Quick hit: where are the fat facts?

There was a hateful article about fat in the Herald Sun this week (what a surprise). It was penned by Susie O’Brien, who has a long track-record of spewing forth vitriolic fat-shaming. I won’t go into any details because Bri has already done that here.

But, a post-script: O’Brien does a regular ‘live blog’, and this week she was taken to task by a number of sensible people over her attitudes towards fat children and their parents, and her misunderstanding of the facts. She didn’t listen. She just kept repeating the “statistic” that this generation of kids is the first to have a lower life expectancy than their parents. That pretty much killed her credibility right there because that statement is not credible. An individual doctor thought he could ‘intuit’ that outcome and his quote was printed in a newspaper and quickly converted to ‘truth’ by the world media, and afterwards some researchers claim to have backed it up, except that they didn’t. Essentially,it’s baseless. Google could have told you that Susie O’Brien, and if you had any genuine interest in the issue or, you know, journalistic skills, you’d have checked your facts.

For future reference for all those Susie O’Briens you come across (oh if only there was just the one), here is a simple, accessible, link-filled Fat Acceptance/HAES 101 for you. Read it, bookmark it, send it to your friends. (Thanks to Golda, I don’t have to write that page for myself now!)

Blaming the mother and other plot devices

Sometimes I watch really bad television. Sometimes I watch quite-good-actually-by-disappointingly-low-standards television. Like last night’s episode of Lie To Me.

If you don’t know it, Lie To Me is kind of like CSI would be if they just decided people were guilty based on the way they scratched their elbow instead of where they dropped an eyelash. I watch it for Tim Roth’s Cal Lightman, who is kind of like House-lite. (Insufferable and inexplicably attractive, only less so.)

The plot of this particular episode concerned a psychopathic serial killer who, as they generally do in prime time, preyed on attractive young women. Of course, this meant that the show indulged in some pretty nasty reinforcement of the trope that all women are sexually vulnerable to violent creeps, even/especially smart, beautiful, sucessful women. All the smart, beautiful, successful women in the show were either sleeping with the killer, charmed by the killer, agreeing to go on a date with the killer after a five minute conversation, or, well, killed by him. (Did I mention that the first three female characters referenced in that sentence were behavioural experts? Even so, only Dr Lightman, a man, could see through the killer’s wiles. Natch.) I often avoid episodes of any programme that rely on the serial-killer plot, because they’re nasty, and they show too many images of tortured women. This one wasn’t particularly heavy on the blatant depiction of violence against women but it still made me want to go triple-check the locks. Because, like, the subtext might as well have been a mantra: we’re all vulnerable, we’re all vulnerable, the world is a scary place. When men ask me why I and most of my women friends are afraid to be alone overnight I say to them do you actually watch television? Or films? Or consume any media at all? Or live in the world?

But, I digress. What I really noticed about the show was the way that the killer’s mother was treated. It was made clear that although she outwardly defended her son from accusations, she was terrified of him. The viewers knew that she was aware of something ‘wrong’ about him. But that didn’t mean we should feel sorry for her, living with this man who was, frankly, terrifying! Oh no. Because she was his mother. As Lightman said, quite plainly, ‘the deaths of those girls are on [her] conscience.’ The show’s hero was, in fact, incredibly cruel to this mother whilst his female colleague stood by in tacit approval. At no point in the episode was the killer’s father even mentioned and at no point was it revealed that the killer’s mother had participated in any kind of cover-up. Her crime was to give birth to someone who would go on to do evil and in the court of prime time television, she was summarily convicted and offered no right of appeal.

This outrageous case of mother-blaming was fictional, but that doesn’t mean it was harmless. In the world of Lie To Me, Lightman is an expert in human nature, a supreme judge of character, and whilst he’s not generally nice he’s almost always right. He blames the mother without hesitation or remorse in television-land. What does this say about the reality-land the script writers live in? What does that say about us?

I say, try not to blame the mother. It’s a hackneyed old plot device and you, and I, can do better.

