Butterfly Cauldron

So, I've seen this photo a few times this week around the blogosphere. I thought the model was pretty, looked good and was glad she was included in a major runway show. I don't follow fashion, so I don't know a damn thing about the designer, etc. Mostly, it was just something that caught my eye, I appreciated it and moved on.

Well. Over at Feministing it got posted with some questions about what the designer intended by putting her in his otherwise thin-model show. No big deal there, for me, at least. Seems something worth discussing, even if I don't follow fashion.

And then I got to comments. And started to get pissed off.

It devoled quickly from addressing the topic at hand to remarks like "this model does not look good in those clothes" to "no one wants to see this" to "this woman is morbidly obese". She was called not normal, extremely large, couldn't be healthy and fit. There's one poster there who is convinced, completely, that obesity is a horrible, horrible disease and will kill all us fat girls one day.

A few people came in and spoke, for which I'm grateful, but -- again with women bashing women! What the hell? It's not bad enough we all have to live in this society where we're generally undervalued, we have to put up with comments like this from other women?

No one wants to see women like this? Then tell me how this woman is a professional model. (Living in Paris, not America, of course.) If no one wanted to see her, how would she be making a living? No one wants to see a size 20? Have you ever taken a quick skim of all the Plus-Size Porn sites? Not only to people want to see women who look like her, in sexy clothing, they're willing to pay to see them in a great deal less. (Not that I suggest basing your worth or body image on porn, but the fact remains that there is a market for fat porn and there wouldn't be if it were true no one found fat bodies sexually attractive.)

Again with this stupidity! How does my (or any other) fat body affect you? Seriously? I mean, you can't catch it. If you don't want to look, don't look. I don't expect everyone to find me attractive or want to have sex with me or whatever. But I do expect to be able to enter a discussion with people who are supposed to be my fucking allies and not be so offended I leave. I do expect a little respect. I do expect to be able to have a discussion that doesn't devolve into "yes, but fat is unhealthy. My fill-in-family-member has X disease because s/he is fat." No. You relative has X disease for whatever actually causes that disease. Their extra weight may not be helping their health, but it did not, on it's own with no other factors, cause that disease. There is not a single illness that has been proven to be caused by fat. Ever. Why? Because being fat doesn't make you sick! If it did, with our 'obesity crisis' in this country, we should all be dropping dead at alarming rates. And we're not. We're living longer. Because being fat, by itself, isn't going to kill you. Or make you sick.

I'm just really fed up with the fat bashing I've seen lately. There's this post, then there was fucking Dennis Miller on The Daily Show a few nights ago who spent the whole segment making cracks about fat people. I mean, it's the fucking Daily Show! You'd think Miller of all people would have something better to talk about than how fat people are worth mocking. You know, like all that political and religious shit he didn't got to talk about on Katie Couric's show? But noo...let's talk about the fatties!

So you know what? Leave us the fuck alone, really. Especially you people who are supposed to be our feminist/progressive allies. If you don't understand how sizeism is just another form of social repression and control, you haven't been paying attention and I'm just too fucking tired of this shit to explain it to you. Again.

Labels: fat, feminism, stupid people