Sesame Street has added a new muppet: Lily was introduced in an hour-long special entitled “Growing Hope Against Hunger”. Her purpose is to give kids in food-insecure households someone to relate to, as well as to draw attention to the issue.
…In the special, Lily is prompted to make a revelation when one of the more popular muppets — Elmo — remarks that he “didn’t know there were so many people who didn’t have the food they needed.”
Lily then confesses to him that she doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from and that times can be difficult.
Food insecurity is defined as the lack of a consistent access to food for active, healthy lives, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The USDA says 14.5% of households were food insecure at least some time during 2010 and that 5.4% of households experienced very low food security the same year.
Obviously, current rates of food insecurity are a side effect of the economic climate and continued unemployment or underemployment, although obviously this is a problem for some families even when times are good for the majority of folks.
When the opportunity arose to review Nordstrom Rack, I was a little dubious. To be honest, I didn’t actually know that they carried plus sizes. Turns out they do, and starting September 15, they’ll be carrying more of them in the store where they already exist, and adding plus sizes to 15 additional stores. Yay! See, I’ve gotten accustomed to all my favorite discount stores (who shall remain nameless) limiting or removing their plus size selection, as so many have done in recent years, so rather than get my hopes up, I tend to presume that I won’t find anything to fit me, and sometimes I get to be pleasantly surprised.
There’s little to recommend my local Nordstrom Rack as a destination insofar as decor is concerned; the space is purely practical. On arrival, I spent several minutes wandering the big open floor in confoundment, wondering, oh no, maybe they DON’T have plus sizes in this joint. Or maybe they do but there will be three things and I’ll hate them all.
I needn’t have worried. Once I located the plus racks — which are integrated within the store, and not hidden in a back corner as is typically the case — I spent half an hour picking out cardigans from the racks of separates before I even found the dresses.
Things happened.
I got a new job! After nearly ten years at my previous employer — which I now feel totally comfortable saying was Simmons College — the crazy kids over at xoJane.com seduced me away by offering me a job as an associate editor. After a lot of thinking and soul-searching, I accepted. My last day at Simmons was September 2, which feels strangely far away now.
In less cheerful news, on Monday of the same week, my kittycat companion of thirteen years embarked on his Viking funeral, having fought several cancers and other ailments valiantly for a year. He was fifteen, which is average for a cat, but it still seemed too soon. This loss was actually far more difficult than I expected, as he was not doing well by the end, but as always seemed to happen in these cases, he went downhill so gradually that it was only later I realized how sick he truly was.
Oberon, in younger/healthier days, lounges on the living room rug.
So, between the loss of the cat I’ve had since the year I reached the legal drinking age, and the change from my job of a bazillion years to a new position in a new field working from home…. it’s been emotional. And whiplash-inducing.
While I’m writing lots of stuff at xoJane.com now, I also intend to return to regular (weekly, at least) posts here, since I’ll have time to do so again. Tomorrow there will be a review of Nordstrom Rack’s plus size department, plus a giveaway (thanks to the kind folks at BlogHer, which you may have noticed is now serving ads on this site).
I also intend to get back to posting missives from Your Beluga Best Friend, who I have to admit is quite cross with me for being so unavailable lately. Have you ever seen an angry beluga? It’s adorable.
That’s all for now.
I know, it's like all I am doing lately is quick little article-debunkings. Soon, my pets, I will have time for blogging again. Like roughly two weeks from now. Ahem.
Let's start with the bad. Today's Boston Globe has an article about trying to tell our kids how fat they are. And how it's, like, hard. For one, the parent in question is often the mom, who, being female and human, usually has her own raft of body issues, many of which she has probably modeled for her kid. That's what we call a vicious cycle, friends. Mom inherits emotional issues with body size and food and eating from her mom, then passes same on to her own kids.
...When her child started gaining weight in high school, [Agnes] Mastropietro was torn between telling Michelle to put down the chips and keeping quiet for fear of hurting her or triggering an eating disorder.
[...]
In her case, Mastropietro said that when she did suggest that her daughter stop eating high-calorie food, her teenager played “the sensitive card’’ and started crying. “She’d say, ‘You’re supposed to love me the way I am.’ ’’
The sensitive card.
The sensitive card.
Damn, y’all, how busy have I been? Really, really busy.