Australian women online: talking Fat Acceptance

Events of recent weeks made a few things abundantly clear: there is still not nearly enough information or discussion about size acceptance outside of Fat Acceptance (or FA-friendly) blogs; quite a few people are interested in finding out more about the Fat Acceptance movement; and even a little awareness of the main principles of size acceptance can bring about real change in people’s attitudes and beliefs about fat people.

So I’m very grateful that Australian Women Online has given voice to FA – my guest post on the topic is their featured article today.

Fat Acceptance is a diverse movement, and I think it’s primarily a social justice movement – one that I’m also fairly new to. But I wanted this guest post – which couldn’t cover everything! – to reflect on the important intersection between Fat Acceptance and health/mental health/body image promotion in the community. At present, the National Advisory Group on Body Image explicitly calls for ‘healthy’ representations of women in the media to include those with a BMI in the ‘healthy range’. That is, it specifically excludes fat people (even ‘BMI overweight’ people, the majority of whom would barely register as fat in the public consciousness.) Now, I have huge issues with the idea that to promote positive self esteem, young people need only see ‘healthy’ bodies in the media, but even putting that aside: what I absolutely take issue with is the notion that the only healthy bodies are thin bodies. Cause that, my friends, is a stinking pile of excrement.

So that’s where I went with my article.

Now, do I actually think that health – as in the ‘moral virtue’ – is actually the main issue facing fat people? Not really. And do I think there are ‘bad fatties’ and ‘good (healthy) fatties’? Hell, no. I believe in bodily autonomy and I believe that no one has a right to judge me on ‘health’ grounds anymore than on ‘size’ grounds. Tasha Fierce says it perfectly in her post As Fat As I Wanna Be: My body, my weight, my choices, my health, MY BUSINESS. But, when we’re talking specifically about government health policy – both physical and mental health – a Health At Every Size paradigm is a lot more productive than the current approach which demonizes fat. Fat isn’t the health issue (sedentary lives and processed foods may be part of it, if there’s a health crisis at all). Nevertheless, prejudice against fat people is constantly justified on health grounds, and the way to get rid of that justification is to show, through HAES, that it’s false. I think that’s valuable.

The bottom line, though? Without the health justification, many people will just find another way to make their fear and loathing of fat acceptable. So at the very heart of the Fat Acceptance movement is the basic notion that fat people are human beings. We deserve, like all people, a life free from hateful prejudice.

If one person reads my article and is persuaded to that conclusion, through a Health At Every Size prism or not, I’ll be happy.

Dear Ms Freedman

Yesterday I received a comment on my blog from Mia Freedman. I wanted to respond properly, and at length, so it has taken me a while. Unlike Ms Freedman, I don’t make any coin from my blogging, and as someone with parenting, study and some paid work to do as well, there was no question that I could do that immediately. This delay has been to the detriment of my already tarnished standing as far as Freedman and her supporters are concerned (it has not gone without comment on her blog) but that, I’m afraid, was out of my hands.

Freedman’s comment is below:

Hi Spilt Milk,
If you ever wanted to write a post explaining fat acceptance (FA?) then I would certainly consider publishing it on Mamamia.
It’s a movement I know little about and would be interested to understand it better.
My intention on yesterday’s post – as I repeatedly tried to explain – was never to generalise about overweight people but to highlight a newsworthy phenomenon of gainer blogs and Donna Simpson in particular.
You can contact me at info@mamamia.com.au if you’re interested.
Peace out.

What those of us who responded critically to her post Fat, fatter, fattest: meet the people who think bigger is better initially asked for was meaningful engagement, so I was pleased to see that she had stopped by Spilt Milk. (Incidentally, Freedman has since changed the title of her post to the far less inflammatory Gainer Blogs, which is a speedy back pedal if ever I saw one.)  Subsequent exchanges, however, have led me to doubt whether what she sought here was meaningful engagement at all.

To be totally honest, I am disappointed. I think, if done in an appropriate way, a post and discussion about Fat Acceptance on Mamamia would be very helpful. Clearly, despite being a growing movement and closely aligned to body image advocacy, FA is a concept of which Freedman and many of her readers remain largely ignorant. Obviously, an opportunity to change that would be a positive thing.  I felt immediately ambivalent about being the one to do a guest post, however, both because of my reservations about Mamamia, which I’ve discussed before, and my need to ration sanity points. In other words, there were commenters there who were rude to me personally and showed enormous prejudice against fat people generally, and I’m not sure that’s an environment I would want to contribute to. I did, nevertheless, keep an open mind. Open-mindedness is a position that has generally served me well.

