In the meantime, here’s the Fug Girls’ take on Gabby Sidibe’s dress at the Oscars. I have to say I don’t love it; I don’t love the color and I don’t love the applique business. On the other hand, I love this insane jumpsuit being worn by Beth Ditto, so I might just be crazy. I wouldn’t rule it out.

Speaking of the Oscars, Kate Harding wrote a piece for Salon in defense of Mo’Nique’s Oscar speech that I thought was very thought-provoking. And also, I am so happy that Kathryn Bigelow won. (Even if every recipient of a Scientific and Technical award appeared to be a white dude.) I hope she inspires other little girls to be directors. I really, really hope so.

Anyway, I’m going out of town this weekend and am teaching classes up until the very last minute, so posting may continue to be light until next week. In the meantime, here are some links for you! (I think there are a few potential juicy conversations in here, so I may pull out some comments and start spinoff posts if it seems like we want to talk more about something.)

The Oscars, cutting calories, Kirstie Alley, schisms in the fatosphere, and a feminist take on LOST coming right up…

1. The Oscars are on Sunday! I can’t wait to see what Gabby Sidibe and Mo’Nique decide to wear. Here they are at the NAACP Image Awards: Gabby in a short, sparkly gray dressand Mo’Nique in a bridal-looking white gown. The Rungay boys on Mo’Nique:

It’s a pretty dress and she looks good, but it’s the same effect that happened with Kate Winslet last year. She got nominated for an Oscar and sand blasted all her unique quirkiness away to make herself look like an Oscar nominee.

2. Urging “small caloric changes” to fight obesity is misleading.

[T]he “small changes” theory fails to take the body’s adaptive mechanisms into account. The rise in children’s obesity over the past few decades can’t be explained by an extra 100-calorie soda each day, or fewer physical education classes. Skipping a cookie or walking to school would barely make a dent in a calorie imbalance that goes “far beyond the ability of most individuals to address on a personal level,” the authors wrote — on the order of walking 5 to 10 miles a day for 10 years.”

“Instead of focusing on weight or appearance, focus on people’s health. There are things people can do to improve their health significantly that don’t require normalizing your weight.”

3. Kirstie Alley should stop trying to lose weight and just own the fat.

Some advice: if Kirstie Alley is going to do a show about being fat, she needs to go Ru-Paul on our asses and work it. Don’t use the word fat as a stand-in for disgusting. Fat is lots of things, but it is not gross. For every outspoken self-hating fat celebrity out there, there are a million fat chicks just trying to be okay with their bodies. Alley has the chance to be a champion for all the chubby girls in the house. How much fun would it be to watch her fabulous, slightly insane self walk around town being all, “I’m fat! What! Pass that cake!” Show her working out (News flash! Lots of fat people work out!), shopping (News flash! We want cute clothes too!), dating (News flash! Lots of dudes dig fat ladies! And thin ladies! Really, men just want to get with a lady!) and just being all about her fabulous fat self.

Jenfu said this very thing a few months ago! Thanks to Becca for the link.

4. Third-wave fat acceptance? An interesting conversation in the Fierce Fatties comments.

There are so many different perspectives in Fat Acceptance. And every time I’ve heard someone say that everyone in fat acceptance agrees on something, I end up thinking about all the instances where that is so not true.

We don’t have a single leader or a single idea that we follow in FA. Even the “big names” of fat acceptance say things like, “we don’t want fat acceptance to be monolithic”…

If fat acceptance is a smorgasbord of ideas, I think each of us needs to pick those things that work for us and discard the rest.

I feel like I’m so out of the loop on FA gossip and drama! I don’t even understand the thing with the three competing feeds; should BFD be on any other feeds? Or would BFD be shunned by the other feeds? I have no idea.

5. I won a Beautiful Blogger Award! Okay, it’s just a little graphic, but it reminds me of the day we won Diarist.net awards and pretended they meant things. (Oh man, Diarist.net is defunct now! Who knew.) Well, it is a lovely compliment to be on Rachel’s list… so thank you!

And in the spirit of the awards, I will point you to the awesome feminist blog Tiger Beatdown, which recently did a feminist analysis of LOST.

