I’ve already “hidden” posts on my news feed from folks who seem to think that a running litany of everything they ate/didn’t eat wanted to eat/didn’t want to eat or weight they lost/gained inexplicably was the utmost in fascinating conversation… Yesterday this… was not possible when a woman actively messaged me to ask why I hadn’t joined (or “liked”? I’m not sure which) the page she’d set up to log all her Weight Loss Adventures.

2. Do plus-sized women need a separate social networking site? (And if so, why is it not called Fatbook?) Via Jenfu.

Women who are a size 12 or above make up 60% of the population. It seems odd to treat them as though they’re an odd minority who need their own special site when they’re pretty clearly the majority. I just kind of feel like there should be enough of a place for plus sized women in the mainsteam discussion that this sould be unecessary – but maybe that’s not the case. And if it’s not, then the mainstream discussion is really failing.

3. Feminist Does Not Mean “Strong Woman” by my new girlcrush Tasha Fierce. If Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and Sarah Palin unsettle you, you aren’t alone.

These women are part of a new wave of conservative feminism, which apparently views women’s advancement in the workplace and politics to be the most important tenet of actual feminism. Basically, these conservative feminist leaders have decided that the advancement of women to the upper echelons of business — something they have already achieved — is what feminism should really be about… By opposing ideas like subsidized child care, access to birth control, and legal abortion, these women will actually make things worse for any homemaker not privileged by race and wealth.

4. You can buy your own airline seatbelt extender if you would rather not ask for one. Via the Fatcast podcast! Featuring Marianne Kirby and Leslie Kinzel!

5. And finally, from @TweetsOfOld, an excerpt from a Missouri newspaper in 1878:

A 13 months-old boy tips the scales at 100 pounds. The parents intend to exhibit him to the public.

As you do. Happy Thursday, everyone!

A random sampling:

First Impressions: Kagan looks like a fat drag queen.

Yeash that Elena Kagan is another fat dychy type! Are there just endless fat, short haired woman in the Dem establishment?

no disrespect intended but man is Kagan is a fat, ugly bitch

Yeah, there are plenty more. By far the most popular is calling her a fat version of [dude], including Matthew Broderick, Kevin James, Chris Farley, and “Fat Bastard” from Austin Powers. Also, the data (i.e. me glancing at user pics) would suggest that most of the people spouting this crap are men. No better way to take a powerful woman down than call her fat, right?

Thanks for the people calling this out, for instance:

@shorterstory Come on, @theDailyBeast, why call your #Kagan roundup Big Fat Story except for frat boy smirking? http://bit.ly/daurQV #shameonyou

@SaraLibby Cringing at the first Kagan-is-fat joke to pop up on my Twitter feed.

All I know is, a male nominee would not have all of this knee-jerk patriarchal bullshit directed at them, and it pisses me off. What slams were made on John Roberts’s physical appearance? Yeah, right, none.

“When you’re not what they consider ideal, you know, and you’re out there trying to get your dance on at those other places, you get the looks, the stares. But not here. Everything’s accepted here,” says Vanessa Gray of Long Beach, an attractive 30-something woman who acknowledges jovially that after giving birth to three children, “I’ve got a little more meat on my bones.”

There are several hands here: on the one of them, I love the idea of a safe place to go, at which you feel absolutely accepted, and in control of other people’s reactions, that you are with peers and being evaluated by a set of criteria that includes your very specific kind of beauty (because let’s face it, night clubs are pretty much all about being checked out. And dancing. But mostly being checked out.). And it’s lovely to have a place to go and not be afraid to be as totally you and gorgeous as possible, without fearing that you might be torn down.

Here’s the other hand, though–it seems a little bit like hiding, to me. Because, okay, the ideal is, as per The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, to advocate “that everyone be treated equally regardless of size,” because “we don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world.” It seems to me that so much fat prejudice is saying “we don’t want to have to look at you,” and a plus-size nightclub is essentially saying “well, okay, we’ll just go hide over here, then, where you don’t have to see us.”

