The-F-Word.org

I’ve got lots of school stuff to catch up on, so here’s a quick round-up of related topics in the blogosphere and news.

Congratulations to Harriet Brown, who announced this week that HarperCollins has purchased the rights to her next book, Brave Girl Eating. The memoir follows the Brown family’s struggle to cope with daughter Kitty’s anorexia. You can read Kitty’s story here. A brief summation of the book:

When Brown’s daughter developed anorexia at 14, Brown refused to accept the dismal track record of traditional approaches to eating disorders; this is the story of her family’s triumph over the disease, weaving together a parent’s perspective, a journalist’s point of view and issues of neurobiology and genetics. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Brown wrote about her family’s experience in the Times Magazine in 2006.

I’m still accepting blogs to be added to the Eating Disorders Digest feed. If your blog addresses eating disorders at least in part and you want to be added to the list, leave a comment here with your blog RSS feed address. Note: I have had to delete a blog off the list that ends every post with a running count of the blogger’s current weight, calories consumed, and exercise undertaken. While this feed is not intended to be anti-reality, I also want it to be as safe a place as possible for those struggling with eating disorders to go to. Detailing your own struggles with an eating disorder is fine, but I think posting a running count of your stats and weight loss goals aren’t appropriate for this feed, either. Another note: if you’d like to be added to the feed, please embed the feed on your site first. The feed is intended to be a cross-collaborative project, for both bloggers and readers of our blogs. You can view the feed here. Also, if you haven’t already, join the Eating Disorder Studies Yahoo group.

Size-zero models form a convenient coathook upon which the media like to blame many an eating disorder. But for me and others like Naomi Hooke, the development of our eating disorders has very little to do with ultra-thin models. Hooke explores the forces that led to her development of anorexia at age 11 in the British Independent - finding it had nothing to do with size-zero models.

Anorexia has often been perceived as a quest for model-like beauty, as a teenage fad or as a diet gone wrong. It has even been described as a lifestyle choice. Seldom is anorexia acknowledged as the life-threatening medical condition that it is… Sufferers are often presumed to pour over the pages of glossy magazines and starve themselves in their aspiration to become glamorous, thinner-than-thin sex goddesses. From my own experiences and from those of numerous other eating disorder patients I have met, I can say unequivocally that nothing could be further from the truth. Beauty has very little to do with eating disorders, and the desire to be thin is merely one of many symptoms. Rarely can a single “cause” be identified.

Although the fashion industry may be rife with anorexia, the majority of eating disorder patients have not become ill through catwalk influences. And nor are they models.

And finally, go and read 18-year-old Katie Muller’s fantastic essay “F.A.T.” over at the other TheFWord site:

There is no good reason why women should be so appalled by their natural size and inherent store of fat (women naturally have a higher percentage of fat on their bodies than men) but there is a simple reason why they are. We live, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, in a man’s world. We are still, in a million small ways and plenty of big ones, submissive, convinced of our inferiority and full of contempt for our own sex. And to fit into the small space left for us in this man’s world, we have no choice but to shrink.

Shrink to fit, we are told, and reap the glorious benefits of success, money and even love. And when that never happens, reap the benefits of dying exhausted and being buried thin.

Muller’s conclusions on why aesthetic beauty standards are more stringent for women than for men fall in line with my own research interests: Women are encouraged to change their bodies so they don’t have the time nor the effort to change the world. As Miller explains:

Self-starvation is encouraged because as long as fat is seen as the enemy and ‘beauty’ the prize at the end of the rainbow, men are safe and women are trapped. Suddenly, from this perspective, eating disorders seem like an obvious solution, a practical reaction to society’s demands. They are so perfectly suited, in fact, to the job of undermining women that it would not be unreasonable to suppose they had been invented for that very purpose.

Muller, who also struggled with anorexia, understands what so many women in similar situations have come to understand: that “thin enough” is simply a journey, never a destination reached; that one can never be “thin enough” or “pretty enough” or “good enough” because the standards constantly shift, become higher and harsher. As she explains it:

We are all bashing our heads against the same brick wall. What are we trying to do? Break down the wall? It is not working is it? Perhaps that’s because we don’t need to break down the wall at all. We just need to stop bashing our heads against it.

Sage advice, indeed.

