OK, D00d Nation, THIS Is What I Want From You

posted by meowser

Pursuant to the “fat women are only useful inasfar as I find them fuckable” BS that Marianne takes on with such aplomb here, I would like to add to that theme. And this goes double for all the “butbutbut you can’t MAKE me find you attractive!!eleventyone!” d00ds of D00d Nation too (or is that t00?).

I honestly do not give one falling space turd about whether you personally find me attractive or not. I’m set there, thanks. If you want to hold out for a woman aged 21 to 23, between 5′4″ and 5′6″ tall, with waist-length naturally red hair, weighing no more and no less than 120 pounds, with exactly five freckles on each butt cheek, and none on the face, and you would much rather spend your spooge allowance spanking it into a washcloth thinking about your fantasy babe rather than getting it on with me or any other real-life human standing before you…that is absolutely fine. It. Does. Not. Matter. To. Me. At all.

Here is what I do care about, and passionately. I care very much about how you treat my boyfriend.

If you are a stranger, what are you thinking when you see him with me? Are you thinking about what must be wrong with him that he has to “settle” for someone like me? Do you think I must be his pity date and that he’s just too much of a wimp to let me go, or that I must “have something” on him that prevents him from leaving? Or that I’m just a fast fuck and that he couldn’t possibly like me, because you think no “normal” man who digs women possibly could? Would you ever be rude to him because of me?

If you are his peer, do you refuse to really be friends with him because he’s with me? Or refuse to invite us over to the house or out to a meal (when you’d happily invite just him) because you think the sight of us together would gross everyone out, including you?

If you are his boss, do you refuse to promote him because his partner (me) isn’t enough of a trophy for you? Do you regard him as being less intelligent and less capable than he is because of me? Would you refuse to hire him if you knew he had a fat woman for a partner?

And in any of those situations, if he did or said something to piss you off, would a cheap shot at his partner’s body habitus and/or his liking of it be one of the first things to jump out of your mouth?

If you can answer “absolutely, positively not, never ever” to every single one of those questions, and really mean it, we’re cool.

And if you can’t…why on earth not? Does everyone’s taste have to match yours, or it’s “wrong”?

Help a Fatass Out: Go See ‘Up’

posted by meowser

Typically of alter cockers my age and upwards, I don’t get out to movie theaters very much these days. But when a commenter on Shapely Prose whose name escapes me at the moment (feel free to identify yourself if it’s you) mentioned that Pixar’s latest film, Up, had fat characters who were not made the butt of jokes because of their weight, and that this was exactly the kind of thing Fatospherians should be showing support (read: entertainment $$) to, I had to agree. I even sprung for 3-D, figuring I didn’t go to movies that much and if I was going to go, I might as well have the value-add experience I couldn’t get watching at home. (For whatever it’s worth, though, not many people seemed to agree with me on that; besides me and Chris, there were about six other people in the theater for an early Sunday night showing.)

Well, lemme tell you: 2-D or 3-D, this movie rules. RULES, I tell you. I’m not going to describe the plot in a lot of detail; let’s just say a flying house, talking dogs, a colorful chocolate-loving bird, and an exiled scientist desperate to clear his name are involved, and leave it at that. What I loved about it was that, yes, this is exactly the kind of movie I want to see a lot more of, one where there was wonderful characterization and voicing, gorgeous scenery, and many funny jokes, and not one of those jokes involved the weight of either the pudgy 78-year-old white man (played by 79-year-old Ed Asner; the character looks amusingly like him, with some latter-day Walter Matthau and Spencer Tracy thrown in) or the even pudgier 8-year-old Asian American boy (played by newcomer Jordan Nagai). If the characters’ weight is acknowledged at all, it’s said to work to their advantage in what they’re trying to accomplish.

According to Pixar Blog, the studio is not putting out much merchandise on Up despite brisk ticket sales, thinking dolls of fat old men and fat little boys aren’t going to be what kids are clamoring for…but shit, if they do put out Carl (old man) and Russell (little boy) dolls, I’m gonna scoop them up, you bet. Both of these characters are CUTE AS DAMN BUTTONS. And I don’t just mean their looks, either. Part of this is how they’re written, but even more so, the marvelous voice skills of the actors. Ed Asner, boy, you’ve been missed. (He’s been working all this time, apparently, but it sure doesn’t seem like it.) Another bonus of this film is that it does, indeed, put a real-life fat old man in the spotlight (Asner will turn 80 in November), reminding people once again that, no, we fatasses don’t all cack by the time we’re 60. (It shouldn’t need to be said — shit, I create medical records for fat old people all the time — but for some reason, that idea dies hard for a lot of people. Wishful thinking, perhaps?)

Asner might have been the only actor on earth who could have given Lou Grant (his character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its eponymous followup series, Lou Grant) the multiple dimensions he had; he made the drunk asshole boss both funny and deep, right from that first “I hate spunk!” interview of Mary. And yeah, he was catnip to women, too (especially to Betty White’s brilliantly played horndogette, Sue Ann), despite the fat japes made about him. Carl, by comparison, is merely grumpy, but Asner hasn’t lost a step off his timing, and Jordan Nagai — who has huge mouthfuls of verbiage to deliver as Russell — keeps right up with him. (And yes, not that Disney deserves a cookie for doing what they’re supposed to and hiring an Asian American actor to play an Asian American character, but it’s definitely the sort of thing to nudge them in the direction of.) And in case you’re wondering, the 3-D glasses do fit over regular ones. What you’d mainly get from the 3-D here is not so much Disneyland-ish special effects (no birds landing on your nose or anything), but a sense of actually being there in the middle of the action. Which I dug, myself. But I hardly think you’d be losing out by seeing it in 2-D, either.

Now, all I could ask are some films featuring fat old ladies and fat little girls. C’mon, Pixar, I’m ready.

I’m So Concerned For That Ugly Girl’s Health

posted by meowser

So I was fiddlefarting around on the Mets blog Amazin’ Avenue — I only lurk there sometimes to get the latest information about the team, I never post there. It’s not exactly a feminist haven, though (few sports sites are, especially if they’re devoted to sports played by men), and for some reason, tonight the subject of Beth Ditto came up when I was glancing at the open thread from tonight’s game. Maybe she was at the game? I don’t know, not having seen the entire broadcast. Anyway, one of the posters sniffed, wanting women to have a better body image is one thing, but “deliberately making yourself as unhealthy as possible is another.”

Which made me think, “Deliberately making yourself as unhealthy as possible? Really, dude nation dude? So all your favorite records were made by nonsmoking, drug-free teetotalers who never had unprotected sex with strangers?”

Quick Question

posted by meowser

I’ve been wanting to do more aspie/autie/brain-related blogging lately, not necessarily related to fat.

So if you could, please let me know how you would feel about my writing about that stuff here at Fat Fu. I’m not adverse to the idea of setting up a separate aspie blog and in fact might do it anyway, but I’d be curious to take Fatospherians’ temperature on that. Would you say your response to that question would be closest to:

1) No — posts only belong on the Fatosphere if they at least tangentially relate to fat in some way. Putting non-fat-related brain stuff on a separate blog would be better.
2) Sure — blogging about being autistic counts as intersectionality, fire away.
3) Don’t really have a strong opinion in either direction.
4) Something else (feel free to specify).

Thanks!

A$$es and $eat$

posted by meowser

What can I tell you? Recently my mom, who hasn’t gotten to visit with me in multiple Tisha B’avs, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She would fly me to New York, where she’s now living, and put me up and feed me and all the rest for five entire days. So I went last week. Alas, I missed Kate and Marianne’s Re/Dress shindig by a few days; I couldn’t logistically make everything fit so that I’d be there in time for that event, because I also had to schedule my trip so I could squeeze in a visit with my dad, who’s now moving down to Florida and would only be in New York very briefly before going back down south again. Bummer. So I’ve mostly been off the grid all week and for most of the week before that, in case anyone was wondering.

It was a nice trip, and I’ll probably go into more detail about it later. For now, what I’m going to talk about is the logistics of accommodating my mountainous tush on both the airplane and in other places where my butt took up occupancy on this trip. Like I said, what with the airlines and their you-must-pay-extra-for-not-controlling-your-greedy-appetite-fatass policies making the news of late, I have been more than a little reluctant to fly. We’re talking about a cross-country flight, which isn’t cheap, and even if my mom would agree to pay extra for tush shipment, which I’m sure she would if she had to, I would hate to put her out like that. And me, too. But I remembered that not only did Jet Blue have direct flights between PDX and JFK, but their seats were an entire 17.8″ inches across, which is a little bigger than most of the other airlines are offering these days. So I asked her to book me with them if she possibly could, and she did.

My flight out was a red-eye, which was okay with me since I normally keep vampire’s hours and I knew I’d have to do something pretty radical right off the bat to reset my body clock to Eastern Daylight Time. To my utter amazement, about a third of the plane was unoccupied; yeah, I know it was a red-eye, but I’ve taken this very same flight a couple of times before in the last couple of years, and it was ass to ass. Not now; in fact, the seat between my aisle seat and the window was unoccupied. Would there have been a problem if it wasn’t? Well, let’s put it this way; at about a size 20, I got on my seatbelt with no extender, no prob, but putting down that armrest? Owie. I could physically do it, but not by much. I actually had mine resting lightly on my left leg for takeoff with my elbow on top of it, and nobody said anything. If they had I’d have crunched it down, but I was very happy not to have to, believe me. And with the armrest all the way down, there would definitely have been thigh squooshage into the adjoining seat. So, bullet dodged, at least for the outbound flight.