Not to get on my soapbox (I can see your house from here!), but the way to change the perception of fat people, isn’t it to have more visibility–not only more covers in magazines, more photoshoots, more plus size models, but more average, every-day women being visible, beautiful, unashamed of their bodies, dressing up, not hiding out, and going out and being unabashedly, unashamedly, unapologetically themselves? To flirt and dance and do the things that maybe sometimes feel a little dangerous?

Or maybe someone has done that thing where they have suddenly and with astonishment noticed the incredibly economically powerful plus-size market and have jammed their straw right into the heart of it and are greedily sucking it down dry!

So I’m torn. Tell me what you think of plus-size nightclubs–safe haven, hidey-hole, brilliant cash-generating  scheme, or something else altogether? And then, let’s put on sequinned tube tops and go dancing.

And now another one has surfaced! The company apologized for the first ad, saying it was “mistakenly released.” How can they explain this one? My guess is that someone in their art department is clinically insane.

I’m not a consipiracy theorist, I swear it. But I’ve got to tell you, it’s not hard to start thinking that maybe this isn’t an oopsie do, tee hee! Maybe Ralph Lauren is making some kind of twisted commentary about women’s bodies. Maybe Ralph Lauren and Karl Lagerfeld are best friends! Maybe someone ought to retire their Photoshop license.

In the meantime, the project is a pretty brilliant idea: it’s “an international, 5-day body activism campaign that draws attention to body image issues and the damaging impact of the thin ideal on women in society.” And the point of it is to highlight the damage that your inner critic can do, how you can absolutely brutalize yourself, how your self-negative thoughts can so often be attributed to the current, incredibly pervasive beauty ideal (as chronicled on these pages). The project calls it “fat talk.”  The site says:

Fat Talk describes all of the statements made in everyday conversation that reinforce the thin ideal and contribute to women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies. Examples of Fat Talk include: “I’m so fat,” “Do I look fat in this?”, “I need to lose 10 pounds” and “She’s too fat to be wearing that swimsuit.” Statements that are considered Fat Talk don’t necessarily have to be negative; they can seem positive yet reinforce the need to be thin — “You look great! Have you lost weight?”

We believe that that by eliminating fat talk, we can begin to change the way that women think about their bodies.

If you read BFD, you’re probably already pretty aware and pretty angry about the prevailing body image ideal, the extent to which women will go to achieve it, the extent to which even when we deliberately and mindfully reject that ideal it can still creep in and undermine our confidence and our strength. I was going to type that I think we’d be surpised at how often even the most enlightened of us still can fall prey to that kind of negative, messed up thinking–but I actually don’t think we’d be surprised at all. Or surprised by the statistics that the campaign has compiled. They’ve also got “Five Ways to Help Promote Positive Body Image,” but I think our list is better.

So, No Fat Talk. This week, every week. Here’s the pledge:

Today I promise to eliminate Fat Talk from conversations with my friends, my family and myself.

Starting now, I will strive for a healthy ideal, which I know looks different for every woman, and focuses on health, not weight or size.

I will celebrate the things about myself and the women in my life that have nothing to do with how we look.

I decide to end Fat Talk NOW!

Sounds like a damn fine idea to me. Have you already signed the pledge in your heart? Do you think you need to sign a pledge like this? It wouldn’t hold up in court if we forced people to sign this under duress, would it? Anyone?

I’ve heard the idea of a “soda tax” floated many times before, but this is the first time any actual legislation has been on the horizon–let alone right in my backyard:

Newsom said he was particularly motivated… by Thursday’s release of a UCLA study showing a link between soda and obesity in California. Researchers found that adults who drink at least one soft drink a day are 27 percent more likely to be obese than those who don’t – and that soda consumption is fueling the state’s $41 billion annual obesity problem. The study also found that 41 percent of children and 62 percent of teens drink at least one soda daily.

“Soda is cheap, sweet and irresistibly marketed to teens,” said Susan Babey, the study’s lead author. “Not enough teens know about the health and dietary risks of drinking huge quantities of what is essentially liquid sugar.”

