, maybe it’s BPA or formula related (although Qingyu says he’s breastfed.) Whatever the issue is, however, doctors are studying him, the medical field is searching for the answers, and they should be the ones passing judgment and doling out advice – not the internet masses.
I have to admit, it’s a lot easier for me to sit back at my computer screen and judge the news operations and the bloggers slowing down to stare at, point at, and make generalizations about a baby before they know all the facts. This may not be a 20th-century circus, but when I turned my computer on this morning, I certainly felt like I was at an old-fashioned freakshow.

Did you know that Michelin Tire Baby Syndrome is an actual medical condition? The syndrome is also named for the sufferer’s similarity in appearance to the Michelin Man, but it has nothing to do with obesity. It’s a rare skin condition where babies are born with folding skin and scarred tissue. This means that not only is the blogosphere using a catchy, if insulting comparison, to a big, puffy cartoon with rolls, it’s also completely trampling on a term already in use for an actual set of symptoms for an entirely different condition.

Like I said before, maybe I’m being a bit too sensitive, but many of the blogs I’ve read concerning Lei Lei say nothing about the possible causes of his rapid weight gain. Perhaps, if they want to be fit for public consumption, they should provide some information on baby weight statistics, guidelines, possible causes, and tests that are being done. Perhaps they should give advice to other parents concerned about their young ones’ health, fitness and weight, or provide tips on what doctors recommend a baby’s diet be. Perhaps they could do just a little research before using a catchphrase that’s already in use. Perhaps they should do more than shout as loudly as they can: Look at that huge baby! Oh my God, he’s huge! Here’s a picture! Perhaps the baby, the parents, and the public deserve just a little better than that.