The return flight was not a red-eye; in fact, it was scheduled for departure at 7:40 PM local time on Saturday, and sat there on the tarmac for two stinkin’ hours because the bumblefucks who did the scheduling didn’t realize that every international flight in the galaxy would be taking off at around the same time, duhhhh. I expected more tushes on this flight; not only was I wrong about that, but the plane was even emptier than the inbound one. In fact, it was so empty that before they bolted us into our seats for the tarmac wait, they encouraged people to move to a completely unoccupied row if we saw one that looked good to us. Unoccupied rows? What is going on here? Are people just not flying anymore unless they absolutely must? No wonder they all want to charge fatasses double; if they could get away with it, they’d charge everyone double. Triple, even. Wearing heavy wool socks? That’ll be $15 extra! I will note that on neither flight did I see anyone fatter than myself, and I don’t, in fact, remember seeing anyone else who was Officially Fat on the plane at all. What that actually means, I can only guess.

Now, since I am a Metsochist, while I was in New York, I just had to go to a game at the Mets’ new digs, Citi Field. I’d been hearing all kinds of great things about the park — better food, improved sightlines, nifty historical stuff, and one of the things that had been ballyhooed in the media was “bigger seats!” Only, I didn’t realize that they only meant “bigger seats” in the expensive parts of the ballpark, not the upper deck where I bought my ticket (on StubHub). It only took one extremely painful attempt to wedge my hips all the way back into my chair to realize that a 19″ seat in a stadium was a much different deal from a 17.8″ seat on an airplane; that 19″ is the entirety of your real estate, there is no squooshing out under the armrests. The lower deck seats, I found out later, top out at 24″ (although I don’t know for sure if they’re all that width, it’s not at all clear from the seating chart or any other information I was able to find online).

So if you ever go to a game or a concert at this facility and you are a wide load, be forewarned. Fortunately, as is the case with pretty much all the newer ballparks (built from 1992 onwards), you are not stuck in your seat if you want to see the game; with the open structure of the grandstands, you can take a walk around the concourse, even on the lower levels if you like, and not miss anything. You can even watch from different angles in different parts of the park, although I’m not sure if the same rules would apply during a concert.

Still, it kind of burnt my toast that none of the stories or publicly available info about this ballpark ever mentioned this little, um, quirk with the seats for those of us wearing bigger than size 12 bloomers. For whatever it’s worth, I saw plenty of fat guys with big bellies at this game, and they, natcherly, had no trouble fitting in the seats. I don’t remember seeing a single fat chick. Of course not! Fat chicks prefer to watch the game at home! Riiiiight…and my great-grandparents settled on the Lower East Side when they came to America because they thought Central Park West wasn’t good enough for them. Uh-HUH.

The food is really good, though. Gotta give them that.

I also rode Metro-North and the subway while I was there. God, all those stairs on the subway, just stairs and stairs and stairs and stairs. I can walk on flat land for days, no problem, but those stairs in Birkenstocks were killing my knees, going up or down. Also, what’s up with those seat dividers when there are all those seats in a row bench-style? What’s the point? Is it to keep the phantom schlong dudes from spreading their legs out to MX-missile width? Because if it is, then it’s not working, any better than it’s working to keep my ass from measuring more than 16″ across. You might as well just have a bench, just a flat old bench, and let people arrange themselves however.

At least they’re not talking about making fatties pay double on the subway or commuter train just yet. I guess it would cost them more to enforce that rule than they’d actually make from the deal.

I Hate Metformin (A Rantlet)

posted by meowser

I wish I was a voice-file-editing wizard, because in order to get the full impact of the title and what it means to me, it needs to be read in one of those Yosemite Sam type of growls: “Ahhhhhh HAAAATES metfohmin.” Because I really do hate metformin (brand name: Glucophage) the way Yosemite Sam hated Bugs Bunny, and with a lot more justification. Metformin is not cute. It is not witty. It does not have soft pettable-if-only-it-were-real fur. It does not kiss its enemies full on the lips and then spin its ears to fly away. It’s just a big old nightmare, that’s all.

For those of you who are met-n00bs, lucky you, a bit of background on what this drug is. It’s supposed to be an insulin sensitizer, so it’s typically given to people with type 2 diabetes who are not yet insulin dependent, so they can make the best possible use of what little insulin their pancreases are able to come up with at this stage of the disease. But in recent years (I was first prescribed it in 1997), it’s also been commonly dispensed to women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which I have, because one of the markers for PCOS is elevated fasting insulin. That means my pancreas is working way too hard, and for the time being, the net result is that my blood sugars, even after eating, tend to run a little on the low side. But if the pancreas continues to overwork itself, it could eventually burn itself out and bang, diabetes. That’s the theory, anyway, and hence metformin is supposed to slow down the overproduction of insulin so I’ll have more of it later on when I need it.

But I’ve never been able to stay on it. (Okay, here comes the grody part; that’s what you love me for, right?) Because here’s what else it does to me, besides sensitize my cells to insulin: It turns my digestive tract into a long, snakey blender set permanently on puree. I’m sure if you asked most people whether they’d rather have explosive diarrhea or be fat, they’d pick the diarrhea, but not me. Explosive diarrhea is my idea of an unacceptable side effect. I mean, really, think about it. You can’t go ANYWHERE without knowing exactly where the nearest toilet is, and when you get there it had better be unoccupied. Last I looked it was still legal to be fat in a supermarket (at least for the time being); I’m pretty sure it’s totally illegal to take a dump in the middle of a produce aisle. Yeah, I could wear an adult diaper, and I’m well aware that there’s no way around that for a lot of people, but you still have to change the damn diaper as soon as you know you’ve, er, used it. Which still amounts to finding and gaining access to the blasted toilet ASAP before people start complaining about the smell. Call me shallow, but I’d rather put off the adult-diaper stage of my life for as long as I can swing it.

So for years, the cycle has been that I’d stay on the met for as long as I could stand it, then discontinue and tell my doctor I can’t tolerate it. Then the doctor says, “Well, you really should take it,” so I’d start taking it again, and become Ms. Poopy Shorts again, and the doctor would give me shit (snerk) about discontinuing again, and the typical thing they tell you to do is take some Imodium or something to stop the flying poop. Well, I have a couple of problems with that. One, I firmly believe that if something is racing to exit your body, there’s probably a good reason for it, and messing with that every day could cause all kinds of problems later. For another, I really dislike the “take more drugs to counteract the side effects of the drugs you’re taking” syndrome. I already do that with psych meds, and it blows mountain-lion-sized hairball chunks. Because, where does it end? That’s why, whenever I create a medical report for someone older than about 60, they’re always on about 20 different drugs and getting more added every time they show up at the doctor’s. Iatrogenic illness, what a party.

And lately, especially after my month-long bout with antibiotics, which can do a number on your gut all by themselves, it’s gotten much, much worse. Let’s just say that at one point there was a race to a public bathroom and…I lost. Fortunately, this happened at the shrink’s office, and she had a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing. Her belief is that I have all this wacky shit (snerk snerk) going on in my digestive tract (and my endocrine system) because I’ve spent my life under a ridiculous amount of stress due to untreated/unrecognized Asperger’s, and that “you’ll get your body back” when I finally decompress from it all (when, I ask?).

But you know, I’ve checked around the t00bz, and I ain’t the only one set on perma-puree by this not-so-little white pill, believe you me. It seems like more people than not actually do have digestive iss-yews with metformin, but since the result of all that time spent making personal deposits in Bank of the Sewer is often weight loss…oh yay, bring it on! ANYTHING to weigh a few pounds less! I don’t get neurotypical people sometimes, would they really rather crap their pants than buy them a size bigger? Evidently they would. Therefore, none of the pharmaceutical companies, to my knowledge, are offering any real alternative to the Big Met. I asked my gyno about that, since she has PCOS herself and I thought she might have some answers, but no, even she doesn’t know of any other than “take Imodium, and if that doesn’t work, then forget about it.”

So about a month ago, I decided to forget about it. That’s how I know for sure that the metformin was the guilty party; I discontinued for a week, the flying poop went away, and went back on it and the flying poop came back. Hard to get any more certain than that. After that I stayed off it for good, and decided I would substitute cinnamon extract, apple cider vinegar (dissolve in water or club soda, wait five minutes for the smell to dissipate, and add a splash of juice for flavoring), and alpha-lipoic acid, and just keep checking my fasting insulin to make sure it wasn’t creeping up on me.

And then a funny thing happened: I started getting way more productive at work. I get paid by the line, and my line counts the last couple of weeks have increased by over 50%. And they have incentive bonuses that kick in over a certain number of lines, so that means a substantial increase in pay. Now granted, I wasn’t earning squat before and this won’t make me affluent by any means, but dayyyum, I’ll take it. Am I certain that booting metformin out of my life is what did the trick? I don’t know, but I’d have to say it didn’t hurt.

And I don’t know about you, but I like things that don’t hurt.

The Hidden Virtues of Superficial Lip Service

posted by meowser

Buffpuff, who doesn’t blog anywhere near often enough to suit me, the other day blogged the following regarding the infamous Gruen Transfer mock-ads:

I’m not trying to infer that fat discrimination is worse than racism, anti-Semitism, ableism or homophobia nor am I trying to say it’s exactly the same in nature. They’re all different, they’re all life blighting, they all still go on and they all stink. What I am saying is that here, in my experience, sizeism has yet to be acknowledged as a form of discrimination at all – by the media, the government, the medical profession or anybody else save a handful of those who experience it. There is no public discourse, no self-examination, no glimmer of change on the horizon, no protection enshrined in law which, given that we we make up half the UK population, is shameful. That doesn’t make tackling sizeism more important than tackling any other type of discrimination, but it does mean there’s an awful lot of work to be done before it’s taken as seriously.

