Category Archives: OtherBlogs

Rape of Women (not Men) in fiction, Kickstarter, and A Kitten

Discussing rape in fiction in her brilliant essay titled “The Rape of James Bond”, Sophia McDougall asks writers to ask themselves:

“Would I ever write a story in which the male hero is raped as part of his origin story, or as the nadir he had to fight back from, or to inspire someone else to take revenge?”

And if you would, yes, I think perhaps you should go ahead and do it. If done very well, and respectfully, it could even help to destigmatise the experience of male survivors. It could help to diminish that sense that rape somehow defines female experience.

And if you would not, ask yourself why not. And if there’s any part of you that answers, that you wouldn’t find a male survivor of rape heroic, that it’s too humiliating to even think about – then, for everyone’s sakes, until you can honestly find a different answer within yourself, you need to not be writing about rape at all.

(links added)

On a different note, people are talking about Kickstarter a lot.  Indie musician Marian Call, who organizes some of the most organized shows I’ve helped with,  organized a very successful Kickstarter for her first-ever tour of Europe.  And did the tour, and has released the live album that the Kickstarter promised.  Oh…and blogged about it.

A lot of it comes down to making sure you will have supporters, and not expecting them to sent by central casting.  Pre-Kickstarter, Marian had done other fundraisers, both quiet ones and auctions. She knew who would want to contribute and what they’d want.  Marian also has 3 bullet points that are variations on “know your audience”, “respect them too” and “like your audience”. But she also points out the financial side:

[Once] you deduct 10% for Kickstarter/Amazon and then 15% for taxes, and then you really add up the cost of fulfillment, you might be earning only $2-3 at your reward level that seems to profitable. [On the NUMBER SMASH page of my public budget] I calculated what each reward level would cost me, and then I wondered how many people would go for higher-return vs. lower-return rewards. What would people buy the most of?  If everyone went for necklaces & USB drives, could I still actually afford to do my trip?  I worked through a couple different scenarios to get a good estimate of what rewards would cost me — and how much I would need to ask for to wind up with $7,000 to make it to Europe & back (the answer is about $11,000, so $4000 would go into fees & fulfillment).

And:

Does anyone want you to make the thing you want to make? Are people clamoring for it? Because — this is an important distinction — there is art you make because other people want you to make it, and there is art you make because you must make it. [....Y]ou only want to crowdfund something people want and need and get super excited about.  [If they don't]  I’m not saying don’t make it. I’m saying fund that thing in another way.

Not everything has an audience.  Or has found their audience, at least.   If you’re interested in Kickstarter, either as a funder or a fundraiser, you may find Marian’s writeup useful. (Also longish and conversational.)

And here’s a video of a kitten playing with a Roomba.  Happy Friday!

Things to Read

If you can (not allergic to eggs etc) get your flu shot. Yes, really.

The Kindle edition of A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master” by Rachel Held Evans is $1.99 right now. I enjoyed it, and not just for the debunking of the “Wives are required by God to appear pretty/sexy” meme.  (Rachel is also the author of “How to win a culture war and lose a generation“, “15 Reasons I Left Church“, and “15 Reasons I Returned to The Church“.)

Guns do kill people (at least in the US) in one graph.

How the late Jack Klugman helped people get needed medical care.

The Fat Nutritionist post on “Stuff people assume I believe vs. stuff I actually believe” is cool, but it’s sad that it’s needed.  (See also comments on how if I keep exercising I’ll lose weight.  No, not necessarily, and that’s not the point anyway.)

And check out Barry Deutsch‘s take on “Reality Television“.

Things to Read

Free speech means that yes, you get to say anything you want (with some legal limits regarding libel and slander laws, advocating harm of another person or threatening someone with death or bodily harm, blackmail, all that), but free speech also means that other people get to say what they want, too, whether you like it or not.

Free speech does not mean the freedom to not be called an asshole.

Free speech also does not mean  you get off scott-free for saying legally actionable things about or to other people.

Threatening people is not protected under free speech.  Just in case you were getting any ideas.

— Polimicks

I felt that people would look at me and assume I was diseased, and shudder and move away. And even though I was doing something ostensibly good for my health, this understanding and awareness that people find me gross did not make it easier or more rewarding to care for my health.