Perhaps because of that, it has struck me that Mia Freedman is quite obviously not approaching Fat Acceptance with an open mind.

I accept that Freedman did not post her piece about Donna Simpson with the explicit intention of drawing fat-hating comments. And as I and others have repeatedly said: feederism is not something I condone, nor is it aligned with Fat Acceptance. But the reality is that hateful fat stereotypes applied to Donna Simpson are the same stereotypes applied to other fat people – people who are fat for a whole range of reasons. And beyond that, some commenters on her post did make generalised statements about fat people and obesity, a few engaging in quite lengthy justifications of this hatred along the lines of ‘tax payers dollars’ or ‘health care workers dread obese patients.’  That Mia Freedman, with all her years of experience in writing and publishing and all of her years of speaking about body image could read such comments and see no fat hatred at all is astounding to me. I know she’s an intelligent woman with critical thinking faculties so I am, literally, flummoxed by such a denial. It would have cost her nothing to accept that some of those comments were hurtful and denigrated fat in general, and to condemn the prejudices underpinning them, and thus forcefully distance herself from such attitudes.

Such an action: a display of empathy with those who feel maligned by the proliferation of fat-hatred all over the place, but especially at Mamamia, would have been powerful. Mia Freedman is the kind of role model that young women might look up to: she’s successful, smart and has an interesting career. As a body image advocate and someone concerned about the welfare of teenagers,  she must know the hurtful impact that words can have. She must know that the fat girls reading her blog are vulnerable — painfully, dangerously vulnerable — to hating themselves when they read hatred directed towards obese people.  I would be extremely surprised if Freedman didn’t care about those girls, but I am thoroughly convinced that she has done a very poor job of conveying that care.

And it is blatantly obvious that she cares not a jot about me, or about the Fat Acceptance movement that she claimed to be interested to “understand better.” Fat Acceptance is not three women sitting in a room plotting to bring down Mamamia: it is a huge, diverse, international movement. Within the movement are people of all sizes – but yes, a lot of us have in common that we are fat. We are fat, we are accustomed to very real discrimination on the grounds of our weight; we recognise that such discrimination is fed by myths and misconceptions about fat and health, and that underpinning it is a lot of fear and hatred. The movement includes successful and prolific writers like Kate Harding, health experts like Dr Linda Bacon, bloggers like Marianne Kirby (who has just featured on a Dr. Phil episode which is yet to air in Australia) and concerned members of the public, like me. Information about Fat Acceptance and the related concept of Health At Every Size is all over the internet and there’s a big ol’ shelf of books dedicated to it. For the Chair of the Body Image Advisory Group to be openly ignorant of the size acceptance movement is in itself a concern.  In Freedman’s latest blog post, she distances herself even further from FA by calling those who have been critical of her recent work simply ‘the fat activists’ and also in centering her response around the misguided notion that our intention was mainly to defend feederism. I have personally made it perfectly clear to Freedman, over twitter, on her blog, and on my blog, that I am not in support of feederism (beyond an acceptance that people have a right to bodily autonomy). In continually reframing the discussion as one purely about Donna Simpson, I feel she’s being obtuse.

Freedman obviously feels attacked. That’s understandable. My intention was never to attack her, and I’ve no desire to cast aspersions on her personal character. I’m not surprised that she felt the Today, Tonight story was unbalanced — that’s to be expected from that type of programme. But her reporting on Donna Simpson and gainer blogs was hardly responsible or balanced! She didn’t do her research (admitting she knew ‘nothing’ about the gainer phenomenon, despite quite balanced articles like this being easily found with the magic of google) and she didn’t – despite her media experience – predict that her post might be interpreted as an invitation to hate on fatties. Perhaps that was a simple mistake. And perhaps, had she simply admitted that the “Fat, Fatter, Fattest” post displayed some poor judgement instead of nastily attacking those who criticised it, this would be a very different story.