I completely agree.

Now, before anyone starts yelling “Oppression Olympics!” at Buffpuff or at me, rest assured that neither of us confuses a social justice movement being taken seriously, or at least being given lip service, with actual lack of prejudice or hate. We’re well aware that none of those other prejudices are “over,” or can no longer be considered serious problems — of course that’s not the case, or all those social justice movements wouldn’t still exist. I haven’t changed my mind about fat hate being a repository for all kinds of prejudice people feel they need to talk in code about.

What I want to know is, when are people going to have to start talking in code about us? (And when I say “us,” I of course mean the part of “us” that’s fat, regardless of whatever other identities we inhabit.) When is being vocally against human rights and humanistic treatment for fat people going to cost anybody anything ever? Bear in mind that the mock-commercials in question were being created to “sell the unsellable.” Us. We’re what’s unsellable. Of course fat rights is a big fat joke! All you people have to do is eat less, and everyone will like you just fine! (That is, if you don’t belong to any other stigmatized groups, either.)

Almost everyone thinks this. Even most of our fellow fatties, who still imagine they’re just a few passed-up sodas and spurned candy bars away from the acceptance they crave way more than sugar. That’s how bad it is, folks; if you showed me a really naturally-skinny person and a really naturally-fat person side by side, and I knew nothing else about either one of them, and you asked me which of them would be more likely to be down with fat acceptance? I go with the naturally-skinny person. Every time. I’m really not kidding. Why? I have no clue (although it could have something to do with the fact that the really skinny people know they couldn’t attain anywhere close to my BMI if they tried). But when I try explaining this stuff to people, I’ve noticed over and over again that my odds are better with people with BMIs under 22 who don’t diet than with people with BMIs over 32 who do. If fat people were on their own damned side, fat acceptance wouldn’t feel like shoving an anvil off a five-mile cliff.

I’m in total agreement with those who say the Gruen Transfer presentation was appallingly sexist, smug, smarmy, and self-congratulatory (sssssss), and I continue to maintain that there is no such thing as someone who truly loves everyone but fatties. What’s happened is that fashion has changed so that people such as these telegenic young(ish) white men are now required to give their share of superficial lip service to being against other (although certainly not all other) forms of prejudice.

Look, I grew up in the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when American suburbia was all white-flight haven. In those suburbs, I was surrounded by white people, Jewish and not, who were visibly relieved they didn’t live next door to poor black people (although they were also visibly relieved when there was an affluent black family around who spoke the King’s English better than they did). These same people also despised George Wallace and Richard Nixon and everything they stood for, and voted for JFK and Lyndon Johnson and were outraged by things like segregated bathrooms and voter literacy tests, and were thrilled to see the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed. They may not have wanted to live next door to poor black people, but they were downright proud to vote for people who made it easier for those poor black people to vote too, and to move about in public without being dogged by Jim Crow.

Is that good enough? Does that prove lack of prejudice? Of course not, squared. But it was something. Superficial lip service in favor of black civil rights by whites, arguably, is what finally got the law changed, even if white people took their sweet time coming around to it. (And yes, I’m well aware that there were white people who were true believers and put their lives on the line for the civil rights movement in ways that totally put me to shame, also, including women who would later go on to spearhead second-wave feminism.)

Same went with the women’s movement, as we called it when I was a baby fatty. No, we couldn’t get the ERA passed, even with a majority of Americans in favor of it, because Schlafly et al managed to convince just enough people in the exact right places that it would require men to wear pantyhose and take their wives’ last names, and 7-year-old girls to use the men’s room and have to be exposed to strange men whipping out their willies to pee. Silly shit, but boy, it was effective. But a whole mess of other, smaller laws did pass and mores changed along with them (Daisy’s Thank a Second Wave Feminist post lays this out spectacularly) that allowed women to get medical care without their husbands’ or fathers’ permission, and wear pants to school and work, and have their own credit, and about a squillion other things that women nowadays take as givens. Is that because people forgot all about sexism all of a sudden? Need you ask? Nope, superficial lip service struck again. (The swelling chorus of millions of women who all seemed to realize simultaneously that they were getting the fuzzy end of the lolly for no good reason didn’t hurt, either.)

I don’t care if people like me or think I’m pretty or healthy or nice or that I smell of sandalwood soap (not elderberries!), or any of that shit. Okay, maybe I do (at least give me credit for my deodorant working), but that’s not the most important thing to me at the moment. Most of all, I want the fucking laws off my fat ass. I want it to be illegal for people to pull the kinds of shenanigans the airlines have pulled on us. I want it to be illegal for people to refuse to hire us or to fire us or to spurn us for promotions or to slap fines on us just because of our weight. I want it to be illegal for schools to refuse us admission or landlords to refuse to rent to us because we’re fat. I want it to be illegal for insurance companies to refuse to cover us, or doctors to refuse to treat us for the problem we came in for, no matter how potentially deadly, until we get thin. And if we can’t make it entirely illegal, I want it to be extremely painful and costly for them to do those things. I want it to be more than a few of us who have been labeled fringe goofballs saying it shouldn’t be. I don’t care why people protest on our behalf. I just want them to frigging do it.

Hell, I remember when things like same-sex marriage and trans rights were considered just as “unsellable” (says the woman who lost her job as a teenager in 1980 for saying she thought gay people should be allowed to get married to each other and adopt kids). There’s still untold miles to go in both of those battles, and plenty of hatebags to defeat, and millions of people who are way more prejudiced in either or both of those areas than they’d ever cop to. But would anyone who’s paying any attention at all claim those causes are “unsellable” to almost everyone now? Things can change, drastically and quickly, so I wouldn’t say there’s no hope that our rights will become “sellable” too. However, one thing I will say — and once again, I’m with my fellow Jew Buffpuff on this — I’m not among those offended that someone would compare the plight of the Jews to that of fat people. No, there haven’t been fat pogroms or concentration camps, and I’d like to keep it that way.

But I also know that when there have been violent uprisings against Jewish people (and not just in the last century), they didn’t come out of nowhere. It took decades of escalating scapegoating and hatemongering before those eruptions took place. Nazism was not a one-decade fluke where people temporarily lost their marbles; any Jew could tell you that. And as long as fat people are portrayed more and more often in popular and alternative media as the Awful Ugly Greedy People Whose Fault Everything Is, and with our rights actually becoming more curtailed than they were a decade ago, I’m not willing to say it couldn’t happen to our fat asses (Jewish or otherwise), too. (And yeah, I know all too well that “my” people have been some of the leading fetishizers of thinness, unfortunately, because stoutness has an unbreakable association with the dreaded shtetls and thinness has long been linked with fitting in with upper-caste WASPs.) I’m a lot more concerned that people won’t learn from what happened to the Jews than that they’ll think about it too much, frankly.

It’s tempting to say the “support” of people who (I think) are assholes is worse than no support at all. And I still don’t intend to allow diet or yay-weight-loss talk on this site, for the simple reason that I don’t get much of a safe haven from that stuff elsewhere and neither do most of my readers. But as far as whether or not you, yourself are actually dieting or hoping to become thin(ner), and want to know if you can still work for fat rights and say your own fat is no good? Or what if you think fat is unhealthy, but that all the things I mentioned should still be illegal? Let’s just say this. There’s a huge difference — I mean, the size of the Grand Canyon — between who I feel I can stand behind as a movement leader and who is “fit” to be a supporter. I hesitate even to type the latter part of that sentence, because it sounds as if I have some kind of Fit Supporter Rule Book and I really, really don’t.

But just because I don’t want to hear about your diet or applaud while you pull out the waistband of your fat pants doesn’t mean I hate you, or don’t want your support. (I think most people in fat acceptance have meatspace friends and relatives who diet and don’t hate their guts for it, even if we don’t want to hear their blow-by-blow weekly scale reports.) When it comes to getting the laws and the culture changed, we need all the support we can get, even from calorie counters, even from people who are decidedly not perfect in other ways. If only the pure of heart could effect any sort of change, we’d be in big-assed trouble.

NY Daily News “Fat-letes” Slide Show: Sports Entertainers of Size as Food/Eating Porn

posted by meowser

I should have known. I never learn. So I’m poking around the NY Daily News sports pages for news about the Mets (speaking of never learning), and something on the sidebar catches my eye: a slide show called “Fat-letes: The Um, BIGGEST Sports Stars of All Time.” And I’m thinking, “Gee, that’s nice, they’re finally acknowledging that fat sports entertainers exist and have accomplished things! Let’s have a look!”

Oh yes. Let’s. (As per my flamebait rules, no direct link: here is the link to the photo gallery page, from which you can find it if you just can’t resist peeking.) There are 35 photos of fat current and former pro athletes, all men, from nearly every professional sport, plus one of A-Rod, who’s not at all fat but got a “dishonorable mention” regarding the “Bitch Tits” nickname allegedly given to him by his Yankee teammates for his roided-out pecs. If the latter gives you a big fat hint that this slide show is not meant to be the slightest bit complimentary or respectful, righty-o you are, Felix. Almost every picture in the series either shows the jock in question with food (e.g. ex-Met Mo Vaughn pictured with the mile-high sandwich the Carnegie Deli named after him), or references to him as something like “donut loving” (ex-MLB slugger Cecil Fielder), or having “eaten his awards instead of hanging them on the wall” (Hall of Fame outfielder Tony Gwynn) or, in the case of Cecil Fielder’s son Prince, who currently plays first base for the Milwaukee Brewers, marveling that a man of his dimensions could actually be a vegetarian. (Gasp.)

