marie claire sucks

[mickeym]

By way of annella:

Who wants to see fat people in love? Not Marie Claire.

That is a link to a discussion of an article in fucking MARIE CLAIRE about how disgusting fat people are. Like Elle said in her post, I'm not linking to the article; it's easy enough to find it, and I don't want to encourage traffic to their site.

Here's an excerpt from the article: So anyway, yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

(I particularly like that the anti!fat writer misspelled 'heroin'.)



I feel...anger and sorrow at this. At the attitude toward obesity in general. There are so many reasons why people are overweight: genetic factors, emotional factors, health things like thyroid or blood sugar. For some it's a combination of things.

I weigh somewhere in the area of 430lbs right now. I am -- and probably always will be, to some degree -- one of those people that the author is talking about not wanting to see sharing affection/being intimate because of the gross factor. And it's attitudes LIKE hers that make me not want to step foot outside my house because I'm likely to be one of the heaviest people in any gathering. I don't want to open myself up for emotional hurt. I had more than enough experiences growing up of being called "fatty" and "fatso", and being picked last for kickball. I had to endure comments when I was older about how it must suck that my stomach sticks out further than my boobs. Whispers that followed me if I went into a store by myself.

Right now it's hard enough to make myself go outside and walk, move, whatever. It's physically painful and difficult, and it would be really easy to give up trying. It would be nice to think that when I do go out that if I'm being judged by anyone it's for what I'm saying or doing. That I'm judged for ME and not my appearance.

I know that's not the case. I am painfully aware that that's not the case. No doubt I've lost job opportunities because someone didn't want to hire someone who's obviously morbidly obese. I know there are people who feel obesity somehow affects intelligence, and that I'm probably being judged as stupid. There are days, depending on my mood and how my self-esteem is at that particular moment, I'd probably agree with them.

My husband left me for someone who is tall and slender--and dumb as a rock.

I HATE that there is so much attention paid to what people look like. The emphasis on being thin and "gorgeous" that's everywhere, in all forms of media.

I have as much right as anyone else to kiss whom I want wherever I want. If I'm losing weight, it's not because I'm trying to spare someone's delicate sensibilities. It's because I want to be healthier over all, for me. If I choose NOT to lose weight, that's also my decision, and if I have someone to kiss I will do so in public if I want...and if it bothers whoever might be looking, well. Don't look. It's your problem, not mine.

Comments

[fufaraw]

There have been so many studies of what, when, and how people eat that prove that most obese people (of course there are exceptions, I'm talking about the normative majority of people who weigh significantly more than is healthy for their frame and body type) actually eat less than their slimmer counterparts. There is such a thing as predisposition, and if you're born with it, you're condemned to fight it your whole life.

But people who have "thin genes" look at large people and see a lack of willpower, a lack of self-esteem, a lack of sufficient pride in one's self to maintain a healthy body. And of course standards of "healthy appearance" have grown ludicrous in their endorsement of vanishing percentages of body fat, visible muscle mass, and apparent bone and tendon. People with those sorts of body types are vaunted and praised right now, but most of them have done little or nothing to achieve them, just as I've done little or nothing to achieve resemblance to a bowling ball.

As far as scolding the writer and vilifying the magazine, all of that is generated interest and traffic, so in their eyes the article was a rousing success, as it has doubled or tripled their hit count.

::shrug:: We can't win, not as long as they're making the rules. We have to make up our own rules and play our own games, and let the skinny-obsessed preen and strut for each other and themselves.

Me, I'll cheer on your and anybody's efforts to improve your health and mobility, and expect the same from you and the rest of us oversized and large-hearted people.

((((you)))).

And some more *hugs*, just because.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to agree on the point of how much of it is just genetics. I mean, I am not exactly thin - I have that Viking/farmer build thing going on where if it were a couple hundred years ago and I had to spend hours every day shoveling snow so I could feed the animals or plow the fields myself, and then survive on the last remnants of dried fish and turnips, I'd be fine. (Well, assuming I got hungry enough to eat salt cod. Blech.)

But I also put muscle on like nobody's business - Nic's seen me in person when I've been doing a lot of lifting and carrying on a routine basis, she can totally vouch for me that I had Lance arms - muscle definition that some 'fitness' model types would KILL for, just from daily life - no concerted effort to bulk up, no special diet - my body just naturally put on muscle mass in such an amount and such a way that it showed to a point which most women would honestly really have to work (and possibly take steroids or something) to manage - because that's how my body works.

And it's pretty clear that it's a genetic thing, because my dad does EXACTLY the same thing - he gets more mass due to being male, but we both put on muscle and develop muscle definition at the drop of a hat. (We have the same skeletal build, too, which I imagine is not coincidental - I have broad shoulders and a fairly deep rib cage and my bones in general, going by lack of having ever broken anything, seem pretty dense - exactly the sort of bone structure you'd need to support large amounts of muscle.) (Once I went on an open day for a crew team thing when I was at uni in England, and one of the crew members was seriously practically drooling over the structure of my shoulders/upper body. It was kind of creepy.)

I'm not saying this to be all 'yay me' but rather to point out - if I made any kind of effort at all to actually try to build muscle mass intentionally, I'd probably have pretty quick results that were simply unrealistic for people without my genetic cocktail. And yet if I were, say, a fitness model (meaning those semi-attractive women with muscle tone who aren't total body builders, but are more buff than 'normal') people would be asking for my secrets - and the fitness and diet industry would be trying to sell them on the idea that they too could get the same results with X magic product - even though the 'magic' in this case is that I've got a certain combination of genes or whatever it is exactly that makes my body respond to exertion in a specific way.

I guess at some point they'll be trying to figure out how to bottle THAT, which is just creepy, but until that point - we're all going to look how we look. There's some 'wiggle' room in that - I'm not always all buffed up, for example, if I'm not using the muscle regularly - but it's not so much that you can reasonably change the basics of how your body wants to be. (I mean, my mom just does not put on muscle mass at ALL. When she broke her leg and had PT to help her use a wheelchair and crutches more effectively, it took them FOREVER to build up her upper body, because even with the best possible scenario, it's just not something her body wants to do. Her body does not want to be able to step in and plow the field, should the oxen be sick one day. It's designed to be good at something different.)

[fufaraw]

Oh yes, definitely, bodies are designed differently to be good at different things. I am dreadfully nearsighted and have always had loose joints that dislocate easily, thus preventing me from running very well. I was also fertile as a bunny and began menarche at ten. In anthropological terms, this makes me a valuable commodity: my ordinarily wide hips are meant for breeding and my loose joints make childbirth less stressful than females who are more tightly strung. I have little upper body strength to fight off suitors, and can't see well enough to run away. I also metabolise calories extremely slowly, so in times of famine I have larger than average reserves to draw on and can go longer without food to survive.

Unfortunately, the traits that made me a prize in prehistoric times are the exact ones that dispose me to packing on fat in the much more sedentary modern office-mass-transit-apartment life. ::shrug:: So I'm an anachronism. A chubby, tv-watching net-surfing displaced body type.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

I am dreadfully nearsighted and have always had loose joints that dislocate easily, thus preventing me from running very well.

Pardon me for butting in here, but have your doctors ever discussed Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehlers–Danlos_syndrome) with you? It's what I've got, and it's incredibly common and incredibly under-diagnosed. Just from that sentence, it sounds like you might have it too!