My problem with the “most interesting story lines” though, to be troublesomely ladybusiness for a moment, is this: Claire’s most interesting story line was having a baby and a boyfriend. Sun’s most interesting storyline is having a husband and a baby. Kate’s most interesting story line is having two potential boyfriends, between whom she cannot choose, and also a baby eventually. Juliet’s most important storyline was that her boyfriend might have thought for 1.5 seconds about liking another girl so she had to fall down a mine shaft and explode three times on screen.

Happy reading!

Gabby is the star of the film Precious, also starring Mo’Nique, who is also getting Oscar buzz, which I approve of, especially because her name is Mo’Nique. Rachel blogged about the movie here:

The film is based on the book, Push, by Sapphire, about an abused fat teenage black girl in Harlem, and seems to encapsulate the range of feminist topics: domestic abuse, racism, sizeism, poverty, sexual assault, illiteracy… And newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, who plays Precious, is an Actual Fat Woman and not some thin star swimming in a fat suit.

And Annie sent me this link about Gabby herself:

“She is unequivocally comfortable in her body, in a very bizarre way. Either she’s in a state of denial or she’s so elevated that she’s on another level,” [the director] says. “I had no doubt in my mind that she had four or five boyfriends, easily.”

Ah, yes, her weight. When Sidibe was 11 years old, an aunt offered to pay for a cruise if she lost 50 pounds. Friends and family continue to pressure her about it. “I still hear it from people who don’t know that they’re pretty close to hurting my feelings,” she says, “people who care about me, like this one friend. I was eating a light potato chip, and she eyeballed me like I was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen. She says, ‘Every time you want to put something disgusting in your mouth, think of the designers who won’t make a dress for you because you’re fat.’ ”

But at some point, says Sidibe, “I learned to love myself, because I sleep with myself every night and I wake up with myself every morning, and if I don’t like myself, there’s no reason to even live the life. I love the way I look. I’m fine with it. And if my body changes, I’ll be fine with that.”

I won’t lie–I’m kind of nervous to see Precious, because it is clearly not an easy movie to experience. But I’m thrilled to see actresses like Sidibe and Mo’Nique getting recognition for this project, and I have no doubt that it’s an outstanding film.

If you were making a “most beautiful” list, who would you put on it?

Feel free to discuss this story or anything else in the open thread! Regular posting will resume next week.

Once again at this point it’s just a rumor, but if proven to be true it will amount to yet another slap in the face of fat people by one of our own. Star Jones was a champion for size acceptance then fought for years to cover up her surgery before coming clean last year. If the same thing is going on with Mo’Nique her credibility in the eyes of millions of ladies and a few men like myself will be shot.

It always mystifies me when fat women act betrayed if a plus-size star has wls. even skinny women often hold a distorted idea of their body image. Why is it so hard to believe that MoNique would too? It doesn’t mean she was disgusted by contestants on FAT Chance, and it doesn’t make her message of loving yourself regardless of size a lie–it means that she has deep, personal image problems and you don’t know what they’re rooted in. We’ve got to stop expecting perfection from each other! I’m a proud 220 pounds. I look good and I know it. I would never excoriate another overweight woman for making that decision–that’s like beating up on someone who has a psychological problem.

It’s just that there are so few BBWs in the public eye and fewer still that send the message that it IS possible to be plus size and confident, successful, beautiful and O.K. with one’s body. When someone like Mo’Nique or, recently, Queen Latifah, shift and begin extolling weight loss, a lot of women who found inspiration and strength through their example are left alone again.

I don’t begrudge anyone’s weight loss, I really don’t, but when someone who has made an effort to spread the message of size acceptance (and carved a career niche from it) suddenly takes measures to ensure weight loss, it’s hard not to feel a little bit betrayed.

I myself and overweight by at least 85 lbs, but never have I ever thought that I should EMBRACE my size. Plain and simple, the bottom line is about being HEALTHY! …..why can’t we be HONEST with ourselves and admit that being overweight is NOT healthy… Let’s stop being so judgemental when we have carried the burden of being judged ourselves.

So, let’s pretend for a moment that this rumor is true. Which one of these comments do you agree with? I personally continue to feel like the third commenter above—I hate to “lose” one of the few icons out there who advocate for size acceptance, and it does call into question Mo’Nique’s whole philosophy of being “Fabulous and Thick” that she works so hard to promote. But, as with Queen Latifah, I also kind of understand it’s none of my business. I don’t know. Is it different, because she’s so vocal about size acceptance? How do you feel about it?