Yeah, most of those guys probably do eat a lot — or did when they were playing. Of course they did; in order to maintain the muscle mass necessary to perform at that level, you can’t exactly pick at dry salads, and I guarantee you their thin and buff counterparts put it away too, even if they’re health nuts. (Ever hear about Julio Franco and the 20 egg whites he used to have for breakfast — just breakfast — every day, as part of the 5000-calorie-a-day playing regime he employed to keep playing major-league ball until he was pushing 50? Now you have. You’re welcome.) But for some reason, thin and buff players (and, of course, thin and buff everybody else) who are big eaters never seem to have what’s on their plates lit up in neon like the fat folks do. People just really want to believe that we fatasses put it away like nobody else does, regardless of whether they actually have proof of such consumption or not.

I remember years ago going to a fat-positive spoken-word reading in San Francisco that Marilyn Wann put on, and one of the alt-weeklies advertising the event made the nudge-wink observation that there would probably be lots of great food there, you know, because fat acceptance means aaaalways eeeeeating. Even at a reading. A reading that TOOK PLACE WELL AFTER THE FUCKING DINNER HOUR. (There was no food there at all, in case you care.) I used to think this kind of thing kept happening because “non-obese” people were desperate to believe that our pariah status was completely voluntary, that if you took that away from them they’d whine about oh nooooes, yet another stigmatized group we have to try to be nice to and actually pretend to learn something about and come up with code words to mask our prejudices against — isn’t there anyone left we can pick on out loud anymore?

And maybe there’s something to that, but now I’m starting to believe that in many cases, the reason fat haters insist so loudly that every one of us fatasses must be constantly chewing and swallowing ALL THOZE CALORIEZ YAAARGH, even over our staunch denials, is because their insistence amounts to a form of food and eating porn. They need, right down to the fluid in their cells, to believe that somebody, somebody weaker of spirit and flesh than they, is consuming all that “sinful” food; since it can’t be them (because, of course, they could gain a hundred pounds if they do!), they can at least get to watch us, if only in their minds’ eyes, eat the mile-high sandwich and the (baby) donuts and the awards plaques and maybe even a few Daily News reporters for dessert. If we can demonstrate that our eating habits are nothing out of the ordinary, there goes that wank-target out the window.

Oh, I’m sure Matt Marrone, Andy Clayton and Matt Simonides, who put together this particular disrespect-fest, would deny my interpretation of it out their smug fratboy asses. OK, so here’s the thing. I don’t think fat jokes should necessarily be off limits per se, but for the luvva pastrami, why do they always have to be so witless? About 10 years ago, C.C. Sabathia, (yes, he’s in this slideshow too), then pitching for the Cleveland Indians, showed up in spring training weighing about 300 pounds, which led some media wiseass (whose name now escapes me) to dub him “CCC Sabathia.” See, now that’s funny. I laughed at that. I still giggle about it now. But what does it tell you that of all the fat jokes and japes I’ve heard, seen, and read since then — and good gravy Marie have there been dozens — not ONE has even so much as made me smile? If you people who are being paid six and seven figures to make funnies whiff every goddamn time you make jokes about subject X, if your “humor” about subject X never rises above the third-grade har-har-you-stuff-your-face level, shouldn’t it tell you that maybe you should lay off subject X already until you grow some wit? If you’re going to mock us, at least bring your A game to the field. The “fat-letes” you so disparage did exactly that, after all.

I Caught a Troll! I Caught a Troll! I Caught My Very Own Troll!

posted by meowser

OK, normally I send posts like this straight to spamville. (Not that I get very many, but still.) But just because I’m in a blasting-plastic-fish-in-a-barrel kinda mood, I thought I’d offer this particular one up for your moldy-pea shooters. Disputing my claim that choosing the fries over the salad was hardly going to make a difference of 100 pounds to anyone all by itself, our troll, thinking I’m fat just because nobody ever bothered to teach me calorie voodoo math before I hit junior high (thereby proving that sie has not read ANYTHING else I’ve posted here), schools me thusly:

-Choosing the fries over a salad CAN mean 100 pounds or more. If you consistently choose fries over salad thats a daily dose of grease, cholesterol, starch….fries provide very fattening calories…not to mention if you consistently chose salad you would be getting a daily dose of complex carbohydrates, vitamins and other nutrients with considerably less calories (that is if you are eating a salad with a modest amount of dressing, not a soup). Do a little experiment and purchase a couple of rats. Keep one of them on a regular diet of water, fruits, nuts and vegetables. Keep the other on a regular diet of processed foods (soda, chips, fries, burgers, cookies). It will not take long to see the physical differences that diet effects. You could probably even switch the diets of the rats and and see the effects follow the diets. You will quickly find it is within everyones genetic range to weigh a lot.

Sure, people have the genetic capacity to grow large, obviously or it wouldn’t happen. However, claiming that fat is not a matter of choice but a matter of genetics is absurd. Consider the following example:

There are x amount of cigarette smokers with lung cancer. They have developed lung cancer because it is within their genetic capacity to do so.

Wooookay. One of these days I’m gonna do a whole “why fat isn’t like smoking” post, but let’s take the lung cancer part first, just because it’s so tickly. Yes, it’s true, some people are genetically far more predisposed to forming metastatic cells in their bodies at a relatively young age than others, regardless of environmental factors. That’s probably why very few smokers actually die of primary lung cancer, even though the vast majority of people who get primary lung cancer were heavy smokers at one time. See the difference? It’s statistically impossible for 97% of smokers to die of lung cancer. Don’t some of them die in car wrecks or fighting wars or something? It’s far more common for smokers who continue to smoke heavily for decades and die of natural causes to contract COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), which leads to respiratory failure and emphysema. In fact, it’s about, oh, eighty times more common than lung cancer, and other than in a few cases where there’s a congenital alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency, is caused almost entirely by chronic exposure to serious pulmotoxins (of which cigarette smoke is one). And while you certainly need a genetic tendency to enjoy tobacco (or at least not have a complete aversion to it) to take up smoking, and genetics can certainly affect one’s ability to quit, starting smoking is completely voluntary (even figuring in that it usually happens in one’s teens, when feelings of immortality tend to peak). Becoming fat is not nearly so voluntary for most fat people. You can get really fucking fat doing everything your doctor tells you to do. I did.

Which brings me to They Who Have Come To Enlighten Me’s first point. Which is that if rats eat fries instead of salad, they’ll gain 100 pounds. Or something like that. Leaving aside that TWHCTEM obviously has never met anyone with a hummingbird metabolism, much less lived with someone like that and observed on a daily basis what they actually eat, let’s explore what “fries versus salad” actually means to most people. No, it doesn’t mean you eat a large order of fries (or hashbrowns, or the equivalent) with every meal, every single day, on top of everything else on your plate. I don’t know of anyone who has ever done that; even binge eaters usually want more variety than that. Maybe some movie star did that to (temporarily) gain weight to play a fat character, I don’t know.

But most of us who are not trying to gain weight, we don’t do that. What we do is, once, maybe twice a week when we eat fast food or go out, get fries on the side. (Yes, I know some people are much more frequent fast food consumers, but most people past college age don’t have fries 10 times a week.) How many more calories is that than a salad? Well, it depends. If your idea of a “salad” is all non-starchy vegetables and no (or the merest hint of) dressing, croutons, nuts, or anything else, and your idea of an order of fries is enough to build a hut with, probably a lot. Although still not enough to make a 100-pound difference in body weight without way more help from your metabolism than most of us get. But consider, if you will, that most of us are going to eat maybe 10 to 30 fries at a sitting, depending on size of said fries, and that ordering a plain, dull salad will almost certainly mean we will be hungrier later and crave a snack — come on, if you’ve ever dieted, you’ve been there. “I’m being soooo good! I’m eating a big bowl of veggies! Yay me! And boo all the fry-snarfing pigs!” And then — maybe not the same day, but surely someday very soon — appetite wins out over the dieter’s high, and before you know it you’re putting Chunky Monkey up your nose. (Ow.)

This is what happens when you give people plenty of food and free will to feed themselves how they choose. We value those things, do we not? You’re not really suggesting that we get put in…um…cages and have our captors feed us when they decide we’re hungry instead of us, right? And really, if the idea of people eating McDonald’s for lunch every day bothers you that much, if you really do think it’s any of your goddamn business, open a damn fruit stand in a poor neighborhood or some other produce desert and give them an alternative. But spare me the finger-rubbing smugness. Geez.

Okay, I’m done. Your turn.

Fat, Major Depression, Asperger’s: Where the Social Model Meets the Medical Model

posted by meowser

This is my first-ever post for Blogging Against Disablism Day! Which actually was yesterday. But I did write it then and didn’t get a chance to post it until now, so hopefully it will make the list. If not, click the picture and go read the awesome posts there anyway!

