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Reading my RSS feeds yesterday, I ran across a post on Kotaku — of all places — about the winner of a design contest by Let’s Move, Michelle Obama’s campaign against “childhood obesity”. The challenge was to design an infographic enumerating the — oh, I don’t know y’all, I guess some of the stuff that’s happened at the same time that childhood obesity rates have gone up, along with some of the stuff being done to make those rates go back down again. Kotaku picked up on it because one of the things that happened, and which is noted on the chart, was the release of the Sony Playstation. The design of the graphic is pretty swell, I’ll admit, but I’m a little amused at how some events are linked to the enfattening of the childrens while others are not. Why isn’t the purple-tinged rise to power of Barney the fat purple dinosaur included? Barney totally promotes obesity — have you seen his rear end? — and kids love him. The first “successful” mall food court is worth noting on the chart, but the disappearance of the Pogo Ball, a popular 1980s child-torture device, from toy store shelves nationwide is not. Possibly most egregiously, why does the Playstation get a mention but the original Nintendo Entertainment System does not? While the Playstation was a worthy landmark in the evolution of video games as a legitimate form of media — pardon me, I mean as THE SCOURGE OF HUMANITY — I tend to think the NES was really the beginning of widespread home video-gaming.*

I digress.

I know it’s just a pithy representation of information that most folks couldn’t be arsed to read without some graphical interest to draw their attention, and of course it’d focus on the favored scapegoats of soda, television, and video games as causing the downfall of our great civilization. But what I really want to discuss here is not the legitimacy of the cultural landmarks that may or may not have anything to do with anything. Rather, I want to discuss our often-inappropriate use of public health information to condemn individuals.

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I expect being beautiful is not easy. No, really. I expect people’s assumptions about traditionally-pretty female-presenting humans get tiresome — if you are good-looking you must be stupid, or dull, or self-centered, or ridiculous. Certainly, it is possible to be attractive and intelligent at the same time, but it seems as though no one expects that to happen, nor do they care when it does. Whatever else you are, the pretty will tend to override it.

The pretty get bonus points, in life. Don’t argue. It’s inarguably, indubitably true. You can dislike it; you can find it unfair; you can try not to take advantage of it. But it will continue to happen. There are aspects of my own being that give me privilege — being white, for example, or presently able-bodied, or cisgendered — and as much as I disdain the system that imposes those privileges by valuing whiteness or able-bodiedness or non-diverse representations of gender, and as hard as I may work at maintaining a keen awareness of the advantages and recognitions I get as a result of these factors, I can never wipe them away, I can never burn them off; they are inescapable. Likewise, the pretty may be uncomfortable with the upsides of their appearance, but their discomfort does not mean the advantages do not exist.

On an individual basis, pretty is in the eye of the beholder, so when I talk about the pretty here, I am using a generalized aggregate of standardized characteristics of beauty, at least as they exist in my own local American culture. Pretty bodies are slender and having a feminine proportion from bust to waist to hips: not too deeply curved, as that is intimidating, and not curved in the wrong direction, or not curved at all, as that is terrifying. Pretty faces are symmetrical, delicate, and charming. An appropriately narrow nose, carefully-tended brows, a mouth that is plump without being overlarge. By the law of averages there will always be a certain number of individuals who possess a majority, if not all, of these attributes, and who then gain the benefits and advantages thereof. Even if said individual does not desire those benefits and advantages, and even if said individual does not believe herself worthy of them.

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This morning I was poking around JetBlue’s website, mostly looking to see if they’ve implemented in-flight wifi yet (they haven’t), when I ran across a new series of promotional videos of JetBlue customers explaining why JetBlue is so freaking awesome. I already knew JetBlue was pretty awesome, so under normal circumstances I’d ignore these videos, but one of the customers… looked like a big guy. I was intrigued, major airlines being so committed to the lie that “normal” customers equal thin customers, because this makes it easier to justify arbitrary and inconsistently-applied second-seat policies. So I watched (be warned, that link goes directly to an autoplay video that takes up the whole browser window).

