Entries from June 2007 ↓

I’ve been so busy at work I’ve not had much time to write anything blog-worthy. But there have been plenty of interesting posts from the Fatosphere, including Kate Harding who’s now a regular contributor over at Shakesville. I hope more progressive blogs will take Shakesville’s example and get right on the issue of fat and size acceptance.

Yesterday I had to have my “Pre-employment medical” (even though I’ve been working where I do for some time). Since my phobia of dentists and doctors is strong, and doesn’t actually have a lot to do with my weight, I managed to arrange it so my regular, trusted, doctor could fill in the paperwork. My doctor is a lovely woman who has never harangued me because of my weight, never even specifically mentioned it even – and has also pooh-poohed the suggestion of a certain specialist that tried to sell me lap band surgery as “I don’t think that kind of thing is a very good idea at all!” She believes me when I tell her I eat a balanced diet and get enjoyable exercise. I’m quite sure if she thought my size was a problem she’d bring it up in a rational and tactful way. If only all doctors would be like her. There was also a medical student in there that day, and I signed my permission for her to observe and participate in the exam because I hoped she’d see a happy fat person to counter the anti-fat messages given to med students these days.

Hanne Blank, author of Big Big Love and now Virgin: The Untouched History, has a letter she takes to any new doctor, explaining her stance on not wanting to be weighed, not needing to be lectured on weight loss, and things like that. I’ve written a modified version and given it to my doctor to have on file, just in case I have to see someone other than her or I move city and have a new doctor. I highly recommend giving a copy of a similar letter to your health care provider, especially if you are a bit shy or intimidated by medical situations. If your doctor reads the letter and still gives you the “Fat is eeeeevil and unhealthyyyyy!” lecture, find another one as soon as you can. I realise many people may be in a situation where they don’t have a choice of doctor, but if there’s any way you can find an alternate, your health and peace of mind is worth it. I think there are is a significant percentage of doctors who are as horrified by the obesity hysteria as we are, only that’s not a view that sells diet pharmaceuticals and surgery, so they tend to be drowned out. But they’re there, the ones who take “First do no harm” seriously. Also, do tell your doctor how much you appreciate her or him and their fat-friendly stance. Doctors need love too!

Sandy Szwarc does it again: A post on new “guidelines” for doctors to “treat” and “manage” fat kids.

It’s a recommendation from a USA committee on fat kids which is made up of (are we surprised?) interest groups with big financial stakes in diet pharmaceuticals, weight loss surgery, lab test supplies, and so on.

The most base idiocy in this is that what makes a kid fat is not actual adipose tissue, but jsut that they fall into the 85th percentile and above on the pediatric growth charts. So that’s a segment of the juvenile population that will be considered fat no matter what. I had a friend with a 4 year old daughter who was the size of the average 6 year old. Fairly skinny, too. But she fell in about the 97th percentile on those growth charts, so was counted as obese. With the proposed guidelines, she’d be faced with all kinds of micromanaging that, as Szwarc points out, you’d normally see only in elderly cardiac patients or the chronically ill, not healthy children. Then there’s all the recommendations on how much time the child is “allowed” to spend watching TV and how many meals the family should eat together.

These people are not living on planet Earth. They are well-paid people isolated from the everyday living reality of the great majority of the population, and especially from working-class families. Never mind that the recommendations are not even founded on science, I’d just like to see them try to deal with all that as a single-income or single parent minimum-wage family who have to struggle to put food on the table at all and spend quality time with their children let alone have their lives micromanaged on the order of sanctimonious fuckwits who don’t actually care about children, just their own reputations, careers and stockholders.

Hey, and when the kids fail to become slim, you can just blame anyone else but yourself and your idiotic policies. Must be nice to live in such a bubble of self-satisfied unreality.

As I’m not a fat man, I can’t authoritatively comment on what it means to be a fat man, and I’m not going to make any proclamations here, just musings. (I wish there were more male fat acceptance bloggers. Where are you?)

It seems like a man can be up to a certain size but then after that he becomes Other – possibly tempered by how much of the approved masculine behaviours in which he engages. Bigger guys can be the star of a TV sitcom with a socially-approved pretty, thin wife who graciously puts up with their bumbling. King of Queens, According to Jim, etc, and animatedly, Family Guy and The Simpsons. For example. They may not be presented as heart-throbs but they’re still allowed to have a life and family and it’s not questioned, even despite the fat jokes made at their expense. Then you get guys like the character Hurley from Lost, who’s too big for that and is the “safe” guy that you can trust isn’t going to steal your island girlfriend because sexy girls don’t want big fat guys except as a friend, right? He loves fried chicken more than chasing women. He goes in the category with the women and the queers. Other. (tick box) Perhaps that veneer of acceptance is what keeps a lot of fat men from getting weight loss surgery.

It’s still very tiresome, that’s for sure. And angry-making. I want to see interesting, boring, clever, mean, smart, silly, average, freaky, tall, short, fat, thin people in TV and in movies and ads and magazines. That people only want to see “aspirational” figures (i.e. skinny white buff young people) is a lie promoted by marketing’s evil side. It’s lazy.

…And I’m tired and starting to go off on a tangent. All rants become one!

I’ve had a doctor try to sell me weight loss surgery. He was one of those “Doctor always knows best no matter what” god-complex types, so I just said “Whatever” and left as fast as I could. It wasn’t gastric bypass, but the laparascopic banding (LAP©®™ band or whatever it is), which is admittedly less intrusive and destructive than gastric bypass, but it’s still surgically-enforced starvation with plenty of its own unpleasant side effects. And yet again based on the faulty premise that fat people just can’t stop eating.

Around 80-85% of this surgery is performed on women, usually young women who are actually fairly healthy. The men who have this surgery are much, much fatter than the women. It’s a feminist issue because this is mutilation of women, and we all know how much society loves that. SueW has a post on a recent “advertorial” program shown on US television, promoting gastric bypass surgery by glossing over the risks and hugely over-representing the potential risks of being fat.

Sandy Szwarc has an excellent and comprehensive post on why bariatric/obesity surgery is a really, really bad idea. And in yet another great post, she explains:

“…a woman at the very fattest 0.2% of women has a 99.9 percent chance of living another year.

So, by having bariatric surgery a woman increases her risk of dying 45-fold.”

The facts are pretty plain. Women have been so convinced by everything around them that their life will be better even if they are literally dying of malnutrition because they will be thin. Now there’s some fine woman hating right there. Every doctor who performs and promotes this surgery is guilty of misogyny and fat hatred. Everyone who makes money out of it. They know the surgery is dangerous and will not improve health. They lie to women, denying them agency. They convince them they deserve and need it. They mutilate healthy organs. They dump them when the side effects kick in or claim it’s their own fault. Sounds like rape and assault to me.

Another disturbing similarity, as discussed in Sandy’s posts, is that those bariatric surgery victims who speak up about the devastating side effects and try to ask for support are often threatened and ostracised.

I hope more feminists will recognise this and fight it.

Yes, as Twisty Faster says, women often have to do things that are varying levels of anti-feminist in order to survive like wear high heels and makeup to get a job to feed your kids, or marry someone they don’t want to so they’re not outcasts, you can think of a million more examples. I can understand perfectly why a fat person would be desperate to get this surgery: just to get some damn respect. But really, it’s nothing to do with actual survival, seeing as how you tend to die from it or have a greatly reduced quality of life in a way that other survival strategies rarely match. It’s wanton destruction.

Please stop.