Until very recently, I would have refused even the very idea of considering myself a “person with disabilities.” (And please note the plural, about which more later.) It’s not that I didn’t always have conditions which limited my ability to live the kind of life I thought I wanted to be living, or which caused me great pain. And it’s not as though I thought being thought of as “disabled” was icky to me or anything. It was more like, how dare I? How dare I call attention to myself when other people needed and deserved the attention more than I did? I have a job, albeit one where I telecommute. I can get up and down stairs, albeit more slowly than most people. I’ve used assistive devices only for short periods of time when I had an injury. I don’t have a degenerative or terminal physical condition or horrible, intractable physical pain. I can bend, stoop, twist, reach, cook meals, shop for groceries, drive a car once in a while, manage to get my cable modem bill paid before they switch it off, clean up cat vomit, read, write, wash my clothes without ruining them (usually), crochet, pick up a musical instrument once in a while…all kinds of things. If I take birth control pills, I can even avoid the five-alarm menstrual cramps and killer PMS and migraines I used to get when I was younger (and don’t get me started about the first GYN I saw, who refused to prescribe them because “there’s a death rate on the pill” and thus I couldn’t get them before my mid-20s…gah). By those standards, I am not a person with disabilities, to be sure.

But now that I know something about the social model of disability (i.e. disability is subjective and depends upon being able to complete the tasks society expects of you, which may or may not be reasonable) and the medical model (i.e. you, PWD, are deficient and something to be fixed), it’s interesting to compare the two models with all the medical records, thousands upon thousands, I’ve created over the years. People don’t just go to doctors or hospitals when they have serious, physically painful or life-threatening problems; often they wind up there because in America (and not just here, either, although that’s the part of the world I know) between the ages of 18 and 50, maybe later, you are expected to be a bundle of energy and accomplishment. And millions of people, gods know how many, can’t hack it. You are supposed to sleep only five or six hours a night, grab a cup of coffee, and go go go go go. You are supposed to be able to handle (most of) the following, and probably more, for those 32 years without a hitch:

- working and going to school at the same time, often “full-time” at both

- having a healthy, honest, loving monogamous relationship (and commencing said relationship young enough to “start a family”)

- raising a family of well-behaved, happy, safe, wonderfully nourished children (note plural!) who are thrilled to eat all their greens and run around the neighborhood with a group of equally wholesome friends who all remain so up until they go away to college (and of course your children must all go to college!)

- lifting heavy objects and hoisting them up and down stairs for hours at a time

- driving defensively but not overly so every single day without your head exploding from three hours of horn-honking traffic

- being able to keep jobs through multiple rounds of layoffs because of how completely cheerfully industrious and useful you are

- staying trim, lithe, and youthful-looking even if your family tree is going to fight you on that every step of the way

- always eating lots of veggies and whole grains

- always avoiding sugar and fried food, and having the presence of mind to feel guilty when you do cave in and eat them

- never smoking or overindulging in alcohol or drugs

- if you are pregnant, never ingesting anything “bad” or being too sick to work as hard as you always have right up until the moment of delivery, and being ready to pop right back to your desk undistracted the minute the episiotomy heals

- working out every day without your workout and diet program leaving you too injured or ill or stressed to continue

- having a mortgage, a reliable car, sparkling clean credit and lots of savings

- always being able to smile, smile, smile and act like you’re on top of things when you know the people around you can’t handle how you’re really feeling (and they usually can’t)

- having enough of a social life that people don’t become suspicious of you, but not picking the “wrong” people to associate with

- developing a career (or having a partner with one) that will impress people when you tell them what it is

- and never, ever be too sick, too tired, in too much pain, or too overwhelmed to beg off from your appointed duties for more than 48 hours (longer if you are more affluent and have people who can cover for you)

You’d think that those expectations existed because the vast majority of people aged 18 to 50-whatever could actually keep all this up. But really, it’s not true. The reams of medical records I’ve created is the proof in the pudding that what we expect of “healthy” people in this world is ridiculous. A lot of people can’t even think about living that way; a lot of people start out living that way until serious illness or injury arriving out of the blue throws them a curve; a lot of people try, try, try to live that way thinking they have to and break under the strain, sometimes for good. It’s not just that people are considered to have disabilities because they don’t live up to society’s standards, it’s also that society’s standards themselves often create disability — i.e. actual loss of ability and serious pain — where it otherwise might not exist if we weren’t so rough on each other.

I’m one of the ones who can’t even think about measuring up, and never could, although I felt plenty shitty about myself about it and spent untold energies clobbering myself for it.

For starters, I am fat. I started out being merely a bit heavier than average, thanks to polycystic ovarian syndrome; once I started on psychiatric medications in my late 20s, I gained more than half my body weight again. Being fat in and of itself does not impede my functionality, but it does more or less eliminate me from many people’s Good, Attractive, and Capable Person Lists. People thinking you can’t do stuff, and thus not getting the chance, often winds up materially identical to not actually being physically able to do it. Looking “healthy” is much more important in this world than actually being “healthy.”

Which brings me to major depression. When I say I had serious depression from the time I was 11 years old, I am not kidding around. I mean that I felt like I wanted to die, and came close to acting on that wish, enough times that it really did threaten my life, and the rest of the time felt like walking through rapidly hardening cement. Depression was like a pack of trolls living in my brain alternately spewing razorblades and ether, telling me I was complete garbage and deserved nothing but censure, then taking a vacuum hose and sucking up the last of my adrenaline so I couldn’t fight back. It cost me time from work, it cost me friends, it cost me fun, it cost me achievement, it cost me relationships, and most of all, it cost me ME. Being fat is a million, billion times better than that any day of the week, let me tell you.

And then we come to Asperger syndrome. I have gone back and forth on whether I consider this a “disability” or a “difference.” There are things I’ve come to love about being aspie; I like that my brain comes up with things a neurotypical person might not. Given my very late diagnosis, though (age 44), and all the years I had to struggle with this not knowing what the hell it was, it’s been suggested to me that the severity of my depression is linked strongly to having my reality denied for so long from such a young age. (I’ve seen studies that have put the rate of suicidal ideation among aspies at around 50%; I’m not surprised.) And since so much of success in life is connected to being able to decode and respond immediately to people’s unspoken wishes, and be physically graceful, and squelch what you are really thinking and feeling for the sake of propriety, of course we aspies are usually shut out of the rat race. We must find another way to live, and tell all those expectations to go stuff themselves, or we die.

Fat, major depression, Asperger’s: linking rings. Hard to separate one from the rest. You could, if you wanted, make the argument that my true disability is the depression — and really, if I could have one of those three things “cured,” without causing myself undue harm in another department, that would be the one I would choose. I am not one of these people who romanticizes this condition; it SUCKS. There is nothing romantic about not being able to sit down with your favorite musical instrument because you think every sound you make is the sound of horseshit. There is nothing romantic about thinking that anyone who claims they like you just feels sorry for you, even if they have chosen to co-own a bed and three cats with you. There is nothing romantic about being scared to fucking death you’re going to swallow every pill in the house or go have something dry cleaned just so you can have the bag to suffocate yourself with. There is nothing romantic about feeling terminally stuck in the driveway in neutral for decades upon decades. There is nothing romantic about having to miss work, and even lose jobs, because you can’t stop crying for days even though nothing bad actually happened. You can KEEP that shit. KEEP it. I’d gain 100 more pounds if it meant I’d be guaranteed never to feel like that again. You cannot possibly imagine the sweet relief of remission unless you’ve experienced it. This, because nothing else has ever worked for me no matter how hard I’ve tried, I need doctors and their evil annoying pills to keep under control. Maybe forever. If people think that’s something about me that actually needs fixing — a disability according to the medical model — I can’t in good conscience argue.

But would the depression have gotten that bad without the sheer hate heaped on fat people (especially fat female people) in this society, or without the thousand-tiny-cuts hostility that NT people demonstrate towards those of us on the autism spectrum? I’m sure it would still have existed — it’s not like I don’t have plenty of thin, neurotypical wet blankies in my family tree — but would it have been THAT bad? Kill-myself bad? Everybody-hates-me bad? Hard to fathom. When are we going to ask, as a society, “are we making people feel shitloads worse, both physically and mentally, than we really need to?”

I’d like to know, and so would my doctors.

There Are Diets, And Then There Are DIETS

posted by meowser

Fillyjonk’s tremendous post yesterday on intuitive eating and how it doesn’t always mean eating everything you’re “allowed” to eat — and the ensuing discussion that climaxed in the question, “What if you can’t stop eating things you know are bad for you?” — got me thinking. (Ooh, dangerous.)

There’s no universally “bad for you” food unless it’s food that has been tainted in some way that will make everyone who eats it deathly ill. We’ve established that. But teetering on the precipice of codgerhood, and having created more medical records than I can count where people are put on restrictive diets for one medical condition or another, serves to remind me once again that there’s also no universally “good for you” food either, and that some food encounters that are benign for some people are less so for others. C. has had kidney stones and isn’t supposed to have spinach (or at least not very much of it). My XH has hereditary hemochromatosis and is told to avoid leafy greens. Similarly, people on blood thinners like Coumadin (a very common medication for people over 70) are told that if they do eat greens, they must eat the same amount every day or not eat them at all, so that their medication can be adjusted accordingly. But the rest of us are told that there’s no such thing as too many greens, we can knock ourselves out, and can actually be given a hard time for not eating enough of them, especially if we’re fatasses.

Some people with diabetes can eat sugar and other carbs and as long as they don’t go bonkers, it’s not a problem for them, they just adjust their insulin dosages or tweak their diets in some other way and they don’t have blood sugar spikes. Some others with diabetes find that even eating one or two bites of candy made with sugar will make their fasting glucoses soar into the 300s and beyond, or even put them in a coma. Some people with diabetes need to have sugar at a particular moment in time if they are experiencing hypoglycemia; others never get hypoglycemia at all.

