Or Maybe Not?
From Shakesville comes another take on Dan Savage, including quotes from his book. In the book, Savage is dismissive of fat activists and makes some anti-fat statements, while he is gay himself, and a big advocate for gay rights. Kate makes the very good point that there is some overlap in terms of anti-gay and anti-fat rhetoric, and includes an extensive list, very much worth reading.
I will not make the argument that being fat is the same as being gay in this society, because fat people are not murdered by strangers for being fat, nor beaten up by cops for being fat, and fat people are free to marry each other in all fifty states. But you know what? That’s about where the dissimilarities end.
Anyway, if you’re interested in the debate, there’s another angle for you. And check out the comments, too. Is Dan Savage a hypocrite?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Meta
Hey, thanks for the link. I hope it didn’t look like I was snarking on you guys there. As Brian said somewhere, if I hadn’t had all that context for Savage’s response stuck in my head, I would have cheered the latest column, too.
I don’t really see any point in attacking the man. Sometimes he says things you agree with, sometimes not. It doesn’t make him all evil or all good, just a person like anyone else. If he does say things that are uninformed it’s most likely out of ignorance and not deep-seated bigotry. And I think you can certainly cheer the latest column but at the same time dislike other things he’s said. It’s not an all or nothing proposition.
I’m surprised there was no mention of his book “Skipping Towards Gomorrah” which covers the seven deadly skins and has an entire chapter devoted to gluttony. He visits a fat acceptance convention and comments on some of the hypocrisy he sees there. He also goes to a restaurant with a legendary and obscenely large chocolate cake. He mentions that his family is rather fat and he has the same genes since not a day goes by that he doesn’t want to eat everything in sight.
By “attacking” I assume you mean publicly disagreeing with Savage. I don’t see anyone who has stooped to the belittling approach that Savage himself took in expressing his views, so I find it very questionable to calling our views “attacks” while declaring that his views should be free from criticism.
Not everyone agrees that being fat is awful. Those of us who don’t ought to speak out when people like Savage promote that view or adopt cover for that view by granting conditional tolerations.
Savage painted NAAFA in the way he wanted to. Rather than allow his assumpsion that NAAFA was a gluttony celebration organization, he sought out a NAAFA critic who wanted to push the “Fat Acceptance is endangering the rights of dieters” nonsense. Savage had his expectations and saw to it that they were met. His attitudes are precisely what fat acceptance advocates ought to counter.
You know, I couldn’t quite articulate why the first letter & response of the column (I won’t dwell on the remainder) seemed like such an about-face from other things I’d seen him write in the past that seemed to border on weight bigotry (don’t get me started on libertarians in general). BStu and Kate make the point that Dan believes that, short kids and “emeny aminals”, anyone/thing can be attracted to anyone/thing — which is what seems to be the point of yesterday’s statement — but that he seems to not be quite so tolerant of folks being “fat in their daily lives”, as it was put. (And I don’t think we’re even going to get into general gay male body dysmorphia tendencies today and how it shadows the body dysmorphia of straight women, either — to paraphrase Mr. Porter, “It’s Too Daaaarn Hot.”)
So thanks, y’all, for getting to the bottom of what I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I wonder if D.S.’s response to fat people in general is reflective of his fears for himself, which he makes clear in the Gomorrah book, as I recall. He doesn’t want to be fat himself, much of his family is obese, he fears that this is his destiny and want that for himself. (I won’t get into how he should or shouldn’t feel, or even if is assumptions are correct — I’m just talking about his own fears/biases in relation to his *own* body image.)
I haven’t been reading his column regularly of late, but when I did, his responses in letters generally addressed the specific sexual issue in the letter. (Unless it was related to Rick Santorum, hee.) So in this case, he’s calling the letter writer out about the content of the letter; and his response would be much the same if the writer has said he’d married a short woman but was really only sexually attracted to tall women (assuming that being attracted to tall women was socially unacceptable for some reason.)
He may very well have internalized (and not-so-internalized) fat bias, but it appears he can step away from it enough to craft a decent response to a letter writer who’s being an ass about fat women. Which is more than a lot of fat-biased people can manage to do, so I’ll give him a little credit for that.
MizShrew, the Gomorrah book is actually the only one of his I haven’t read, and now I’m a little afraid that I’d just end up throwing it across the room. But I can tell you this: since I started writing about fat on a high-profile blog, I’ve discovered that many of the most vicious trolls eventually admit they have problems with compulsive overeating and/or are extremely fat. They hate themselves for it, and they extrapolate assumptions about ALL fat people from their own disordered eating, even though people who binge eat or eat compulsively are a very small percentage of the population. They don’t get that it IS disordered eating, because our culture perpetuates the myth that all fat people overeat wildly and never exercise. Nor do they get that the shame they feel is not necessarily the most appropriate response.
From what I’ve been hearing, he expresses in the Gomorrah book that he’s afraid if he gave up strict control of his diet, he’d do nothing but eat. That wouldn’t make him a normal fat person; it would make him a person with an eating disorder. He doesn’t seem to get that.
And, uh, I’m officially done giving him the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve been off of the Dan wagon for a few years now. I started listening to his radio show years and years ago and used to just love him. A lot of the time interspersed with the good advice he just tends to be mean. Which I don’t particularly care for personally.
I’ve seen a few too many mentions of love handles and OH NOEZ fatness in his columns to really enjoy them anymore sadly. Some days he’s fantastic and other days I just want to pull his hair and tell him to shut the hell up until he can pull a foot out of the bias puddle.
Pasta Queen, I don’t think anyone is attacking him. But his recent column has been hailed by a lot of people as being very pro-fat. Kate’s column discusses why that isn’t so and, in addition, expresses that she herself likes him 99% of the time.
Also, deep-seated bigotry is FOUNDED on ignorance.
How much self-hatred does this man have for himself I wonder? Because all the stuff he’s saying has to be a reflection of that. I’ve never been a fan of his (and I’m an un-P.C. libertine with too many opinions). He always came off as demeaning, obnoxious and a bit daft to me. Which this makes him seem even more unimpressive in my eyes.
I was actually at that NAAFA conference (not a convention) in San Francisco that Savage referenced in his book.
“Pointed out hypocrisy”? How so, Pastaqueen? Savage attended a seminar on weight-loss surgery and his position was that WLS was jim dandy and that anyone opposed to it was a spoilsport who didn’t want people to have the pleasure of being thin. Even after he spent about 45 minutes talking to Marilyn Wann there, he came away with the idea that if fat people remained fat by simply eating normally, we owed it to society to starve ourselves on as little as it would take to slim us down. You call this speaking truth to power? Shudder.
And as I recall, his chief complaint was that we weren’t eating enough for his tastes. After all, he had to do a chapter on gluttony and we were fvcking it up for him by eating like normal people — and actually attending aerobics classes and swimming! — instead of sticking our heads in giant buckets of Rocky Road and lying around like beached whales in front of a 72-foot TV! The nerve of us, right?
Kate, it is really cool that Dan came by to respond to your comment, although I do hope he is interested in a dialogue as opposed to a pronouncement of why your ideas about him are wrong. Because the responses to him made some excellent points. Nonetheless, last time I checked, he hadn’t come back a second time.
Meowser, that is amazing. It reminds me that we should talk sometime soon about the role of WLS in the fat acceptance community.