A weekend ago I collaborated with the amazing Nancy Haque to deliver a workshop on radical fattery for Western States Center’s Community Strategic Training Initiative. It was a pretty excellent time. The day-long workshop went surprisingly great — I am always astounded when people seem open to these ideas, and don’t fight me on them — and I got to explore a bit of Portland besides, although my impression is that Portland is probably a more compelling place when you have a handy local to show you around.
I spent the better part of Sunday at Powell’s epic store of books, the only real break being when I figured I’d better check out some other places downtown and walked to Fat Fancy, which was closed. I took this as a sign and returned to Powell’s for another couple of hours. Later, I ate a donut with bacon on it, because pretty much everyone was all “GO EAT THE BACON DONUT!” It was less life-changing than I might have hoped, but an interesting experience nonetheless.
What else? I was on NPR’s Morning Edition today, talking about fat characters on TV. This bit was recorded back in January, so I had to read the transcript to remember what I said. You can read (or listen) here. And, of course, there’s lots of new stuff from me on xoJane, including this post about street harassment, the comments to which are cuckoobananas in their awesomeness and their rage.
But enough about me. On to the most amusing links of the past month.
The following was originally printed in the Summer 2010 “Body Issue” of Geez Magazine, a Canadian publication dealing with progressive spirituality. I just learned last week that it actually won something: 1st place opinion piece in the Canadian Church Press awards. Wild, huh? Anyway, that reminded me that the full text of the piece never did make it online, so I’m reproducing it here.
When I was in the sixth grade, there was a boy in my class who was continually trying to put his hand up my shorts.
It was like a compulsion. His desk was beside mine, in the very back of the classroom, so we were largely unsupervised most of the time. I’d be sitting at my desk and I’d feel someone touch my knee, or the bottom part of one thigh. At the time I was too young, or too naive, to know that I should report this to a teacher. I was however old enough to believe I was somehow at fault, and that his efforts to touch me were embarrassing, even shameful. I took to surreptitiously punching the boy whenever his hand inched toward me. He was small for his age, smaller than I, and why he chose to harass me in this way, I’ll never know.
One day, after many months of foiling his groping attempts, I was called on in class, and had to stand beside my desk to give my answer. As I began to speak, I sensed his hand creeping toward the hem of my shorts, and up my leg. In one smooth movement, ferociously intent on keeping this problem from becoming the public knowledge of the whole class, I stepped backward, crushing his hand between my considerable rear end and the edge of the desk. He cried out in pain, and only when the teacher inquired as to what was going on back there did I turn to look at him with a calculatedly blank stare.
He went to the nurse’s office; I believe he may have had a minor fracture. I occasionally wonder what he told them by way of explanation. At any rate, he didn’t try to touch me after that.
It's dick-tacular!
Several of you have emailed me about this today, so here you go.
Some dudes are planning a LAN party in Austin, TX to coincide with the release of Battlefield 3. Pretty much every FPS gamer I know is super-psyched for this title, and honestly, the LAN party in question sounds pretty boss. Until you get to the section that originally said:
Are there other restrictions? Yes. Nothing ruins a good LAN party like uncomfortable guests or lots of tension, both of which can result from mixing immature, misogynistic male-gamers with female counterparts. Though we’ve done our best to avoid these situations in years past, we’ve certainly had our share of problems. As a result, we no longer allow women to attend this event.
Since it’s been picked up by some blogs, the text has been changed to describe the event simply as a “gentleman’s retreat”, with a link to this site, in an effort to either elicit hilarity (that said men are trying to be better people by playing Battlefield 3 together) or to earnestly reframe the male-exclusive space as a positive thing. There is also some weird drama in which possibly-imaginary female attendees describe harassment at prior LAN parties put on by this group that may have never happened.
Ultimately, the question of whether women have been egregiously harassed at past events — although it would seem to be implied by the original wording — is irrelevant to this post. All I want to unpack here is the original language in the original pre-drama announcement quoted above, because I think it demonstrates a lot of what is wrong with games culture in an especially clear way.
