When I was a wee Nomes, only learning the first few pieces of grammar, that’s what I learned what a noun is. And obviously the misogynistic culture we live in has a lot to do with shunting women from “person” to “thing.” Lately I’ve been carrying around in my head that particular chant when I’ve seen the marketing for the film Precious. Please bear with me; image analysis is so not my field, and I am out of practice with this stuff, but I wanted to write about this.

I got the book out of the library. And it is phenomenal. I love that Precious is so determined to tell her story that we get the words directly as she thinks them. Here’s the cover:

Bright, bold, striking. I like it, I think it goes really well with the story. Especially with the significance of the lettering – the letters themselves – and Precious’s struggle to gain literacy and express herself.

Here is the first poster for the film:

Although Precious is the titular character of the film, what do we get for her here? A silhouette. Cracked and broken with the image of a hand between her legs, which strikes me as not the most subtle way of alluding to the sexual abuse she suffers from her parents. She has no features, no face, nothing. It’s unclear whether she’s intended to be naked, which is problematic. The safety orange behind her does a good job of expressing the misery of her situation at the start, but that’s about it.

Poster number two:

I like this as art but I don’t know if I like it for the film. Once again Precious has no features – we don’t even get a differentiation between her face and her hair. She looms out of the dingy background, opaque and oblique. I can’t tell if she’s supposed to be wearing a dress with an apron over it? But Precious in the book describes herself as dressing fashionably and loving clothes, including a pair of neon yellow leggings she got at Lane Bryant. I don’t know that dress-with-apron really fits. The name necklace is a nice touch. But overall it again feels to me like it falls short.

Lesley over at Fatshionista already covered some of this same ground. I want to highlight a couple of lines in particular:

Indeed, our culture would remove big pieces of Precious’ identifiable humanity for each of the two physical characteristics that make her different from most everyone else we see in leading roles: her fatness, and her Blackness. If it’s difficult to recognize Precious’ humanity, it isn’t because of the lighting or the angle at which the camera is seeing her; it’s because we’re not accustomed to seeing women who look like Precious portrayed as fully human.

By presenting Precious as a silhouette, a negative space for us to map our readings onto, we take away a lot of what makes Push so incredibly moving and heartrending. The story is about how despite the absolutely toxic environment in which she finds herself, this girl has a mind that only needs a little encouragement to blossom. She has dreams and ideals and hopes and fears and desires and sadnesses, but we don’t get any of that from these posters. Push is a story that demands to be told in the words that Precious can use. These posters don’t give her a mouth, much less a mind.

This is just a very quick post of something that happened to me today, and if it weren’t for the massive posts over at Shapely Prose (this one and the one before) I probably wouldn’t even mention it.

I take the bus to work sometimes. Today it was raining and the bus was very full. I was sitting down (next to a guy who, miraculously, put his legs together so as not to crowd me into the aisle) and there were a lot of people standing up. Dude standing right next to me was hanging onto the support pole with his arm on the other side. His arm closest to me kept rubbing against my arm, and he was talking with someone he’d gotten on the bus with and kept gesturing a lot. I almost got hit in the face several times. And yet I said nothing, because I have been sort of emotionally fragile this week and I really did not want to face getting into a brouhaha when I was trapped on the bus and had to stay on that one to be on time for work and not lose my fare.

I lucked out that I didn’t get hit in the face. Showing up to work with a shiner would’ve been awesome. But hey, transit etiquette: try to keep your goddamn arms to yourself when you’re on a packed moving vehicle.

I had a frustrating day today – trying to go shopping at my local Target has become an exercise in futility, especially since I’m pretty sure they haven’t hired on extra staff to deal with the influx of college students. And their plus size section has dwindled to a meager four racks shoved against the back wall, swallowed up by activewear and maternity. Because fat girls should be working out to lose weight and/or the only acceptable belly is a pregnant one? I kind of don’t think that’s their reasoning but I was in a foul mood.

Anyway, so I’m headed out to Boston at the end of the week to hang out with my bff and see a concert, and so I hit Google to look for plus size options in Beantown. And one of the first results was for this Yahoo Answers post. The first person does mention chain stores which are in basically every mall, but they do also note a couple of boutiques. The second person, though.

“Have you tried Lane Bryant?”

Uh. NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. I am pretty sure almost every fat woman has tried Lane Bryant. How many other options do most of us have? And the thought of going to the same goddamn soulless chain store for the same overpriced clothes that I have to suck it up and pay for because nobody else wants to take my good green money for body coverings, but in an Exotic New Location… well, it’s infuriating and depressing all at once.

Maybe I’m just overly hormonal, but this is really pissing me right the fuck off. Yes, I have tried Lane Bryant. I am looking to support local or indie shops or find something actually goddamned interesting for once. I don’t want to wear clothes that would suit my mom, I want to wear something that makes me feel reasonably on-trend and around my age. I want to wear clothes that are not entirely made out of polyester. I want to wear clothes that are reasonably well-made. I want things that are vaguely office-appropriate.

And the thing is, I shouldn’t feel like I’m asking for the goddamned moon when I write out that list. My sister can find any number of stores that would fit those criteria handily; she wears a size 6, and I wear a size 22, and I’m completely fucked.