The video shows a dudeguy sitting in a row of JetBlue seats set up in the middle of their Epic Terminal of Legend at JFK. If you’ve been to the JetBlue terminal at JFK, you know what I mean. It’s as if they remade Blade Runner and set it in an Apple Store. The dude enters the frame and sits down in the hated Middle Seat, armrests down, though as the video progresses, via the magic of editing, eventually the armrests go up. I wouldn’t call this guy fat, though fat is always in the eye of the beholder, and I’m sure some folk would. But he seems to me like a fairly normal-looking guy. My first reaction was, Good on you, JetBlue, for showing us a non-tiny passenger.

My second reaction was, Damn, that seat is still too small for him. Y’all know how I love arrows, so I’ve pointed out the telltale signs on the screenshot below.

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And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain…

Previously: There was angst. Boy howdy, was there ever. So much angst. Ian likes Amber. Will likes Ian. Amber likes George. George likes Amber, but doesn’t want to get fired. Or go to jail.

In the woods, we come back to the place where we left off, and also where we began, with Will digging for her contraband food at Amber’s request. It’s nighttime, and Amber’s holding the flashlight while Will works, because Amber’s totally a pillow princess like that. When Amber halfheartedly apologizes for dragging Will out here in the middle of the night in flagrant violation of the rules, Will says it’s not a problem, she’s glad to do it: “I am so sick and being told what and when to eat.” Amber argues that Will cannot possibly hate Camp Victory as much as she says, and Will admits, “I don’t hate everything about it. I like the people.” Amber, coyly: “Like Ian?” Whoa. Will shrugs this off, but Amber presses, saying she won’t tell, arguing that Will knows who Amber likes — though in fairness this is because she saw y’all humping in the woods and not because you opened up to her, Miss A. Will deftly sidesteps the issue by proclaiming her crush on Salty Dad. Amber giggles. Why is Amber trying to be so chummy all of a sudden?

Will thinks they’re digging in the wrong place, and Amber says they should forget it. But then Will has an idea. Last week, when she was helping Salty Dad in the kitchen, she learned the secret hiding place of the key to the pantry. At the dark mess hall, Will uses a knife to unlock a window and opens it wide, saying to Amber: “Ladies first.” They enter the kitchen and Will fetches the key, while Amber worries about “security cameras”. Inside the pantry, Will goes straight to the low-fat brownies. They carry the tray out to the prep table and Will tells Amber that when she was “a kid”, during sleepovers and stuff, she’d raid the fridges at other kids’ houses, because her parents never kept junk food in the house. Amber, grabbing a handful of napkins, sadly remembers how “when you were a kid, you could could eat a brownie without feeling bad about it.” Dude, I know. Hence my screaming about the cookies last week.

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Tonight the season finale of Huge will be aired. Are you bummed about that? All of my protestations about returning to non-recap-centric blogging aside, I am going to miss this show enormously (ha) when it’s done. This summer, for the first time ever, we’ve seen the evolution of a series that openly criticizes mainstream body culture, that makes the case for size diversity, and that acknowledges that fat kids laugh, and fight, and have crushes, and love themselves and hate themselves and struggle with figuring out who they are, just like kids of any shape or size. This is a series that normalizes difference, that embraces the outsider-ness we all feel, sometimes. And it has also introduced us to an incredible cast of kids who, in defiance of Hollywood standards, have demonstrated that a young actor can succeed at bringing us a character and a story without relying on ridiculous eyebrows, epic amounts of mouth-breathing, and some truly lucky genetics (see The Secret Life of the American Teenager for an illustration).

I want this show to go on. I want these characters’ stories to continue, and I want the producers and the cast and the crew to keep making them. I want to see a second season. But this is not a foregone conclusion. Huge needs our support for this to happen: ABC Family needs to hear from y’all that you want more.

Send an email through the ABC Family feedback form letting them know how much you dig the show, and that you want a second season.