People with kidney failure are told to avoid all but minimal protein. People with dysphagia (trouble swallowing) have to have pureed diets. People who are treated for heart disease in the hospital are given “heart healthy” diets which are low in saturated fat. People with dental problems need soft foods only and probably have to pass up that pizza unless someone puts it in the blender first. (Pizza shake, yummm.)

And of course, some people have food allergies or intolerances ranging from severe anaphylactic reactions to vomiting and diarrhea if they have wheat, dairy, mushrooms, shellfish, peanuts, soy, or any number of other things they don’t feel well after (or can actually die from) eating.

Me, I have PCOS. If my eating is too heavily carb-weighted, I will get foggy and sleepy. I don’t avoid any particular food entirely unless I just don’t care for it, but I do consider how certain foods will make me feel and function after I eat them. The combination of pizza and beer, for example, is restricted by me to times when I don’t have to do anything at all after I eat, because it will make me stuporous. Sometimes stuporous is nice, but not when you still have four more hours of work ahead of you. And if I haven’t been having a lot of fiber, my digestive tract pays the price and my energy can go out of whack. So I sometimes do push myself to eat more of it even if it’s not what I’m craving. It isn’t so much, “Get the brown rice, white rice is bad for you,” it’s more like, “I’d rather have white rice, but brown will be more filling, and I’ll be able to sit in my chair afterwards without bouncing up and down in it.” And sometimes I’ll get the white rice anyway and take my chances, and sometimes that will be the right decision, too, especially if I’m going to be active immediately afterwards.

The older you get, the more the odds go up that there’s going to be something you used to love to eat which you can’t chew, swallow, digest, or process the way you used to. And even a lot of younger people have health conditions for which their eating is limited by something other than personal predilection. So if that’s true for you, does that mean you have to throw IE out the window? Of course not. Whatever particular food restrictions or requirements you have, you just incorporate into your fund of knowledge about how to feed yourself.

If you have a food restriction that will cause an acute reaction if you violate it, of course, it’s a lot easier to follow that; if you know you get hives the size of NBA basketballs after eating strawberries, you’re probably not going to want to touch them no matter how tasty they look. But it gets trickier when there are no immediate sequelae to eating something your body has trouble processing, at least in the amounts you’re giving it, but the sequelae show up later in the form of impaired insulin response or sluggishness or constipation or some other decidedly non-salubrious effect. What then? Does that mean you can’t be trusted to feed yourself and need a “don’t eat” sheet?

Not hardly, say I. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with allowing the part of your brain that knows your particular body well to have final say over what goes in your mouth. For most people, that takes the form of, “You don’t want to be fat, do you? You’d better not, piggy.” But over here, where we practice earth logic rather than superstition, nobody voluntarily goes hungry to fit a certain pants size, not least because that will completely mess up your hunger responses and make you crave things (and amounts of things) you might not otherwise want. I’ve seen women on diets completely helpless in the face of a tray of day-old Costco muffins: “Get those carbs away from me!” And me, I look at the day-old Costco muffins and see…day-old Costco muffins, gag, no thanks.

The thing is, those it’s-bad/I-shouldn’t/I-want-it-even-more effects can persist for years — decades — after you cease trying to lose weight. (Remember the Ancel Keys semistarvation study? It doesn’t take much calorie restriction, or too long a period of time doing it, to potentially screw your head up but good.) That’s why not everyone can practice IE out of a book, or a blog post, without outside support (and why people with full-blown eating disorders can especially find it problematic). And that’s also why your particular brand of IE can involve your left brain as much as your right. Only it’s a matter of training your left brain not to make this about your looks or about your food choices as caste markers, so much as saying, “Is there something my body could use more of? What do I have access to right now that could satisfy that?”

It gets dicey, of course, when your access to foods your body wants is limited by finances. Sometimes I really, really want those white anchovies, but my bank account says, “Forget it.” That’s when my left brain steps in and says, “Here’s some canned sardines, you like those, too, and they’re a lot cheaper.” Maybe I won’t like them quite as much as the white anchovies, but it’s at least in the ballpark. Similarly, your life circumstances may not allow you (or whoever you live with) to do much cooking or food preparation or shopping, and sit-down restaurant meals may be a rare treat. It’s admittedly much more difficult to get a lot of dietary variety under those circumstances. In which case, I say screw it, you can only do what you can do, and you don’t owe anybody the last of your health and energy to find and chop cauliflower.

The last thing I would ever want to see is for intuitive eating principles to be something people think they’re “failing.” The whole point of doing this is to quit punishing yourself already! You don’t have to eat the exact thing that pops into your head, and that thing that pops into your head doesn’t have to be something “healthy,” or you flunk. Nobody flunks, okay? It’s perfectly understandable that some people will have to go about things a little differently for one reason or another; when you’ve had shit pounded into your head about right and wrong food from the time you were a little kid, those idees fixe can be pretty damn difficult to dispense with, especially if they’re mixed with genuinely appropriate reasons for you to avoid or restrict certain foods that your particular body has trouble with.

But maybe you can gently nudge yourself to start thinking in terms of addition rather than subtraction. C. isn’t supposed to have peanut butter either, which he loves, at least not as often as he used to have it. But he doesn’t clobber himself when he gives in and buys it and eats it more often than his doctors would approve of. Instead, he says, “What can we get next time that I can spread on bread, so I won’t automatically go to the peanut butter?” That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about here. Not forcing yourself to eat stuff you really don’t like, because as we know, you don’t get as much nutrition out of food you don’t care for. But I think you’re allowed to feel “meh” about what you’re eating and have it anyway, because that’s what’s there or because you genuinely need it for the sake of balance. If this is about loving every single bite you eat, and always picking the “perfect” thing and the “perfect” amount of it, I flunk too, believe me.

My Seat, Your Seat, His Seat, Their Seat

posted by meowser

I’m a fatass, but I have skinny partner privilege. If you are a fat woman with a thin partner, you probably have some inkling of what I’m talking about. The fact that C. is thin (and yes, neurotypical, albeit geeky) means there are probably a lot of people who think better of me on first meeting than they would if my partner was also fat. If he likes her, maybe she’s not so bad, I can hear Nice People thinking. (I suppose there are some douchehoses who wonder what’s wrong with him that he has to “settle” for me, but I put them in a separate phylum of dungbrain.)

And nowhere am I more acutely aware of skinny partner privilege than I am on an airplane. When I fly with C., I don’t have to worry that I will get stuck next to Fatphobius jerkwadius who will howl to the flight attendants that OMG HER FRIGHTENING SADDLEBAGS ARE TOUCHING MY SUPERIOR LEG MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP. Only now, I’m planning my first trip on a plane without him in about eight years, at a weight about 20 pounds higher than it was the last time I did it. (I’m going to Pittsburgh to scout out locations for a possible move; he’d be moving, too, but he’s been there already and figured it would be cheaper if only I went out this time.) And all this BS with United’s “fatties pay double and wait endlessly on standby for the privilege maybe for days, and you’ll have to book a hotel room at your own expense too if you’re stranded overnight, fatass” policy has me quaking in my 18-inch-calf boots, lemme tell ya. Even if I avoid booking United, which I plan on doing unless this meatheaded nonsense gets chucked out the window in the next week, I’ve been to Seatguru and checked it against my vintage 1997 copy of Judy Sullivan’s Size Wise. And guess what?

ALL OF THE AIRLINES’ COACH SEATS HAVE GOTTEN SMALLER.

Yes, that’s correct. If you encounter any paid media news accounts of this story, they will tell you that airline seats have stayed the same size since 1960, while we’ve just been snarfing our way into bigger and bigger sizes. (Okay, they haven’t worded it quite that way, but you know they want to.) The paid media won’t tell you this lest the lose their airline ad business, but unless they had eensy-beansy seats in 1960, which was before my time — in which case they got bigger by my first flight in 1972 before getting smaller again — I can tell you that the statement that airline seats haven’t gotten any smaller over the years is hooo-eeeee. From Size Wise:

Airline seats vary from 18.5″ to 23″ wide, depending on the aircraft and its configuration….the 727, 737, and 757s have a 3/3 configuration with 19″ seats. Airlines with 3/3/3 or 3/4/3 configurations use an 18.5″ seat.

According to Seatguru, all the major domestic carriers today use planes with 17.0″ or 17.2″ coach seat, with the exception of Jet Blue, whose seats seem positively generous at 17.8″. In other words, the chances are good that in just the last 12 years, your seat got an entire 2″ smaller. And as commenter liz said on the SP “FUnited” thread, “And it further allows them to make the seats even smaller because the problem will always be the fat ass (no matter how skinny) and not the seat.”

Exactly. I want to say to all these people who think this plan is such a hot idea: “What on earth makes you think you won’t be next?” They’ve already chopped 2″ off the seats, what’s stopping them from chopping even more and then getting to double-charge even more people? (And almost all of them female people, as Kate astutely put it, since a woman needs only wear an average pants size to be in danger of not fitting, whereas a man of average height usually needs to be going on about 400 pounds in order to have any part of his body not fit in a single seat.) All this dribbledrool of YOU CAN’T EXPECT US TO RETROFIT THE PLANES WITH BIGGER SEATS FOR THE FATASSES BLAAARGH MONEY MONEY MONEY is exactly that — dribbledrool. They already did it in the other direction. (Newsflash: Some planes already have bigger seats in them, and they could easily fly those aircraft instead. They know this. They are pulling everyone’s superior legs.)