A friend of mine linked to this article on Twitter: “Move over, Twinkies: Deep-fried butter is here”. The article is about what you’d expect; the state fair in Texas has a deep-frying competition, and one guy who’s won three out of the four last go-rounds has deep-fried butter as his entry. Yeah, okay.

For me, the shocking part of this article comes about a third of the way through, under the heading “‘Special foods for a special time’”. I’m just gonna go ahead and quote parts of this because I am that shocked:

…Should the Food and Drug Administration step in and ban the event?

No, said Jennifer Pereira, a registered dietitian in nearby Arlington, Texas. A firm believer in the “no bad foods” approach to dieting and healthy eating, Pereira said it isn’t such a bad thing for people to splurge occasionally on foods they truly enjoy.

“The state fair is only once a year,” Pereira said. “I would strongly encourage people not to binge. Don’t build up your hunger so you can eat everything in sight. Pick a couple of things that you really enjoy, savor them, and stop eating when you feel satisfied.”
[snip]
“In my practice, once I get people to legalize all foods, it’s amazing how food loses its grip.”

Wait, what’s that? Legalizing all foods? Enjoying food? Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full? Is it just me, or does that sound remarkably like intuitive eating?

IN AN ARTICLE ABOUT DEEP-FRIED BUTTER?

I’m amazed. And a little bit giddy. I assume the word “splurge” is an insertion by the reporter. The quotes from Pereira are, to me, pretty close to how I live my life and try to eat. At the town fair this spring, you can bet that I got a piece of fried dough. And I enjoyed it. But I didn’t even finish the whole thing, because I had Chinese food for lunch and too much fried stuff was making me feel sick after a while. I’m glad to see a registered dietitian in a big media outlet saying something that half-approaches sense.

I was at the comic book store the other day, poking around while my friend picked up her pull list. And I came across the last issue of the Pride and Prejudice mini-comic that Marvel has been publishing. And now I have a whole mini-essay on portrayals of historical literature. Behind a tag, because this got loooong, and image-heavy.

I wish I had a scan of the inside illustrations, because these girls looked like the most anorexic fashion models you can think of. Here’s the cover of the first issue:

She looks like a bobblehead doll.

Now, I am aware that people were smaller back in the 19th century. But they were not all skinny. Let’s look at Jane Austen, in the portrait by her sister:

Nice double chin, right? Jane isn’t Elizabeth Bennet, obviously, so what about descriptions of Lizzie from the book?

“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.”

Not so pretty as Jane. Also, we hear this from the youngest Bennet sister: “Oh!” said Lydia stoutly, “I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest, I’m the tallest.” Further on:

“I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Bingley, “for a kingdom! Upon my honour I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life, as I have this evening; and there are several of them, you see, uncommonly pretty.”

“You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

“Oh! she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”

“Which do you mean?” and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”

This is supposed to show how disagreeable and prideful Darcy is, but it also shows that Elizabeth is a pretty typical example. Here is Darcy’s assessment later on:

But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.

“Light and pleasing.” Does that mean this?

Or this?

I think this gallery at Sensibility.com has a good range of what were considered admirable figures. These women all have round, full arms and full cheeks; many of them have the hint of a double chin, and most of them have not-insignificant bosoms. Contrast their figures with these:

I don’t think it’s going too far to say that this artist may have been more inspired by the Keira Knightley vision of the 19th century than the Jennifer Ehle one. I think it’s also heavily influenced by comic portrayals in general, like this (potentially NSFW) or this or this.

I don’t know. I wish the art was better in general. I wish we had a wider range of size (and race, and sexuality, and gender, and and and) representation in comics. I wish the Bennet girls looked like they were actually related. And I wish I had a better way to wrap this up, but I appear to have run out of steam.

No, I’m not going on a diet.

I just randomly went and looked at the diet blogs a friend of mine and a couple of her friends have, and I realized that just reading these – skimming, really, about a day’s food intake and “cheats” and “being bad” and “why I’m fat” and “I want to be skinny – was making my stomach clench. No, really. Apparently I have grown totally intolerant of diet talk. Which I sort of knew, already, but what a way to confirm it.

I’m actually eating way less these days, but not because of trying to lose weight. I had some fucked-up dental work done, and because of that I am getting food wedged between teeth where it really shouldn’t be. And then I try to get it out and flay open my gums. And then the next time I try to eat it all gets packed in against the still-sore gums. Ow. I am actually limiting my food choices and eating less because I’m afraid of my mouth hurting – I had a really hard time last night when we went out for my dad’s birthday dinner (another post on birthday rituals should be forthcoming) and had to stop eating when I wasn’t really ready to, and take tylenol when I got home. Ow. But I have a consultation coming up, and maybe I can make them fix their own shoddy work so I can eat normally again. It’s bad when I am avoiding fruits and vegetables because the seeds are really awful at getting stuck in my teeth. I want to eat nothing but cucumbers and tomatoes and berries, but I can’t. Because I would cry. A lot.

I am so goddamned lucky.