I’m not particularly a soda drinker or an advocate for soda, but I also don’t see how this tax will really do anything–maybe if you make soda itself a lot more expensive, it could change people’s habits, but taxing Safeway isn’t going to make them stop selling soda, and I doubt they’d raise their prices on soda in response, so what’s the point? (Also, this tax wouldn’t affect fast-food places, so wouldn’t people just go there for a quick soda fix?) The Chamber of Commerce apparently agrees:

Jim Lazarus, vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, said the group opposes the soda tax. “Does this mean there’s a fee on candy bars, on ice cream, on potato chips?” he asked. “Where do you draw the line?”

He added that a small fee – likely to be passed on from the retailer to the consumer – wouldn’t be enough to dramatically change people’s habits, leading him to believe it’s meant to be just another revenue source for the city.

So what do you guys think–does this all feel a little “nanny state” to you, do you think it’s a good idea, do you think it’s insulting? And where are they getting this “obesity costs California $41 billion a year” from, anyway? And Californians, given the budget crisis–what about the idea of taxing “extra” purchases like soda as a way to help dig ourselves out of the hole?

Watkins has been vocal, and pretty cheerful, about her exit from SNL, but Casey’s been completely quiet on the matter.

Could it be because of the totally bitchy and sexist way in which she was ousted from the sketch show?

Our inside comedy sources tell us SNL producers told the curvy Casey to lose 30 pounds during the show’s summer hiatus. They pretty much demanded it. And whether Wilson just couldn’t drop the weight or she just only wanted to give her middle finger some exercise, she didn’t drop a damn pound. And that’s when she was axed, we’re told.

The comedian was already on thin ice, since she never really developed a hit character on the show or struck a nerve with audiences during her two-season run. Case was aware she was one of the show’s least popular players—she even made a Funny or Die video about people not finding her funny (which, coincidentally, we find hilarious).

But insisting she drop pounds to be another stick-thin star? How pathetically prehistoric could Lorne Michaels & Co. possibly get? Casey was pretty much the only female castmember the show’s had in years who wasn’t a size 6 or smaller (a pregnant Amy Poehler notwithstanding). Whereas SNL’s been famous for highlighting obese men—John Belushi, Chris Farley, Horatio Sanz, Bobby Moynihan, to name a few.

Did Will Ferrell have to look good in a bikini for people to laugh at him? Hell no! So why should the women be treated any differently?

I couldn’t have said it better myself. She was certainly not my favorite cast member (she never really carved out a niche for herself on the show, and pales in comparison to someone like Kristin Wiig) but her weight shouldn’t have been a factor in her firing, and if it was, it’s appalling. Here’s the Funny or Die video that Wilson made a while ago, mocking mean comments made about her on the internet.

Thanks to my beloved Annie for the link!

[ETA Casey Wilson is denying this story. Now I wonder where the rumor came from in the first place.]

The Gruen Transfer is an Australian show about advertising which dissects and analyzes the affects of advertising on the average human brain. As part of their show, they frequently issue challenges to agencies–create This Kind of advertisement. Sell this seemingly impossible-to-sell idea. This time around, it was make an ad about fat discrimination.

One entrant came up with an astonishing ad, and it is brutal to watch. (Click below for the link.)

You’ll find it here, and you’ll want to watch it with headphones, if you’re at work.

Basically: a series of nasty-looking people tell a series of racist jokes that will shock the breath out of you. The last joke is a fat joke. The ad asks the question: why isn’t sizeism and fat discrimination treated with the same level of outrage? You were horrified as you watched the litany of discriminatory racial jokes; why isn’t it considered just as fucked up to be prejudiced about someone’s size or weight, why isn’t it considered as wrong and morally reprehensible to make fat jokes as it is to make racist jokes?