— The Fat Nutritionist

FYI: Things to read & do

One of video links going around Facebook of Jennifer Livingston linked to The Fat Nutritionist site for more information on fat acceptance. Michelle is handling the sudden influx with her usual grace, but if you want to help her cope with the many comments (or, y’know, just have some busy threads to watch) you might want to head over. :)

Charlotte Cooper has a thoughtful post about the common experience of being criticized when being fat out-of-doors.

LoveLiveGrow has a nice FA 101 post. (I ran across it when I was looking to see if Stef still had the alt.support.big-folks FAQs online in one of my “yes I have proof fat acceptance predates the web” moments. ;)

Oh! In non-FA, the ebook of Feed  (Kindle Edition) is $1.99 for the month of October.  Feed is by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire and it’s the best political zombie thriller about bloggers I’ve read.  And I don’t even like zombies all that much! :)

QOTD: Health

The debate about what exactly health means goes back to ancient Greece. Does health just mean living a long time? Does it mean feeling strong? Are athletes the epitomy of health? In fact, athletes suffer more injuries and illnesses than the rest of the population because they push themselves so hard. So who represents health? What about spiritual health? Ethical health? It’s amazing how much we project onto body type these days, through our grossly oversimplified idea of health.

— Ben Spatz

Go Away Stalkers

Online harassers are being discussed again (or maybe it never stopped).

I don’t have a solution.

I do have a rockin’ dance track for it, though.

To quote the artist:

“Go Away God Boy” was written in roughly three hours, after a telephone call with my friend the poet Mia Nutick, also known as the Wicked Fairy Apologist.  Mia had had the misfortune to attract an online stalker on her BLOG.  While not uncommon for most of us, her situation had yet another layer of weirdness to it:  this particular stalker was convinced — and wanted Mia to be convinced, as well — that he was Jesus Christ.  The real thing.  Not just a zealous person wishing to convert others to Christianity.  No, no; he went way beyond that.  He was also apparently pretty rude, as the only reason Mia had ever acknowledged his presence, and thereby attracted his attention, was in defending her friends from his unprompted criticism.  In the course of our phone call, Mia related the short version of the sordid tale to me.  To conclude, she said, “I think that the issue is somewhat resolved now, but I’m still asking all of my friends to send as much ‘Go away God Boy’ energy in his direction as they can!”

Lyrics, downloads, and more are here.

Things to Read

As others have noted, Paul Campos’ piece on how the US “Let’s Move” campaign aids and abets bullying is worth reading.  Besides noting that advocating for “child obesity to be eliminated” paints a “pick on me” sign on anyone who isn’t model-thin, Campos also cites studies that have tried healthy interventions with children in the past.  Result?  The kids got healthier.  They didn’t get thinner.

Consider the first lady’s major policy goals: She wants children to eat a healthy balance of nutritious food, both in their homes and at school, and she advocates various reforms that will make it easier for kids to be physically active. These are laudable goals in themselves, but there is no evidence that achieving them would result in a thinner population. Indeed ambitious, resource-intensive versions of Mrs. Obama’s initiatives have been implemented on a smaller scale, for example by the Johns Hopkins University Pathways program, which attempted to improve the diets and increase the activity levels of Native American children in three states, while educating their families about health and nutrition. The program had some success in all these areas, but it produced no weight loss among the children as a group. The same basic results, improved health habits but no weight loss, were obtained in the Child and Adolescent Trial for Cardiovascular Health, a similar program involving thousands of ethnically diverse children in four states. Pursuing comparable initiatives at a national level might be worthwhile—these programs did, after all, result in improved health habits among the children who participated—but there is no reason to think the kinds of reforms Mrs. Obama is advocating will make American children thinner. The perverse result could be that an initiative that might have been judged a success had its primary focus been on producing healthier children will instead end up being used as another example of a failed Big Government program, simply because it did not produce thinner ones.

[Links from the original; emphasis added]

Campos also points out that dieting is often linked to long-term weight gain.

…and on a less serious note, Seanan McGuire wrote a brief description of sci-fi conventions and 10 tips on how to cope with one.  Whether you’ve been to a con or not, it’ll likely make you smile.

QOTD: Why Stigmatize Fat Kids?

