1. Thanks to La Wade for this link: Chelsea Clinton asks her dad to lose 15 pounds before walking her down the aisle.

“She doesn’t think I’m in shape to handle it. You know, she told me the other day, she said, ‘Dad the only thing you gotta do is walk me down the aisle and you need to look good,’” Clinton said. “So I said ‘Well, what’s your definition?’ And she said: ‘Oh, about 15 pounds.’ So I’m halfway home,” Clinton joked to laughter from the audience.

2. Sarah Silverman is kind of awesome.

“I don’t really care for like fat jokes about women, specifically. Because I feel that we live in a society where fat men deserve love, and fat women do not deserve love — at least in white America. And so I feel like that’s an ugly thing, and it doesn’t make me laugh.

3. My friend Miriam went to see a film called A Matter of Size at the Northern Virginia Jewish Film Festival, and she wrote about it on her blog. (She liked it!)

A Matter of Size has to do with Herzl, a man who has been mocked for being fat his entire life. It opens with a scene of children waiting in line to be weighed and then moves quickly to a weigh-in at a diet club. He’s kicked out of the diet club, quits his job at a restaurant when he is relegated to the kitchen to avoid offending customers, and has to deal with his mother yelling at him that he’s going to die from his fat just like his father did. (A flashback later in the film explains this and it is decidedly unexpected.) His mother pushes him to get a job at a Japanese restaurant on the grounds that the food will be disgusting and he won’t be tempted to eat it. So he ends up washing dishes there. His coworkers show him sumo wrestling on TV and he finally sees something fat people can be respected for. So he goes back to the diet club, tells off the mean owner, and talks a few of his friends from it into quitting the diet and joining him in a sumo club.

4. There was a follow-up discussion of Jenfu’s MSNBC article at Shapely Prose. Very interesting conversation in the comments!

5. Terrific essay on Dirty Dancing over at Jezebel. In case you missed it!

Another movie would have built up to a performance [Baby] got perfectly right (and indeed there is one, later), and she gets the guy. Instead, they come back to Penny’s botched abortion, a still incredibly rare and key plot point that Eleanor says she put in back in the mid-1980s because she was afraid Roe v. Wade would be overturned. (Helpfully, her refusal to take it out later lost the movie a pimple cream sponsor that would have forced its image onto every movie poster.) A few weeks ago, she read about a pro-choice march where a man asked a protester what exactly a coat-hanger abortion was and she snapped, “Haven’t you seen Dirty Dancing?”

As always, share your thoughts on any of these links in the comments!

Posted by mo pie

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