The encoded, indirect message behind that text is this:
Shannon from Fierce Fatties tweeted a link at me earlier this week, to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) about the obesity scourge. The RWJF, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a massive “philanthropic” organization specializing in public health. The organization’s titular founder is, yes, the guy who also brought us Johnson & Johnson, the bazillion-dollar international megacorporation that makes everything from prosthetic joints and blood glucose monitoring systems, to that orange bar of Neutrogena facial soap melting away in your shower, to the tube of KY Jelly you used before you knew there were better lubes out there, to the “No More Tears” baby shampoo your mom washed your little noggin with when you were a wee bairn. You want a list of subsidiary holdings and consumer brands? Wikipedia’s got you covered.
It is not overstating the matter to say that Johnson & Johnson looms over all things healthcare like a towering and inescapable monolith. So it’s little wonder that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation should rank as the ninth wealthiest charitable organization in the world, outmatched by such notable competition as the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and coming in first, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These are all organizations that deal in billions and billions of dollars, and many of them do quite a bit of good.
This, of course, is not one of those cases.
Two researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have made a controversial recommendation in an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They suggest that state laws governing child abuse be employed to remove “extremely” fat children from their parents’ custody, and that these children be placed in foster care.
This was sent to me by several readers, plus it was on my local news this morning. MSNBC has an opinion column on the subject from yesterday evening, which manages to argue against the idea while still being absolutely ghastly at the same time, talking about “the epidemic of blubber” and “porky youths” and uncritically blaming all this rampant fattery exclusively on overeating. Given that the column’s author is on the porky side himself, some of this language may be intended to be humorously glib, and to his credit, he does also note: “There is no proven cure for obesity.”
However, when I talk about the overwhelming focus on childhood obesity contributing to a culture that punishes fat kids, this is exactly what I mean. The article authors argue that their suggestion is not about assigning blame to parents, but it is difficult to see it as being about anything else — if you are removing a child from their home under the guise of protecting them from imminent, life-threatening harm, you are essentially arguing that the child’s parents are incapable of providing that child a safe and nurturing environment in which to live. Even if there are no criminal charges filed against the parents, on a purely social level, who else’s fault could it be?
Hey kids! I hope every last one of you is having a marvelous weekend. I have been spending the lion’s share of my free time the past few weeks working on the first round of edits to my upcoming but as-yet-untitled book, which I must now dutifully remind you will be published by The Feminist Press early next year. This is also why I haven’t been blogging as much lately. Book-editing is challenging — though markedly less challenging than book-writing –and most of the challenge comes from trying to anticipate the reactions and questions people might have while reading the text.
See, writing a blog, or really any kind of comment-enabled online material, is a pretty distinct experience because if I say something badly, or use a problematic term, I can get near-instant feedback about it, and can then quickly follow up with further thoughts on the resulting conversation. A book is less of a conversation and more of a lecture, in which my audience is prevented from asserting their queries and criticisms, and I am likewise blocked from responding to them. Being a bit of a perfectionist by nature, I am faced with trying to anticipate all these criticisms. Which is not useful and frankly does not make for a very good book, as I can get so distracted by trying to make my language as correct as possible that I am sometimes hamstrung from actually writing with the kind of impassioned fervor y’all have come to expect from me.
So I am really trying NOT to do this, but it is difficult.
Elsewhere! Marianne and I are working to get back on a regular Fatcast recording schedule. The theme of our most recent episode is “Risk Management” and it is available on iTunes and your favorite podcast server-upper. Over on xoJane I’ve discussed my inexplicable love for survival series Man Vs. Wild, given ferevent but unsolicited advice against buying diet books, and hailed Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex as one of my personal heroes.
I am getting well and truly schooled on statistical research by a real live scientist in comments to my last post, so check the comments over there on where the number-crunching portion of my analysis went off half-cocked.
When you read statements about paper findings you think are meant to be factually accurate (i.e. not a newsmagazine’s or newspaper’s interpretation of the bottom line rather than report on the bottom line as stated) you always have to read it very specifically and literally. The reason it can take you MONTHS to write a 5-page paper is that you have to be very specific with the words, the implications of those words and the sentences they form, EVERYTHING. You CANNOT leave it up to the reader to assume or feel or jump to conclusions the way you can in the humanities. Poor scientific papers are often poor not because their experiments were poor, but because EXACTLY what they did or concluded is not clear – there are too many ways to read the word choices or sentences to be sure of exactly what they are saying.
Curiously, to some extent I fell into the same trap so many media outlets do, that is, using an overly superficial read of a study to make broad proclamations.
Have a delicious Sunday y’all.
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