From Pattie Thomas’ post at Psychology Today in response to a “Cease to be obese crusade” billboard on how kids should exercise:

Why do you have to promote weight loss in order to promote exercise? If you really believe in the calorie in/calorie burned model, promoting exercise and healthy eating for every one would automatically solve the “obesity” problem, would it not? Is it necessary to promote hatred of a fat  body in order to get someone to lose weight? Is it not important to promote play, movement, and sportsmanship among all all kids? Why single out obese kids?

I think the most telling thing about those who are promoting the “healthy children” initiatives that this billboard represents is that the promoters do not trust the calories in/calories burned model.

Pattie Thomas also goes on to note that if it’s really about health, good nutrition and exercise should be the point.   Apparently it’s not.

Ban Fat Marriage?

Yes, I know that Dan Savage’s screed on banning fat marriage is trying to illustrate the point that gay marriage bans are ludicrous.   Fellow Stranger writer Lindy West has already responded with a solid “why fat hate doesn’t work” aimed at those who don’t want to get it, and I don’t disagree with it.

However.

I do think Dan seriously missed the boat bringing up the silly “fat is contagious” thing.  It totally weakens his argument!  No, the better argument is this:

  1. Fat is frequently inherited, even among children who are raised by thin adoptive parents or twins raised separately.
  2. As anti-gay legislatures are constantly reminding us, only married heterosexual people have children.
  3. Therefore, to prevent fat people from passing on their fatness to children, we should not allow fat people to marry.

See?  Much more logical!

See also:  Parents-to-be shouldn’t diet.

PS: Brian at Red No 3 has a good post on this as well.

Things to Read

This is kind of a mishmash ;)

If you’ve seen comments about “dickwolves” and PAX and wondered what it was about, JetWolf has a nice summary.

Author Seanan McGuire addressed why fixing the US healthcare system is so terribly, terribly important this week.  Seanan has discussed why she needs health insurance here and here.

Seanan’s new CD, Wicked Girls, is available for ordering at CDBaby.

Alternet has a well-done piece by Judith Matz on “Why dieting makes you fatter”.  It references Linda Bacon’s Health At Every Size study, Traci Mann’s survey of diet studies, and other research.   If you’ve been into fat acceptance a while it’s mostly things you know, but it’s good to see getting wider play.  It might also be a useful “FA 101″ piece.

A 3-part Q&A with Linda Bacon is over at PyschCentral, too.

Ragen at Dances With Fat has a great post on respecting others’ choices while discussing Fat Acceptance and HAES.

Anything else?

On Decoupling Exercise and Weight Loss

From obesity researcher Travis Saunders comes this excellent post on how Canadian public health efforts to increase activity work against their own aims by tying exercise with weight loss:

[T]he average weight loss in response to a moderate increase in physical activity levels is very modest, and it’s likely that many people would see no weight reduction of any kind.   Even if it’s in the range of 5% of body weight (which is unlikely over the long-term), it’s probably substantially less than most people are hoping for. In which case the individuals who are only exercising for the sake of losing weight are going to get discouraged pretty quickly [...]

Further, this overwhelming focus on the relationship between inactivity and obesity may lead some lean individuals to conclude that they have no reason to be physically active since their body weight is already in a normal range. [...]

[A] single session of aerobic exercise results in measurable improvements triglyceride levels, HDL (good) cholesterol, and insulin sensitivity, even though it has no real impact on adiposity.   Further, it has been noted that mortality levels are lower among obese but fit individuals, as compared to lean but unfit individuals, suggesting that we really do need to be promoting physical activity as a healthy behaviour for everyone, not just those who are overweight or obese.

Travis writes at the Obesity Panacea blog.  Obesity Panacea focuses on the science (or lack thereof) behind popular weight loss products and discussions of the latest news and research regarding obesity, nutrition and physical activity.   It isn’t an explicitly size-acceptance space.

[Bolding and links within the quote are from the original.]

Microagressions

Microagressions is a site about venting those little racist/sexist/classist dings that hit throughout the day.  Some examples:

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”  Man at the bus stop.  I am an Asian American woman.  I was reading Jane Austen.  In English.

“Wow, from talking to you on the phone, I’d never know that you were a fat girl. You don’t sound fat at all.”  My friend’s grandmother, upon our first meeting.

Woman in store:: You’re so skinny, you must be anorexic.
Me:: No, not anorexia – Grave’s disease.

