2002-06-17 - 2:51 p.m.
Fat seems to be the topic du jour these, um, jours. Our personal fat, fatness in fandom, fatness on the screen. It was also, coincidentally enough, one of the topics of a fringe festival play I saw in Montreal this weekend, Maria Glanz's "See Me Naked". She talks about nakedness and body issues, in a way that is more entertaining and less formulaic than this description makes it sound. At one point she says something along the lines of:
"My friend Katy calls these "luxurious worries". This preoccupation with how our bodies look, how they measure up - these are the worries of white, middle-class women, who don't have to worry about whether they can afford enough to eat. Worries that are a privilege compared to the situation women face in many other countries, where it's the safety of your body that is a daily concern, or countries where you can be stoned for showing a bare arm. And it's true, I guess. {small, rueful smile}. But... Katy is skinny. Naturally skinny. She used to be a model."
And that bit made me a little weepy around the edges. Because it's true, all of it. It's true that our obsession with image and physical appearance *is* the hallmark of an incredibly privileged society, and we're lucky if that's the worst thing we have to worry about. And yet... the worry and pain that comes along with not looking the way you are "supposed" to look in this culture is a real one for all of us who feel it. Real, and powerful, and dangerous, and as much as I might tell myself how lucky I am in other respects, I can't dismiss my pain and that of other women I know as a 'luxury'.
I keep thinking back to something I saw on a talkshow once. They were talking to a man who had lost a huge amount of weight, and as they talked I got angrier and angrier. There was something about the attitude both of the host, and of the studio audience. It wasn't just the inevitable, "fat is bad and ugly and you are bad and ugly if you have it," which god knows I am at least used to. What really struck me was the *reverence* with which they listened to his tale. The usual studio-audience catcalls and applause and laughter died away, and they all just sat there in hushed silence, while the host spoke to him in reverent church-like tones…
And don’t get me wrong, this man had clearly lived with struggle, and achieved something that was difficult and that he had fought hard to achieve. 400 pounds is a *lot* of weight to lose. But come on, people - it's not like he pulled a whole family from a burning house. It's not like he discovered the cure for cancer. Or that he was a war criminal who had seen the error of his ways and spent the rest of his life trying to rescue people from terror and oppression.
But that was how the audience was reacting. As though this was the greatest achievement that they could imagine. As though weight loss was some kind of salvation. And it all made me wonder just what it is that our culture *sees* in fat, that they have this kind of attitude towards it. Because I don’t think it can just be the fat itself they are reacting to. I don't think things like fashion, whether in clothes or body types, are arbitrary. I think they link in to all sorts of things that are happening in our culture and our psyche as a society. And this is where I lapse into my own crackpot theories, and people start to edge nervously away from me (grin)...
I sometimes think that our morbid fear of fat comes from the out-of-control consumer nature of our society. We are being constantly urged to consume - to spend money, to acquire things, to buy the newest and the latest and the fastest and the coolest. We are told that it is our economic *duty* as citizens to consume. What's more, the things that we consume lack any real 'nutritional value' - obsolescence is built in, and surface is everything, with nothing built to last, or built for content, not surface. We're force-fed a constant diet of image without substance, and it leaves us both bloated and hungry. And that just makes us consume more and more…
And I think that people know at a gut level that this is wrong. They can sense that things are going off the rails in the way we live, that our lives, not to mention the planet, are bloated with empty material things or the drive to acquire these material things, possessions that only fill the appetites we are told we *should* have, appetites contrived and shaped by marketing and media until we don’t know any more what our real hungers are. So maybe people react so badly to fat because on the inside they *feel* fat, they sense the way their lives have been filled with empty calories and their appetites twisted out of true. So to confront fat means coming painfully close to confronting those feelings about their own lives and their own culture, and that's never a comfortable experience.
I wonder that about anorexia sometimes too. There are lots of good studies out there that link it to feelings of loss of control, and perfectionism, and fear of adulthood. But sometimes I wonder if part of it isn't simpler than that. If these girls starve themselves because they already *are* starving - in the midst of the most affluent culture in the world, with food on the table and clothes on their back, they are dying of a lack of nourishment and want someone to *notice*, to *feed* them already dammit...