Hit ABC Family with your Twitter-based demands for more Huge at @ABCFHuge and at @ABCFamily. Or give them a shout on the Huge Facebook page.

Send a dump truck of mini-muffins to ABC Family’s physical address at:
ABC Family
500 South Buena Vista St.
Burbank, CA 91521-6078

And it may be obvious, but: watch the show via a legit source. Full episodes are available on Hulu and on ABCFamily.com. If you watch it anywhere else, your ratings don’t count. (EDIT: Unless you’re international, in which case your ratings don’t count no matter what, so watch however you like.)

I’ve noted before that when I was a teenager, the show that had the most profound effect on me was My So-Called Life. This show made me feel less alone, even occasionally understood. It helped me find the courage and conviction to stop trying to force myself to fit in, and told me it was okay to stand out — it was okay to be myself, even if it got me in trouble, even if it made people stare, even if I was not perfect, not beautiful, not always smart, not always good. Without My So-Called Life, I may still have become the noisy upstart I am today, but I’ve little doubt it would have taken me far longer, and I might not be quite so brazen, without that early influence of teen-culture-busting. Huge is operating in much the same way for those kids — and adults — who don’t see themselves represented in the mainstream. With Huge, fat kids and weird kids and nerdy kids and maybe-queer kids and kids who just aren’t sure what they want to be yet all have a story to turn to. This is important. My So-Called Life had one season before it was cancelled; I think we can do better with Huge. But first they need to know you want more.

Make some fucking noise. Don’t let this end too soon.

A million thanks, my loves. For reading, for participating, and for being yourselves.

It’s Friday, I have clothes on, and I am trying to revive this habit. The green cropped cardigan came from Target; I can often smush my fatness into their XL sweaters and I make the most of that fact. The navy and white polka-dot dress is by Jane Bon Bon. The white cotton slip underneath is vintage, from eBay, and after I won it I received a strongly-worded email of abuse from the person I apparently outbid. Grey sneakers are Converse, by way of Marshalls.

Have a peachy weekend, y’all.

It’s Friday, and welcome to your playlist! I’m trying to give these playlists little themes. I suppose some of them are more obvious than others.

1. “Beetlebum” // Blur. I was positively passionate about Britpop in my early twenties — this was the height of Oasis’ popularity, after all. And then Damon Albarn started listening to Pavement and we got Blur’s self-titled fifth album. (Some people blame Graham Coxon for this, but I blame Stephen Malkmus.) At the time, it was a major departure, and for about a week I hated it. Until I started listening to it. “Beetlebum” was the song that kept me coming back to give it another chance.
2. “Phenomena” // Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I was not a huge fan of YYYs first album — like my old complaint with The Muffs (remember The Muffs?), I thought they took too many pefectly good songs and ruined them with tuneless screaming. I also think “Maps” is the most unduly-praised and overrated song of the aughts. Thus, I only came to appreciate them with their mostly-scream-free second album, off of which “Phenomena” is taken.
3. “Do I Move You” // Nina Simone. Nina Simone is one of my idols — and not just musically, but politically and intellectually as well.
4. “Addicted to Love” // Florence and the Machine. Is my love of cover songs overwhelmingly apparent yet? I have a particular soft spot for covers of culturally-oversaturated songs, that make efforts to sound very different from the original. Satisfying!
5. “Koop Island Blues” // Koop. Fans of So You Think You Dance may recognize this one from a couple seasons back. I already owned it, on one of the Mystery Albums that magically appear on my iPod without my having any idea whatsoever where they came from. Koop make shifty, velvety eletcro-jazz that sounds like it came off decades-old vinyl. Highly recommended.

It probably comes as a surprise to no one, at this point, that I like the fat boys. I also like the fat girls, but I am inclined to think that the sexualization of fat men’s (or male-identified) bodies tends to receive less attention than it does with the females. This is undoubtedly because women are under far greater and more specific cultural pressure to be sexually appealing than men are, and thus the sexualization of fat women’s bodies is a heated and popular topic of conversation.

