"the dialectic of fat"
(was thinking about that jerk's email to the news reporter, and thinking about susie orbach's book "fat is a feminist issue" and came across this)
The Dialectic of Fat
Kirstie Alley exposes her Rubenesque physique, anorexics share weight-loss tips, TV contestants compete to lose pounds and feminist concerns over body image go global. What’s going on here?
by Catherine Orenstein
Too Fat for Sex! That was one of the headlines, splashed across last November’s cover of Star, that helped launch Kirstie Alley’s television comeback. Who could have predicted? Over the previous year and a half, Alley had become a target of ridicule. Her rising weight drove tabloid sales and became the butt of late-night talk-show gags.
Kirstie Alley sends up the whole Hollywood culture of lookism and fatism
Photo: Mark Seliger/Showtime
. . .
In the age of the designer body, thinness has a brandlike Quality — an idea indirectly explored in LaBute’s “Fat Pig.” The problem the playwright’s male protagonist has with his girlfriend is not that her fat makes her unattractive to him, but that it makes him feel insecure with his friends, who laugh at him. One might imagine a similar dynamic if he were driving a tacky car or had bought his fiancée an embarrassingly small diamond.
. . .
“We would have been horrified at this years ago, but it’s just part of what we do now. How many hours are spent by accomplished, capable, intellectually interesting women in being frightened of food, then decorating or denigrating their bodies? Is the gym really about health? For a lot of women, it’s not about health at all. This is not to attack the women, it’s just to say, ‘What the hell has happened in the culture?’”
. . .
Now we obsessively shrink our bodies in the name of staying “in shape,” and we can worry about the “obesity epidemic” instead of admitting our phobia of fat. But no matter what we call it, the pressure to lose is as powerful and one-sided as ever.
. . . .
http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2005/womenandfat.asp