My friend tells me that he doesn’t think women should be engineers because when women join a traditionally male profession, average salaries go down whereas when men join a traditionally female profession, salaries go up.  We are both majoring in engineering, and I am a woman.

If you want to vent, it’s a good place.  If you want to get a better understanding of some of the fail out there?  Also a good place.

A few links

Marilyn Wann launched a new HAES site at  http://2011revolutions.blogspot.com/, focusing at replacing diet resolutions with a revolution.

Jezebel: If You’re Fat-Phobic, You’re Also An Ignorant, Bigoted Idiot and Biggest Weight Stories of 2010.

“I don’t eat a hamburger and large chips every day!” A qualitative study of the impact of public health messages about obesity on obese adults. From the abstract:

Personal and contextual factors influenced the ways in which individuals interpreted and applied public health messages, including their own health and wellbeing and perceptions of stigma. [...] Many described feeling stigmatised and blamed by the simplicity of messages and the lack of realistic solutions. Participants described the need [for] messages recognise the complexity of obesity and focus on encouraging healthy behaviours for individuals of all sizes.

You may recognize co-author Dr Samantha Thomas, who blogs at Discourse.

 

Things to Read

From Marianne Kirby at The Rotund:

FA represents a long chain of people coming to the realization that the diet roller coaster is, to mix my metaphors, a sucker bet. The diet industry – when you get down to the bare, capitalist bones of it – has quite a lot of profit to be made from making people, especially women, feel awful about their bodies and their weight. If we all felt awesome about ourselves, they would go out of business.

From Nudemuse on some recent posts about fat and feminism:

[T]here seems to be some gap in a lot of feminist thought when it comes to granting fat women the same agency they might give to a woman who wants to do something else with her body.
[...]
No one likes being told, hey you might enjoy bread but you can’t have any because I think it would be best for you.

Now, I don’t know about you folks but my first reaction to that kind of condescension is to say, oh really, okay fuck you.

Maybe people with this mind set are trying to come from a loving place. If you are trying to come from a loving place think about it this way; if it was your life your body how would you feel about some stranger telling you what’s good for you in this manner? If it would upset you, don’t fucking say it.

And April at Round is a Shape on setting a boundary with her mother:

One phrase that I uttered early on in the day when my mother started to bemoan the fact that she was so hungry (after an early morning and only a granola bar she was feeling guilty for daring to feel famished by noon after driving 1.5 hours to see us!) and relay her guilt about going for a piece of bread or another pierogi: “This home is free of food judgments”.  And, happily, this was the last of self-recriminations that we really heard or voiced all day.

:)

FYI: About WordPress.com Ads

I do not directly profit from the Google Ads you may see on my site.  In fact, WordPress prevents me from putting many standard advertisements on the site, which I’m fine with — I don’t pay the hosting.

So, how do these ads appear?  They are placed by WordPress, and are not shown to logged-into-WordPress readers. WordPress user accounts can be created for free (blog not required).   This would avoid ads like this on my site:

a weight-loss ad I recently saw while NOT logged in

an ad I recently saw while NOT logged in

Logging into a user account would also avoid these ads on other WordPress.com sites.

There is an upgrade blog owners can purchase to turn them off, but it involves giving WordPress money.  While I don’t begrudge WordPress the money — again, I’m not paying a dime for this blog — the methods available to get the money to WordPress all involve breaking anonymity.  Currently I do not wish to do this.


Worth Reading

I was damaged as a result of being a fat kid, certainly; however, what damaged me was not my fat, but the messages I received about fatness. I was damaged by both perceiving myself and being treated by others as inferior, an object, something in need of repair, and not a person worthy of basic respect. I was seriously damaged by the endless dieting, such that I grew into adulthood with absolutely no idea of how to eat in a healthful and self-aware way. I was damaged by the idea that so long as I was fat, my life would be forever on hold, as only thin people get to be smart or successful in life.
— Lesley at Fatshionista, writing on “childhood obesity”

I haven’t written much about my childhood here, partly because I’ve spent 20 years trying to get past it and partly because I don’t want to open the vein* that would probably be necessary to do so.

Thanks Lesley, for writing something that I wish I’d written.

*Metaphorically speaking. No actual blood involved, just tears.