Fat Wars
Posted by Sappho on May 12th, 2005 filed in Feminism
It started with this picture (UPDATE: warning, not work-safe), which led to this monster thread at feministe. My husband raised some hackles by remarking:
She could stand to lose a little weight, but other than that I think she looks just fine.
And remember that I can stand to lose a little weight, too. But other than that, I look just fine except for a prominent surgical scar.
Pause a moment here to note that this remark is, in itself, not that critical of the woman. I hope that what’s offending people is context – and not that it’s a vile, horrible thing to ever say that anyone, OK, could stand to lose a little weight, but basically looks fine. And thinking of that, I imagine a conversation that could have gone slightly differently:
Someone else: Hey, Joel, did you have to say that in this thread? What a downer! Can’t you see from the picture that she’s wanting to celebrate her body as it is?
Joel: But I’m overweight and I don’t want to celebrate my body as it is. My body as it is led to my diabetes.
Someone else: The media holds up unrealistic standards to women that have nothing to do with health.
Joel: So it does. I agree that anorexia is unrealistic. Furthermore, it’s unhealthy. Just like being overweight is.
At this point, I stop the imaginary conversation – the one in which no one led off with a comment about castration (Lauren deleted that – though Joel feels she didn’t have to do that, and he wouldn’t hold that comment against her anyway), and note that, when things are framed in this way, it’s at least possible to start to find common ground, and figure out where you really disagree, and where you just started out looking from different angles. But this is the net, and instead things spiralled down, as they sometimes do. And I don’t get to write anyone’s material but my own. So here’s my own.
First, what I understand to be the medical facts about overweight and obesity (two different categories – my take on the photo is that the woman is probably in the “overweight” part of those standard weight charts, but not the “obese part” – and, wherever she really is on the chart, cool photo), and underweight and dieting.
Being overweight increases your risk of various chronic illnesses – significantly. For example, the American Diabetes Association reports that “nearly 9 out of 10 people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes are overweight.” (Type I diabetes is a largely genetic disease that appears in childhood or early adulthood, and that is not caused by being overweight. Type II diabetes also has a strong genetic component, but it’s influenced heavily by weight and lifestyle.)
The ADA’s Diabetes Risk Test (“based on a thorough study about evaluating diabetes risk that was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control”) increases your risk if you are overweight. Just as an experiment, I first plugged in my real weight (not overweight at all), and other facts – no elevated risk for diabetes. I increased my weight to 150 pounds (at my height, still a reasonable place on the weight charts, but less fashionable, enough that people may start seeing me as a bit heavier than I should be) – still no elevated risk. If I increase my weight to 170 – very clearly overweight on the charts, but not actually grossly obese – I move into their low to medium risk range, with no other risk factors. Give myself one diabetic parent, and age myself a year, and that fairly modest amount of excess weight (my large frame “normal” range goes as high as 159 pounds) becomes enough to put me in the high risk category (a category I can dodge, even with the hypothetical diabetic parent, if I keep my weight down).
Diabetes is the illness that catches attention in our household, since my husband is a Type II diabetic (who is regularly told by his doctors that he needs to lose weight), but there are other risks of overweight, such as high blood pressure (which in turn increases the risk of stroke).
Being significantly underweight is worse, medically speaking, than being significantly overweight – or at any rate, gets bad a lot faster. Those extra pounds that so many are carrying around may moderately increase your risk of chronic diseases over time – but underweight – and the dieting and purging people use to get there – can hurt you very badly, very quickly. Think Terri Schiavo.
Since a lot more people are actually overweight than underweight, the cumulative effect of being overweight is said to be the bigger public health problem. This might balance out more if you added, on the “dieting” side of the balance sheet, all the teenage girls who take up smoking to control their weight. I’m not sure. What is true, I think, is that, though only a few actually develop anorexia or bulimia, and lots more will eventually be heavier than is good for their health, many, maybe even most, women will at some point in their lives diet, when doing so doesn’t objectively improve their health. Think of all the teen, and even pre-teen, girls who are dieting, and who, however fat they might eventually be in middle age, are surely not fat now. And media images for women are, yes, out of sync with a truly healthy weight.