I seriously doubt that Freedman’s offer of a potential guest posting spot on her blog still stands. Frankly, she’d probably be equally surprised if I still wanted to take it up.

This is a woman – a powerful and influential woman – who called me crazy. She also implied that I am dishonest, repeatedly claiming on her blog that only one or two of ‘the fat activists’ had posted criticism of her under multiple names, which is an accusation completely without foundation.* I don’t know everyone but I know that there were at least three FA bloggers posting on her site, at least two other concerned people who support FA that I personally am aware of, and also several other regular Mamamia commenters who accepted that what I and some others were saying was reasonable criticism. To blithely make statements erasing all of those people as if they never existed is, frankly, offensive. To delete the comments of posters who tried defending themselves against accusations of dishonesty is not a positive way to contribute to peace-making. Ms Freedman is fond of saying “peace out”, but in this case she’s not been fond of compromises, humility or in a few instances even a fair go, and that makes the peace process a little difficult.

Here is the bare face of it: I’m a fat woman, with a loud voice. I used that voice (independently, there was no carefully mobilised attack force here!) to express my concern about whether the commentary on the blog of a body image advocate was appropriate. I didn’t expect that I would necessarily be handed the floor. But I also didn’t expect to be personally attacked and to have my integrity called into question. I am a person with a mental illness, and although that illness doesn’t prevent me from being reasonable and articulate (I hope!) it does make me feel anxious and vulnerable. Especially when people call me crazy like it’s a joke. Especially when I am silenced for speaking my truth.

My truth is that I am a fat woman who has to walk out of my front door tomorrow into a world where, if the comments on some of Mamamia’s posts are to go by, I will be deemed selfish and lazy and hideous. My truth is that I was once a girl who was teased about her weight, and I have a daughter who will face a world full of body prejudice soon enough. My truth is that when I think about all the young fat girls who feel that they are disgusting and unlovable, I feel overwhelming sadness. My truth is that I know that what those girls need to hear from someone they look up to — someone who advises the government on how best to protect their self esteem — is that they matter and they are not disgusting and they have been heard. And my truth is that I don’t think, after all that has happened, that Mia Freedman is listening.

If that truly changes, I’ll peace out.

• I think it’s really important to note that no one is asking for Mia Freedman to be ‘sacked’, as was suggested on the Today Tonight piece. This isn’t, once more with feeling, about attacking someone’s character or livelihood. There is a good clarification of that here.

If only this were a real thing in the real world

We’re not big commercial TV watchers, especially in the morning/day, but I’ve seen enough to know that advertisements for toys have changed little in the last twenty years (although of course the toys themselves are quite different.) Everything is still incredibly gendered: ‘boy’ ads are loud and aggressive and focus on action, ‘girl’ ads are pink and bright and focus on pretty girls appearing to be popular.

So I really, really love this ad (even though, sadly, it’s not a real commercial.) Transcript is available here.

Also, I want a Brontësaurus for Christmas!

- hat-tip to the Scream-stress

Dishing it out.

Last night on the ‘reality show’ Masterchef, a contestant decided to forfeit her place in the competition in order to go home to be with her family. The contestant, Sarah, was a thirty year old mother – the youngest of her children was only six months old. I’m not sure what the show’s taping schedule is like or what provisions they have for family visits, but it’s clear that signing up meant that Sarah could be away from her family, the bulk of the time, for up to three months.

Inevitably, her choice to participate in the competition and then to leave it has sparked a lot of commentary. Most seem to be in the ‘what the hell was she doing there in the first place?’ camp. And, sure, it is tempting to judge: at six months, Bean hadn’t been apart from me for more than a few hours and was still frequently breastfeeding. There was no way I would have agreed to leave her for such a considerable length of time.

But that, actually, is completely irrelevant. What I would do, or what any other individual mother would do, does not justify such judgement.