However, what is occasionally lost in these discussions is any recognition at all of a) what pressure does exist for men to be attractive, and b) the fact that men, unlike women, tend not to create spaces in which they can talk honestly about their hypothetical feelings of inadequacy. The fact that women often bond over diets and aspirational beauty culture is problematic, for sure, but women do have the option to talk about these pressures with one another in a frank way. Worrying about your appearance, most specifically your size, is a woman’s problem, and not something your typical red-blooded straight cisgendered man is allowed to openly discuss, at least not without having his sexuality challenged by any homophobes in the room. As I recently observed on Fatcast, fat’s tendency is to fuck with gender on a equal-opportunity scale. Culturally-speaking, fatness exerts a masculinizing (or defeminizing) force on women’s bodies, and a feminizing (or emasculating) force on men’s bodies, and if you identify as falling outside the convenient gender binary, well, then it tends to strip you of any sexual identity at all, so far as mainstream recognition is concerned. No matter how you identify and present yourself, gender-wise, fatness is going to fuck with it.

In the course of these recaps, I’ve focused a lot of attention on sexualizing and even objectifying (in a good-natured way) the male bodies. And yes, I do think a certain degree of friendly objectification can be positive if it helps us to see our bodies — no matter what we look like — as sexified vessels of awesomeness. A goodly portion of my urge to stubbornly conceptualize the sexy fat man is because, indeed, I really do find them attractive. Hell to the yeah. But that’s not the only reason: the secondary impetus for my relentless demands for boys’-cabin pillowfights and less clothing is because framing fat men’s bodies in these terms is a process of queering mainstream standards of sexual attractiveness. Here I use “queering” not to mean “making it gay” (although that’s fun too) but to mean taking sexual convention and fucking it up, turning it inside out, and challenging its assumptions. I’m not queering the individuals or even their bodies — what I’m queering is how we read bodies as sexually attractive, and trying to bring a sexualized, semi-objectified (in a pleasant way, I promise!) fat male body into the light of day. Being attracted to fat bodies specifically, if not exclusively, is a queer-ish way of seeing the world, and it’s not one we get to see represented very often.
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NB: Right, so, I wrote this for Friday and then completely forgot to post it.

Okay, one more week with Playlist.com! I still haven’t had time to play with Grooveshark, darn it. For my international readers: evidently the licensing issue is going to be a problem no matter what service I use, and as I said before I am reluctant to host tracks myself and risk the wrath of the RIAA. I’m bummed about it, but unless anyone else has a new suggestion, I’m at a loss here.

1. “Doing the Unstuck” // The Cure. “It’s a perfect day for letting go — for setting fire to bridges, boats, and other dreary worlds you know — let’s get happy.” Anytime anyone disparages The Cure as uniformly depressing, I play them this song. It also transports me, without fail, to my sophomore year of high school.
2. “Float On” // Modest Mouse. I am not one of these old-school Modest Mouse fans. Indeed, my lack of radio exposure means I had never even heard them prior to “Float On” appearing on Rock Band, a game which has introduced me to many a pop song that otherwise would have slipped between the cracks of my awareness. I’m still not a Modest Mouse fan — I bought the album from which this track is taken years ago, but ridiculously, have only listened to it maybe once all the way through — but I still really love this song. (Aside to my dad, who really digs these playlists: lyrics!)
3. “Dream a Little Dream of Me” // The Mamas and the Papas. This is, in my humble opinion, one of the most epically underrated pop songs of all time. OF ALL TIME. Magical.
4. “One two three four” // Feist. Speaking of magical. This was the song that finally got me on the Leslie Feist bandwagon, my suspicion is that the horn section is what did it. I am oddly picky about my folksy artists — the ones I love (Suzanne Vega, Robyn Hitchcock) I love tons, but it takes something special to get me on side. This song, and her collaboration with Kings of Convenience, were sufficient.
5. “Extraordinary Machine” // Fiona Apple. “If there was a better way to go then it would find me / I can’t help it, the road just rolls out behind me / Be kind to me, or treat me mean / I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine.” Enough said.