That is a goddamn fine question. And I am embarrassed to say that it was a question that even I needed to be asked. I am a person who hates fat prejudice, who despises and loathes and rails against fat discrimination, who is sent into rages around fat hatred. And yet, I sat through the racist jokes and cringed and was horrified, but when the fat joke came, I am embarrassed to say that found myself resigned. Oh. A fat joke. Asshole.

I’m used to them. I’m inured to them. I’m angry when people make them, but not shocked, not surprised, not outraged the way I ought to be. And why aren’t I? Why aren’t all of us? Are we so resigned to the idea of fat prejudice? And how do we cut that shit out? Those are some more damn fine questions.

The ad is hard to watch, and makes its point with a slap in the face and a punch to the gut. At that link, after the ad you get the Gruen Transfer panelists discussing the ad, and the argument is that it goes too far to make its point. You get the feeling that the guy who argues most strenuously against the ad wants to say–though he never quite does–that fat discrimination does not ever quite reach the level of racism, and that the two cannot be compared in seriousness or moral reprehensibility. What do you guys think? Does the ad go too far? Does it not go far enough? Is it shock treatment, or just shocking? Tell me what you think.

They’re covering an excellent article by Paul Campos about criticism leveled at some of the (female) possibilities for potential Supreme Court justices. Namely, that they are fat, or might someday become fat, and therefore should be disqualified.

A (female) Supreme Court justice should not “even border on overweight”:

“You want someone who will serve the longest, i.e. with the greatest remaining life expectancy—and that involves more than simple age. I tried assessing their respective health prospects, and ruled out all who even border on overweight.”

A (female) Supreme Court justice should be “a hottie”:

(Wardlaw’s “ectomorphitude” also gets rave reviews at legal gossip site Underneath Their Robes, which describes her as “Heather Locklear in a black robe. This blond Hispanic hottie boasts a fantastic smile and an incredible body, showcased quite nicely by her elegant ensembles.”)

A (female) Supreme Court justice should be fuckable:

So what’s the real motivation for all the anxiety about the bodies that house two such apparently distinguished legal minds? A glance at the comments at a site such as Abovethelaw.com, which features a number of vicious attacks on Kagan’s appearance, provides one clue. For some men, the only thing more intolerable than the sight of a powerful woman is the sight of a powerful woman they don’t want to sleep with.

Jezebel also asks:

Should we get rid of Ginsburg, too, for being sick with cancer? Or should people with long-term, treatable illnesses be disqualified for public office? Or just vaguely not-skinny women.

!@(&%((%*@(*@(*%(!!!@&&@&#.

Lesley:

The backstory to this is that Meghan McCain, daughter of Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, recently posted to her blog on The Daily Beast with some disparaging comments about Ann Coulter, and how McCain believes Coulter is harming the Republican party… McCain’s post led to her being a guest on the Rachel Maddow show last week. Which, subsequently, led Republican radio-show host Laura Ingraham to mock McCain on her show, not for being wrong or stupid or a plague on the Republican party, but for being – wait for it – “plus-sized”.

Rachel quoting McCain:

The question remains: Why, after all this time and all the progress feminists have made, is weight still such an issue? And in Laura’s case, why in the world would a woman raise it? Today, taking shots at a woman’s weight has become one of the last frontiers in socially accepted prejudice.

At this point, I have more respect for Ann Coulter than I do for Laura Ingraham because at least Coulter didn’t come back at me with heartless, substance-less attacks about my weight. All I can do is try to be a positive role model for women of my generation and, I hope, help show that no matter what industry you are in, what size you are has nothing to do with your worth.

CNN quoting McCain:

What do young women think when I speak my mind about politics and I want to have a political discussion about the ideological future of the Republican Party, and the answer is, ‘She’s fat, she shouldn’t have an opinion.’ What kind of message are we sending young women? It infuriates me,” she said.

Well hooray for Meghan McCain; her response may not be perfect, but at least she’s infuriated. And in a world where being fat never got in the way of Rush Limbaugh being allowed to speak his mind and being hailed as an inon of the Republican party in the process, it’s perhaps not the fatism here that bothers me as much as the blatant sexism.