Sarah didn’t leave her baby out on the street or even permanently with qualified, paid strangers: the show featured several shots of him smiling, at home with his father. He was being cared for by a parent. That parent didn’t happen to be his mother but I’m afraid any arguments that he was therefore automatically missing out won’t get far with me. A baby needs constant loving care from a responsible adult. Just because in our culture that adult is usually a mother doesn’t mean in any way that it has to be.*

Going on a reality TV show might seem selfish to some: and hey, perhaps it is. Perhaps pursuing a ‘dream’ when you have young children to care for is self-serving — but if it is, where is the criticism of self-serving men who do this? Reality shows are full of them. Some of them even seem to keep following their dream right up to, during, and after the birth of their offspring, and this is generally seen as cute, brave — even romantic. An Idol song performance dedicated to a brand new babe the father has hardly even held garners many votes, I’d wager.

Sarah attempted to combine motherhood with pursuing a major career goal in an intensive way, and like many women before her, she decided that level of sacrifice wasn’t for her. According to the show, she’s expecting another child and wants to put her business plans on hold until her children are older: a familiar, and reasonable, story. So why the vicious criticism?

In going on television, she has left herself open to attack. We like to put reality show contestants down: that’s part of the purpose of such programmes. And Sarah has committed the dual sins of being emotional and being female. Compounding those is her recent pregnancy – some commentary on twitter went so far as to joke that she needed to get control of her reproductive system before she could work on her career. It was a joke, yes.

But I didn’t laugh.

I don’t find it particularly funny to be reminded that mothers, working outside the home or not, cannot win. Sarah has been ridiculed for crying about missing her children at the same time as being attacked for abandoning them. Her emotional responses at a time of high stress have been taken as evidence that she can’t do her paid work properly, by the same people who have put her down for her fertility.

In (mostly) opting out of the paid workforce, I have avoided having my committment to motherhood questioned. But I have also left myself open to attack from those who think that mothers have little to offer. My work is not seen as valuable: and when I do return to paid work, there will be some who automatically assume that that work is also devalued because of my addled mummy-brain and the likely need to take sick leave at short notice to care for a child.

The predictable and threadbare double-standards trotted out after last night’s Masterchef episode certainly prove one thing: even on TV, a woman can’t escape the reality of patriarchy.

—

* I do wonder, if Sarah was breastfeeding, whether the producers would have found a way to accommodate that: my hunch is not, which is simply another example of how combining motherhood with work is never easy.

The daddy country

This article by Adele Horin appeared in The Age/SMH yesterday. Apparently new research by Lyn Craig of the University of NSW shows that Australian fathers spend more time with their children than those in other countries.

Australian fathers, her study shows, are run off their feet. Their long hours in paid work combined with their domestic labours means they work harder than Danish, French or Italian fathers and the same as Americans. For example, they spend 10 to 11 hours a day in paid and domestic work compared to eight hours for Danish men.

Broken down, the study shows simply shocking revelations, like the fact that Australian men spend an average of a whole forty minutes per day with their offspring, whilst French men spend around half of that. Hence, the claim in the headline that ‘Our dads are better than yours: Aussies lead the world in parenting’.

Interesting, really, that this is an article billed to be about fathers.

Dr Craig, the nation’s foremost authority on work-life balance, points to the even longer work routines of Australian mothers. Though most do much less paid work, they lavish a lot more time on their children and on housework than do mothers in all the other countries, making for a longer day.

”Intensive parenting seems to be a phenomenon of Anglo countries,” she says. ”Australian men and women -but especially women – spend more time with their children than do parents in the other countries, with only the US coming close.”

Hmm, really? So the difference in time spent with kids is actually greater between Australian mothers and those in other countries, than between Australian fathers and those in other countries? And, on the whole, Australian mothers still do far more domestic work and parenting than their male partners? So, why is this article accompanied by a picture of a dad who is ‘run off his feet’ and a headline about men, then? Am I missing something?

The article does raise an interesting point: the extra hours men here spend on combined work and domestic duties compared with those in a place like Denmark probably have much more to do with workplace culture than with equal parenting ideals.

Dr Craig points out in her study, Work and Family Time: Australia in Comparative Perspectives, that the gender division of labour is much more unequal here – not because fathers do less childcare than fathers overseas, but because their wives do less paid work, and much more housework and childcare than elsewhere.