I am having another slow blogging week, and thus I am returning to the well and revisiting/reblogging another old post.

The “gnomes” story reproduced below was just written this past February, but is much beloved, both by me and evidently by many of you, if the emails I get about it — three in the past week alone! — are any indication. It began with a question on my now-practically-abandoned Formspring page (I do want to get back to it, it just became overwhelming!), and here I must use the word “question” as a vague shadow of its fuller meaning, since the inquirer is clearly less interested in my thoughtful response than in trying to provoke an emotional reaction simply by the asking. Lately, we’ve had the misfortune to witness this sort of fat-baiting writ large, and I never cease to be fascinated by the way in which so many of these attacks — if you can call them attacks — rely not on acerbic wit or creative insults, but instead nearly all of their intended cruelty depends upon an assumed negative reaction to the word “fat”. It is enough, in most respectable quarters, for this word to be spat upon someone like a disease; fat is such a powerful word, in fact, that many believe it needs no further context in order to efficiently destroy and silence a person. How else can we explain “insults” such as commenter drst describes, following a skirmish with Anti-Fat Extremists:

I got two messages in my inbox overnight calling me fat. I mean that’s all the messages said. One went something like “You are a fattie fat fat fat fat…” but there was nothing else in the messages.

I hadn’t encountered a situation like this since before I found FA, because most people you encounter face to face don’t throw the f-word around casually. I’m rather relieved my only response to these messages was derisive laughter. I mean, really? That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? I posted a FA message to some haters and the only response they can throw at me is to call me fat? How sad.

This, my loves, is why the process of reclamation — as much as I loathe the term — is so important, and so healing. Preventing people from saying a word is impossible; the more taboo it is, the more folks want to say it, and thus the more power it develops to do real damage when it is finally, inevitably spoken aloud. But as we have recently seen in the news regarding Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s “n-word”-strewn racism joyride, the solution is not simply to say our forbidden words because we can, damning the consequences. The solution is to recontextualize those words, and for that process to be led by the individuals against whom the word has been used. Fat is not a bad word, nor does it need to be a hateful word. Unlike most racial epithets, it is not a word that has a long and violent history of oppression, human misery, and pain — its use as a negative is a relatively recent development, and as such it is a much easier word to reframe as a value-free descriptor, or even as a positive assessment.

And so, to bring this overlong intro to a close: back in February I was asked this question. And the blandness of it — the obviousness of it — was so utterly absurd that I was delighted. Of all the things to ask. I responded thusly:

Q. Why are you so fat ? , its disgusting really .

A. I’ve only written about 100,000 words on this subject just in the past year alone, but since you’ve asked so thoughtfully, I’ll sum up: It was gnomes. Magical invisible fat-making gnomes.

My fatness was first hewn out of flesh from one of the gnomes’ sacred pigs (a majestic animal that was, alas, ritually sacrificed for this purpose), and then, after an arduous process of transubstantiation, I was given life and sent forth into the world for some mysterious as-yet-undisclosed reason, though my suspicions are that bacon is somehow involved. This is where all fat people come from, and having revealed these facts to you and the world at large by answering this question, I will very shortly be spirited away to the gnomes’ reeducation camp, if I am not hanged for treason. That is the truth.

So farewell, my fat-disgusted friend, I hope you appreciate my heavy sacrifice, as I appreciate the heavy burden you must bear in being forced to witness the fatness of all who waddle forth from the gnomes’ secret pig-sacrificing fat-person-building bacon-worshipping kingdom.

Even now I hear them at my door. My time is short. Farewell, farewe—!

You mustn’t ask me what happened when I was interrupted, nor how I managed my escape, to return to this blog and my mission to expose the fatmakers’ plans for pudgy world domination. Suffice to say that Fat Satan owed me a favor. And I’m still here, right? And we’re all happy about that.