And once again, this is coming down to — hiss, boo, groan — the very idea of the alleged “choice” involved in being a horizontally gifted individual. I personally don’t think civil or social rights have jackall to do with “choice” — I don’t give a damn if you were born Jewish or you converted, we both get to stay out of the pogrom. But unfortunately, a lot of people who have a lot of clout do use that standard for determining people’s rights, and I’m beyond certain that that is the dynamic that is happening here. Elsewhere on the “FUnited” thread (over 400 comments and counting! way to go, Shapelings!), commenter Sue reports calling up United and asking some more questions about the two-seats-for-fatties policy:

I am so angry. I just called United and politely asked if I had to have two seats and how would they know it… They said yes blah blah blah. Then I asked what about a person in a wheel chair that takes up a lot of space…would they have to buy two seats as well? He said no. I then went on to say if I got a wheelchair, then I would not have to pay for two seats? He said that was correct. I then lost it. I am shaking with rage right now.

Right. Because if you are a wheelchair user, or you have other medical equipment that causes you not to fit into a single seat, the airlines’ official stance is that it’s not your fault and you shouldn’t be punished. If they see you with an assistive device at the gate, they don’t ask if you need it because you started a barfight, or because you huffed a couple of spray cans of Aqua Net and plowed your Harley into a giant redwood; most assistive-device users need their equipment for reasons other than that, so the few with self-inflicted injuries aren’t separated out and treated unequally. (Although, of course, fatasses with assistive devices routinely get accused of having eaten their way into disability, most airline personnel will keep schtum about such thoughts even if they have them.) Probably a lot of this has not so much to do with them having the utmost respect for PWD so much as recognition that U.S. law will not be on the airlines’ side if they deny a medical equipment user equal access.

But bottom line is, people feel okay about punishing us fatasses who don’t have medical equipment, because the default assumption is that we chose to ascend to the highest possible BMI category by being oh-so-careless with our diet and oh-so-slothful with our movement. Like choosing the fries over the salad makes a difference of a hundred freaking pounds or more. Even if you are the kind of extreme binge eater who did put on serious weight bingeing, it’s still not a matter of conscious choice, for cat’s sake. You still have to have the genetic capacity to become the size you are, fries or no fries, binge or no binge. (Not to mention that you also have to have the genetic capacity to binge.) And as with the medical equipment, you can’t tell by looking who needs it because they just do and who needs it because they fucked themselves up horribly, and frankly, it shouldn’t matter anyway.

O Canada, why do you have to keep proving again and again how much smarter you are than your blowhard egotistical neighbor to the south? One person, one fare — no, that does NOT mean a 600-pound person gets to sit on you for five hours, what it means is that someone whose width, or other reason for not fitting in a single seat, is sussed out ahead of time and comped the extra seat. Yeah, that’s right. They just give it to them, pending presentation of official documentation of said physical condition at check-in. None of this mix-in-a-salad-if-you-don’t-like-it crap, which always seems to come from people who mix in a fuckload less salad than I do anyway. And anyone who thinks a second seat is just the ginchiest gift from God should be forced to be strapped against a seat divider on a cross-country trip and feel that thing digging into their back the whole time. Ow, ow, owwww. Nobody wants to be crunched up against that seat divider, trust me. It’s just that sometimes shit happens and it’s necessary.

But it’s just bewildering that people would choose to hate on us instead of unloading their frustrations on the airlines for being so incommodious. Speaking of which, that woman on Kate’s segment, who complained about her 2-year-old paying full fare? Does she know that they used to only charge kids 2-11 half fare? I know this, because when I was 12 years old circa 1975 (probably before this woman was born), my parents begged me not to wear any jewelry or makeup to the airport so I’d look younger than 12 and they could save some money. I refused. (Does any 12-year-old girl want to be mistaken for 11?) But undigressing, why would they resent us so, unless we thought we could Do Something About It? Yeah, I’ll tell you what I could do about it. I could go off my meds again, and eventually fit into one 17″ seat with canola-oil ease. That is, if I didn’t commit suicide before becoming appreciably smaller. If someone got stuck next to me when I was seriously depressed and having screaming/crying jags, even if I got to be a size 8 they’d still be lodging complaints.

And no, I’m NOT just going to stay home, either. Not all the time. Add that to the list of things I don’t owe Fatphobius jerkwadius.

What Our Ears Have Been Missing

posted by meowser

As some of you know, I sing sometimes. Here’s why I don’t do it in public very much these days: I’m a wuss. Being snickered at and visually picked over by people half my age or less is generally not how I choose to spend my spare time. I sing at home, I sing in the car, I sing in the shower. I could probably get the entirety of my four-octave range back if I really practiced. I haven’t ruled out taking music more seriously one day and finally tapping into the potential I have as a singer and a drummer (I got high praise from drum teachers for my natural ability during my initial lessons a few years ago). But at the moment, it’s kind of asleep for me, although I write down song scraps whenever I think of them and occasionally fashion a new song out of them.

But unlike Susan Boyle, who I assume you’ve all heard about as the great Cinderella story from Britain’s Got Talent, I haven’t yet reached the point where I just can’t stand it any more and I have to let it out where people can see. That’s what I saw when I first looked at her, someone who just finally snapped, someone who said, “Fuck it, I don’t have all the time in the world left. I don’t care if they laugh, let them. Give me that damn microphone already.”

Her voice really is extraordinary. Not only didn’t she drop a note, she made every single one felt. Even most professional singers aren’t that good. And carrying off a difficult, rangy musical-theatre ballad like “I Dreamed a Dream” means that Susan Boyle has been practicing her ass off, probably for decades. (I don’t know if I could sing that song myself without serious training, even in a lower key. It’s tough.) She didn’t just wake up one day and decide to do this on a lark. She’s been growing this talent, in her shower, in her car, in her anywhere that people couldn’t destroy her desire to sing by making fun of her weight and her hair and her age and her awkwardness, for years and years. It was only a matter of her getting to the point where she just had to have that microphone or it would kill her.

What really flattens me is the fact that as soon as Boyle opens her mouth — I mean, on the very first line — the audience just goes NUTS. The very same people who’d been poking each other and gigglesnorting before the music started up, they just start screaming and applauding in waves. It’s like they wanted to be wrong about her. It’s like they were relieved that their prejudices were total BS. Maybe some of them were thinking, “I guess this means I can do it too, and who cares if my boobs are too small or my nose is too big or my teeth are too crooked or my skin tone isn’t luscious or what-the-hell ever, I WANT THAT MICROPHONE TOO.” This wasn’t just a performance, it was an opening of the floodgates, the “physically imperfect” among us (if only if in their own minds) deciding that it was fucked up beyond belief that we would tell a woman she shouldn’t be heard unless she looked like a model and had the world’s most finely tuned self-marketing skills.

But why should anyone have been that shocked? Don’t we all know people who are WOW talents, who nobody’s ever heard of but us and maybe a handful of others? Do people really assume that if someone hasn’t been on television, they couldn’t possibly be worth knowing about? In this day and age? Look, every city in America (let alone gods knows how many other countries) is just teeming with talent. Just oozing with it. The average person is far more talented than they were when I was a kid. When I was little, every other mom didn’t have a three-octave vocal range, every other dad couldn’t play a killer guitar solo, everybody didn’t have a cousin or two with a screenplay that could blow every movie in Hollywood clear off the screen, everyone’s aunt wasn’t making an award-worthy documentary in film school or printing up a chapbook of brilliant poems. Now — oh, man. We couldn’t possibly fit every stunningly gifted person in the world on television, even with 200 channels, and that’s not even getting to the people who haven’t begun to develop their nascent talents yet.

It was interesting to hear BGT judge Amanda Holden say after Susan’s performance that it was a “wake-up call.” You wonder, though, what the take-home lesson will be. “Anyone can have WOW talent no matter what they look like” is a good start, but for me it goes beyond that. I wonder if they’re ever going to get around to asking, “How much vocal richness are we missing out on by insisting all our female singers be super young and super thin and super waspy-cute?” It’s not just that someone like Susan can have a great voice in spite of her age and build and looks and the vicious social snubbing she’s experienced all her life; it’s that those things made her the singer she is. Physically, certain sounds can only come from certain bodies — not that thin young women can’t be great singers, but their tone is different, and how Susan has lived is the source of her soul.

When did audiences become totally unwilling to accept sounds made by anyone who wasn’t young young young and hot hot hot? It hasn’t always been that way. Perhaps part of it is that the gene pool has created more “pretty” people than ever and that is what we are used to seeing (check out what “stunningly beautiful” women on television or in movies or magazines looked like in the 1960s and 1970s, and then look now); perhaps Photoshop and plastic surgery have made us ever intolerant of “flaws” or even obvious markers of ethnicity; perhaps the youth culture that started up in the 1960s has made “never trust anyone over 30″ such a credo that even most people over 30 buy into it. Or something else, I don’t know.

But I keep thinking about the sounds from nearly a century ago that are at the roots of much of today’s contemporary music — folk, blues (which morphed into rhythm and blues, then rock and roll, then rap, and a kajillion other things) and hillbilly (which morphed into country/western, then just plain country). Even a lot of vaudeville performers weren’t dishy young things. Now granted, most of the people who performed and recorded that stuff had the shit exploited out of them and usually weren’t compensated fairly, but they weren’t expected to be young young young and hot hot hot, either. (And even “hot hot hot” didn’t necessarily equal “no visible flesh” then, either.) In fact, if you wanted credibility in any of those music forms you couldn’t look like you had it all that easy (which people would instinctively assume if you were very young and very pretty), or no one would believe you.