So, as far as I know, it is both true that women in particular, are given unrealistic weight standards, and also that overweight can have real health issues, for men and women both, and people may have good reasons for not wanting to accept their bodies as they are. In this context, what really annoys me on the fat friendly side of the argument is how often I hear arguments that seem to want to dismiss what the medical establishment is saying altogether, and to say that weight really doesn’t have that much at all to do with your health – or at least not until you’re something like a hundred pounds overweight – that it’s different for everybody, and that whatever body you actually have is right for you. Which as far as I know, just isn’t true. And what bothers me on the fat unfriendly side of the argument is the moral indignation that sometimes comes out – as if fat is this huge character defect. A lot of it is class and opportunity, anyway, another large portion is genetics, and besides, we’ve all met at least some thin people who, putting all their bad habits together, live unhealthier lifestyles than some of the fat people we know.
Bottom line: it’s OK not to be satisfied with the body you have, and to see room for improvement (my own room for improvement is for my arch to heal, and me to be able to start exercising more). And it’s OK to celebrate and take pleasure in your naked body regardless of whether you, or anyone else, sees room for improvement.
Joel has several posts on this topic, so I’ll just link his latest.
Comments open, but any personal attacks will be deleted, and the thread will be closed if it gets too heated.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:34 am
[…] ion. But pointing out a problem is the compassionate thing to do. See what my wife has to say: In this context, what really annoys me on the fat friendly side […]
May 14th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
First, what I understand to be the medical facts about overweight and obesity (two different categories – my take on the photo is that the woman is probably in the “overweight†part of those standard weight charts, but not the “obese part†– and, wherever she really is on the chart, cool photo), and underweight and dieting.
As I told your husband in the other thread, no they don’t. Mortality rates are about the same for people of my weight (in the “ideal” range the government has established) and people significantly heavier. And the mortality numbers for active fat people are dramatically lower than for sedentary thin people. The reality is that inactivity and bad diet, not fat, kill people.
Even the link to diabetes is weak. Here is a relevant section from The Obesity Myth:
The telling stat is from a CDC study: over the course of the 1990s the incidence of Type 2 diabetes increased from 8.2 to 8.6 percent, while the obesity rate rose by 61%. Does that sound like diabetes is strongly correlated to weight gain?
There is no credible evidence that fat alone is dangerous to one’s health, and what’s more, there is no reliable “treatment” for the “disease” of obesity, either. The vast majority of people end up yo-yo dieting or simply maintaining their present weight. People start exercising, which is great for their health, and then quit because they don’t lose weight. They put themselves on starvation diets to lose 75 lbs, and then they put it back on because human beings are not meant to starve themselves.
What offended me about Joel’s comment is the idea that somehow, even if the woman in the photo has a right to be proud of her body, she shouldn’t be too proud, because she’s a fat woman and should lose some weight. Women already think men want them to weigh 20 lbs less, on average, than men actually find attractive (Jacobi and Cash, “In Pursuit of the Perfect Appearance: Discrepancies Among SelfIdeal Precepts of Multiple Physical Attributes,” J Appl Soc Psychol 24, 27–96 (1994).). Only 10% of white teenage girls to be happy with their bodies (70% of black teenage girls are happy with theirs—Parker et al., “Body Images and Weight Concerns Among African-American and White Adolescent Females,” Human Org 54, 103–114 (1995).). In The Obesity Myth, Campos points out that many obesity “researchers” suggest black and Hispanic women need to be “sensitized” to their inappropriately positive feelings about their bodies. There is an important link between the Healthy At Every Weight movement and feminism here, in my opinion—feminists ought not endorse a culture that leads women to have attitudes like these about their bodies and then tells them to go on a disasterous course of dieting that will surely increase their weight and their mortality.