Parental leave policies can go partway to changing workplace culture to make careers more compatible with family life. It’s heartening that both the government and opposition are at least no longer debating whether we need universal paid parental leave but have moved on to what kind. But we need more than that – we need to stop viewing children as a ‘lifestyle choice’ and start accepting that they are part of our social fabric. Families deserve community support. Women deserve to have their career prospects survive motherhood – or potential motherhood.

Yes, fathers should be acknowledged for the parenting they do but that’s not the real story here: the real story is that Australian parents who want to balance the careers of both partners with a happy family life are up against it. And when you include less privileged families than the white, partnered, educated ones featured in this article and post – well ‘up against it’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Quick Hit: The fattest woman wannabe

Bri at Fat Lot of Good has a post up about Donna Simpson, who says she would ‘love to be 1000 lbs’.

My first cynical reaction: this isn’t news. If a woman was losing a large amount of weight for the gratification or herself, or for men, there would be no articles. It would be called ‘The Biggest Loser’ or ‘The Fashion Industry.’

The issue is clearly more complex than that, though. What do you think?

This is a true story

*trigger warning for descriptions of violence against women*

Scene I

Setting: a classroom.  Class has just finished watching Bowling for Columbine as part of a unit on documentaries.

Cast: Me, the teacher (SM). About 20 students, average age 15, all girls.

SM: So, does anyone want to comment on how they are feeling after watching the film?

Student A: Yeah, I’m a bit shocked actually.

SM: Yes, it is pretty shocking. Especially the security footage from the library. I find that very hard to watch.

Student A: No, I mean I’m shocked that only, like, fifteen people died, but everyone makes out it’s a huge deal.

SM: [stunned pause] But it is a big deal. Many people were murdered or injured,  in terrible circumstances. It was a tragedy.

Student A: Yeah, but everyone said the movie was really disturbing but you don’t really see anything. I didn’t think it was that bad.

Student B: I think we’re just desensitized. We see worse stuff than that all the time and you just get sick of it. Doesn’t mean anything anymore.

SM: That’s interesting. The nightly news reports tragedies all the time, many more deaths than Columbine.

Student C: Yeah but I don’t think she just means the news.

SM: Ok – movies? TV shows?

Student C: Yeah, and video games.

Student A: Grand Theft Auto! [laughter from several students]

SM: What’s Grand Theft Auto?

Student B: It’s this video game my little brother plays where you steal cars and stuff and beat people up. There’s this one bit where you bash a prostitute to death so you can get your money back.

Student C: Yeah, you like, hit her with a baseball bat and stuff, or shoot her, and you get points.

SM: And your brother plays this?

Student B: Yeah. They all do, it’s really “cool”. [uses hands to indicate scare quotes]

Student D: Some of us play it too.

Student C: It’s a pretty good game. I don’t think they [boys] should think it’s so funny to kill a hooker though. They all think it’s hilarious. It’s not funny in real life.

SM: Does that bother you? That they laugh?

Student E: Nope, not really.

Student C: Yeah. I don’t like it. But it’s just normal. What can you do?

Scene II

Setting: The staff room at recess.

SM: I just had an interesting class with my Year 10s – they were telling me what they thought about violent video games.

Colleague: Really? I just had a really depressing one.

SM: What happened?

Colleague: We were reading an article, and it said that a mother and her two young daughters were brutally murdered. One of the girls put up her hand and said: ‘But they were just shot in the head Miss. That’s not really brutal.’ I asked her if she knew what brutal meant. She did: but apparently murder isn’t brutal unless there’s torture, like in the serial killer shows.

SM: Wow. What class was that?

Colleague: Year 7. The girl who said that hasn’t even turned twelve yet.

***

Cruella Blog has this video up, showing a male gamer show in detail how he likes to kill prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto IV. (Huge trigger warning on the video).

Quote of the day

“You can leer at the 16-year-old as you would an adult woman, so long as you’re ignorant. Once you become aware of their age you must look away.” Mike Jennings for Stab Magazine, writing about putting a nude 16 year old on the cover.

Um, or you could just not leer at anybody. Douchebag.