Now everything’s turned on its head. You need youth, looks, thinness, and money, and lots of it, or people will openly mock you when you take that microphone in your hands. Even if your band has that scruffy boho look, your instruments and equipment have cost plenty and so has your rehearsal space and your computers and everything else you’re using to make your noise and get it out there. It’s almost impossible to be a poor, homely middle-aged singer or musician with no “fashion sense” (read: $$$$ that also has to look like you didn’t spend $$$$) now. It doesn’t occur to people how much is being missed by insisting on young young young and pretty pretty pretty, always always always. We’re missing not just the voices, but the songs, the stories from people who have really lived, not just from some cute telegenic white guy whose idea of “suffering” is not being able to get the blonde AND the redhead to sleep with him simultaneously.

And that’s just in music. Think about all the other art forms that applies to.

Are we really ready to throw all that in the trash as a society? Can Susan Boyle do that much? Or will Susan herself get sucked into the Great Prettifying Machine, being operated on and dieted down and endlessly primped to the point where she’s indistinguishable from dozens of other middle-aged celebrities, like so many others before her? That wouldn’t take away any of her considerable gifts as a vocalist, of course, but it would make an awful lot of people miss the point of her success — again, dammit, again. Let’s hope it doesn’t get lost. My own microphone can only gather dust for so long.

More Fatasspie Stuff

posted by meowser

Posting has been kind of light around here because I spent most of last week writing a huge sprawling epic (over 7000 words, or a little under three times as long as the longest post I’ve ever put up here) about Asperger syndrome and how the diagnosis changed my thinking about….well, everything, pretty much, but especially the degree to which I had internalized “normalcy fetishism” and used it as a club to beat myself about the head. And Liss put it up on Shakesville on Tuesday, in its huge sprawling entirety! And people actually read it! More than the three I would have expected to get through the whole thing.

And it’s a tribute to the kind of community Liss and company have built over there that I’ve had over 160 comments on that piece excluding my responses, and not a single commenter was abusive or nasty, even though the entire piece was very pro-neurodiversity. Maybe they’re just ace trollzappers and I never saw any of the nasty ones, but in any case, it was all very gratifying. I could feel a few minds changing, and boy, that was exciting. If you don’t have time or inclination to read it, I totally understand, it is quite the river of verbiage. But I thought I’d pull one paragraph and talk about it here a little bit, because it’s about fat:

And there’s nothing like being on the autism spectrum to remind a fatasspie that all this “last socially acceptable prejudice” stuff WRT fat really is bunkum. There is no such thing as someone who loves and respects every kind of person in the world and draws the line only at fat people, because fat means something to the hater. And what it usually means is, “we can accept people being a little different from the WASPy/able-bodied/standard-brained/sexually binary/male-identified/upper-caste/heterosexual/monogamous/youngish norm (am I leaving anything out?)…but not that different. Not different enough to make us squirm.”

I actually think being aspie made it really easy — possibly unusually easy — for me to embrace fat acceptance when I first encountered it circa 1996. Even if I didn’t know then that I was aspie yet, I still instinctively knew that being thin would never make me “normal,” would never get me invited to all the cool parties (or any of the cool parties I wasn’t invited to as a fatass, really), would never make me socially acceptable, would never make me feel like the members of my peer group of “choice,” even if my peer group consisted of other “outsiders.” I had been much thinner, and none of that had ever come close to happening to me. So I had long since let go of that part of the FOBT, since I knew it wasn’t happening. I just didn’t know why yet, exactly, and wouldn’t until I found out about the Asperger’s.

I’m also starting to realize that being aspie is one potential reason I haven’t gotten anywhere close to the rations of shit that other fat white women have reported. Some shit, yes, but there are women my size and even smaller who have been subject to far greater abuse because of their weight than I have. I used to think it was some kind of flukish accident…but who knows, maybe it isn’t. If I’m aspie, I’ve already flunked White Womanhood, in the sense that I’m not going to live up to most people’s expectations of how white women are “supposed” to think and react no matter what weight I am, so why bother giving me a hard time about it? As it is with age removing me for good from the wolf-meat category, and thus not attracting anywhere near the amount of panting commentary from strange men that I used to get (and I don’t miss it, believe me), male-identified people are going to be roughest on you if they can convince themselves that if you just did things “right” (like diet your brains out), you’d be attractive and appealing enough as a white chick for them to want you around — as a friend, lover, employee, client, whatever. If you are too old, or too odd (or other too-something-elses I’ve not experienced) for that to be happening anyway, your fat ass is less likely to register with them; they’re going to notice the other “too whatevers” about you first. Privilege sometimes runs on a weird-ass track, let me tell you.

And I’m going to say something here that might surprise some of you. If you asked me which has stigmatized me more, being fat or being aspie, I’m going to say that overall, being aspie has, because it’s been there every minute of my life and impacted every minute of my life whether I was fat, thin, or in between. And if I contracted a wasting illness in my old age that cost me a bunch of weight, enough to make me “normal size,” aspiedom would still be with me. You might ask, then, well, why is she blogging about fat if she thinks that?

And it’s a good question. I started blogging here before I got my diagnosis, but it’s kind of an interesting deal that I knew I was fat when I was 8, but didn’t know I was aspie until I was 44. You just don’t hear about autism-spectrum issues with the relentless frequency and intensity that you hear about fat, fat, fatfatfat, from every blithering corner of the planet. Every goddamn magazine and newspaper and anywhere else they sell advertising isn’t plastered with ads about “how to get rid of your Asperger’s.” Television isn’t littered all frigging day long with “here’s how I became neurotypical and so can you if you try hard enough” stories. (”How I made my kid NT” stories are another deal, of course, but even they haven’t attained wallpaper status, not yet.) The autism-related issues are mostly kind of buried, underneath the surface, hidden in the matrix of human interactions and behavior. I’ve never once had anyone say to me, “I don’t want you around because you’re aspie” or anything even remotely like it; it was always more like, “God, but you’re strange, I can’t figure it out.” Fat was something I couldn’t help but know about; you’d have to literally be raised by wolves without electricity not to, and kids are getting the message these days even younger than I did. People on the autism spectrum are often blamed for not trying hard enough to pass for NT, but not so much for not actually becoming NT. Big difference.

But getting thin, as far as I’m concerned, is just another form of “passing.” Just because you can temporarily force your body to look like that of someone who maintains a much smaller size eating and exercising more like the way you used to than the way you do now that you have to frigging starve, doesn’t make you biologically all that much like that thinner person. Straining to force your weight down is very, very different from being a lower weight naturally (or even attaining a lower weight simply by eating in a way that works better for your body), and it boggles my mind that fat people are actually expected to live that way if they want full personhood. And probably the fact that my aspieness makes physical discomfort magnified about tenfold just makes me dig in my heels even more about wanting to prevent as much of it as possible for as long as possible.

Furthermore, I’m sure that if they really did come up with a special diet that rendered non-NT people temporarily NT, kinda Flowers for Algernon-style, and achieved temporary but dramatic results for millions of us, they’d start shoving it down autistic people’s throats too, and getting pissed and resentful at us for refusing it. Don’t you want to be normal? What’s the matter with you? What’s that old proverb again? “The only thing worse than missing paradise is a short trip through it.” Even if it really WAS all that and a travel mug of Super Sauce to be “normal,” which I don’t believe anyway, wouldn’t losing your supply of Super Sauce just feel that much worse than never having had it in the first place? When you’re starving, you don’t sit there and sigh with happiness thinking about the most awesome meal you ever had, do you? If you’re desperately lonely, you don’t sit around smiling about when you were voted Homecoming Queen all those years ago, right? Of course not. That runs counter to every instinct we have. So why would I want to knock myself out, risk what’s left of my physical and mental health, trying to get my fingers on something that’s just going to slip through my grasp anyway? That just sounds kinda…dopey. At least it does to my admittedly unusually-wired noggin.

Brain difference, body difference. Body difference, brain difference. It all kinda works together, doesn’t it?

News Maybe We Can Use? Introducing MagCloud, A Print-On-Demand Glossy Magazine Service

posted by meowser

Today’s New York Times has an article on MagCloud, a new service (still in beta) by Hewlett-Packard, which allows users to create full-color glossy magazines and sell them print-on-demand style, charging 20 cents a page when a customer orders a copy. (I assume they mean 20 cents for each side of the page, although the Web site they have up now is so annoyingly sketchy that they don’t specify that. But I’m deducing that if they say a magazine is, say, 52 pages long and they charge $10.65 for it, that means 26 sheets of paper printed on both sides plus cover.)

I found this very exciting to read about, even if it’s just an opportunity smelled by H-P to sell more ink. People in fat acceptance have been saying for years that they crave a four-color fat-related glossy magazine with fatshion pictorials in it. Well, maybe this is an opportunity for someone to put one together! (Or any other fat-related magazine where full-color artwork would be a major feature.) It doesn’t have to be a huge investment any more to try it and see how it works, maybe even do a one-off, or an annual, or a quarterly…whatever anyone wants.

No advertising means that fewer pages are needed for content, too. (Their terms of use say the site is for “personal use” only and that work on behalf of “third parties” is “strictly prohibited.” Once again, somewhat sketchy writing, but “no paid advertising allowed” is strongly implied.) Obviously that makes it a more expensive item for individual purchase than one that is supported by advertisements, but then, as a publisher you don’t have the headaches involved with dealing with advertisers and the reader doesn’t have to wade through them, so maybe that’s a good thing.

If you’ve tried this, or think you might, let me know! I’d love to see what you put together. If I didn’t have minus-zero photography skills, I might try it myself.