I had a physical this morning. I’d met the doctor once before for about five/ten minutes, getting a new scrip for my antidepressants, but nothing more than that. We chatted a bit about a couple of things, and then… what I’d been expecting. And dreading.

He brought up weight loss. Which I can understand him doing. I have a BMI that qualifies as morbidly obese; my dad was diagnosed as prediabetic a few years back; my grandfather (Dad’s father) died of complications from type 2 diabetes.

But I told him why I wasn’t going to diet. Because I have problems with disordered eating, and trying to restrict my eating and diet triggers that really badly and makes me gain weight, and I would rather just try to get some more exercise and not try to deliberately Go On A Diet.

And his response was not “well, diet anyway.” It was “your chart says you were seeing a psychiatrist at grad school; are you seeing anyone here?” When I said I was going to the psych services at the local university, his follow-up was “do they have an eating disorders specialist?”

How utterly refreshing. And when he noted that my blood glucose levels were perfect and I’d lost ten pounds since the last visit anyway, he seemed a lot less inclined to push the diet thing.

It wasn’t a perfect HAES experience, but it was so, so much better than I had feared.

It was. And I didn’t buy a copy of Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere from Powells because I want to support my local indie bookstore. (Even if that means asking them to order it or whatever.) Anyway.

So. International No Diet Day. I am all in favor of this, as you well know, because diets make people miserable. And unhealthy. And, often, fatter than they started out. Pointless and awful. So today, as with every other day, I ate like I wasn’t on a diet.

I had a Lunabar for breakfast, because I needed something in my stomach before I went with my mom to her doctor’s appointment. With a cup of iced coffee – my dad makes it and just stores it in the fridge and it’s great. And strong. After the appointment, Mom and I went to Friendly’s for lunch. Neither of us finished our food because we were full. She had a bacon cheeseburger and I had some sort of barbecue chicken melt sandwich thing. After work, my sister picked me up and wanted to go get “comfort food,” because she’s been having a rotten week. So we went to Wendy’s and shared some fries and a Frosty. And then for dinner we had steamed asparagus and some grilled chicken and baby spinach. I put Caesar dressing on mine. And I enjoyed every bite, because it was light and what I wanted after all that grease. But I didn’t feel like I was “being good” or “making up for” what I’d eaten before. I just… needed some fiber. And green vegetables. And then I frosted the cupcakes I made yesterday and had one with a whole bunch of strawberries.

I am full still. And happy. And utterly at peace, because there are so many good things to eat in the world. Because I’m not denying myself what I want to eat when there’s no good reason, I’m not worried about missing out. There are more cupcakes downstairs. I doubt I’ll eat them all tonight in a fit of shame and self-loathing. But I might have one for breakfast tomorrow. I might eat some fried dough at the fair this weekend. I might get some sushi before the concert my BFF and I are going to. I don’t know. Possibilities are great. And when I’m not counting calories I have so much room in my head for other stuff.

Plus-size fashion story from the LA Times, from the start of March. Link from The Pretty Pear, whose archives I am going through. It was interesting to read the perspective of those on the other side of the issue – that is, the people making and selling the clothes rather than those of us trying to buy them.

I tried on about ten things at Target today and came home with two. I still have no idea what I’m going to wear at work all summer; my “uniform” of casual ribbed tank tops and hippie skirts isn’t really appropriate for my job.

You don’t say!

I will be cutting the rest of this post for spoilers, so if you haven’t seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine yet and don’t want to know anything (because you’re not a rabid fangirl like me), don’t click.
Okay so. Logan, alias Wolverine, alias James Howlett, alias Hugh Jackman, is the star of the show. Which is only right. A number of other Marvel favorites make appearances, though. And one of them… is Fred Dukes, alias The Blob. And wow, was I ever not expecting what they did with him.

Dukes starts out as just big. Tall, probably taller than Wolverine (Jackman is like 6′2″) and yeah, built like a brick wall, but not what we would think of as a blob. Just a big beefy guy.

Fast-forward six years and some plot hijinks, though, and Logan shows up to the boxing gym where his pals John (Will.i.am) and Dukes ended up. They were on a mutant task force, and they all “dealt with that in their own ways.” And Dukes? Developed “some kind of eating disorder,” John says. “Just don’t mention his weight.”

He’s a grotesquerie. The fat had to be CGI-ed on, but it is still disgusting – both in the sense that it’s meant to revolt the viewer, and in the sense that fat people don’t actually LOOK like that. THere’s a moment where his belly is rippling after a few gut-punches that was clearly meant for laughs. Oh, and a tattoo that used to be of a pinup girl has stretched, and Logan says “I remember when she used to be about 85 pounds.” Um, what? Yes, tats, stretch, but that’s not good writing.

I mean, the movie had its good parts. A lot of shit blew up real pretty-like, and I got to see a lot of Hugh Jackman, and I’m shallow. But between that and some really skanky race and gender fail, I’m not as giddy as I wish I’d been. And while I never expected the race and gender fail to be anything but omnipresent… I’m surprised and pissed off at the level of fat-hatred. I know, I know, it’s a movie about mutants. But come the fuck on, Fox.

…Oh wait.