Comments? Critiques? Leave your thoughts on the stories above in the comments below.

I do not often discuss my own personal dietary choices here, although I may discuss them on other sites in which I feel they are welcomed and appropriate. The reasons why are primarily twofold: Many readers here are actively battling with or recovering from dysfunctional relationships with food and I respect their struggles. My consistent platform has always been and will always remain that food itself is irrelevant; it is rather our relationships with food that are key. In that sense, what I had for dinner last night is moot.

My personal dietary choices are also informed by influences and beliefs that are unique and personal to me. I became vegetarian initially as a reaction to my eating disorder, but later became a committed vegetarian out of moral and ethical concern for animals and the environment, as well as the desire to live a cruelty-free lifestyle. I also identify as Buddhist, and because of my spiritual beliefs, I do not eat meat, drink alcohol or imbibe other drugs, and I try to do things that I feel do not harm other people, creatures or the environment. Because of this and other health concerns, I try to eat organic when I can afford to do so and I eat minimal processed foods. I also try to patronize businesses whose views are best aligned to my own and I donate support, both financial and otherwise, to organizations I feel promote causes I also believe in.

My spiritual beliefs, as well as my political, environmental and feminist ethos, are my own personal choices. Just as I hope others will respect my right to make choices that are right for me, I also hope I respect the rights of others to make choices they feel are best for them. This is why I do not include vegetarianism or alcohol abstinence or eco-consciousness as part of my fat rights or eating disorders awareness activist platforms and I think I have been largely successful in doing so.

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I’ve always liked Christina Ricci as an actress, and after reading a Blackbook interview with her, I like her as a woman, too. Says Christina:

“I think people are learning to actually aspire to be objectified. It’s like the highest form of flattery for teenage girls. The culture we live in right now seems to reward behavior that we used to frown upon. We used to teach our daughters not to be like this…

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen to this generation of children. I just know that things seem wrong to me. I mean, I just feel like sexism is alive and well, and misogyny. And we all like to pretend that it’s not. That makes me feel a little crazy.”

The husband and I walked last night around a popular outdoor air shopping/entertainment plaza. A kiosk sold t-shirts with phrases like “I’m a virgin - but this is an old t-shirt” and “Who says size doesn’t matter?” in girl sizes. My 14-year-old cousin - the one who idolizes Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera but blanks on Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan - looks and dresses older than I do and I’m teetering precariously close to 30. I once mentored a 13-year-old, average-weight biracial girl from my city’s projects who was extremely smart in math and science, and yet constantly downplayed her academic skills while lamenting how fat she was (because other kids told her so).

From body-baring bikinis for girls as young as 6, sexual dolls designed for girls ages 4 - 8, tweens posing in suggestive and provocative ways in magazines and the sexual antics of young celebrity role models, what kind of messages are young girls receiving today on how they ought feel and act? As a report released last year by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls reveals, those messages can be devastating.

Instead of collectively wringing our hands while bemoaning the sad state society has devolved to, I’m more interested in what we can do to fix the problems. The challenge seems daunting: how can one person or even a group of people tackle a mega-billion dollar media and entertainment industry? How can we work to change national opinions and culturally ingrained beliefs? I think the answer starts one girl at a time.

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The belief that upward social mobility in the United States can be achieved with mere hard work and determination has existed almost as long as the country itself. America’s Protestant worth ethic has been encapsulated by people like Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of stories involving poor young men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve great success.

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

The world collectively sighs as it wonders why fat people won’t just practice dietary restraint, eat healthier foods, exercise and pay scads of money for diet programs, even if such programs have been shown to be largely ineffective. Why, oh why can’t and won’t fat people pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become thin, socially acceptable, and responsible citizens?

Maybe it’s because fatness isn’t always caused by inactivity and a scarfing down of Twinkies. As anyone who has struggled with weight will attest, weight loss and gain aren’t always simple matters of “choice.” Here are some physiological reasons why some people are fat:

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I admit it – I like to read the gossip scoops on MSNBC brimming with the latest Britney Spears debacle or rumor of an impending George Clooney marriage. But in reading about the recent lunch of pals Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham, I have to wonder if sharing the details of their food choices – they shared a green salad sans dressing, one piece of fish, a side of steamed spinach and one regular Coke – is really all that fascinating to folks.

Then several days ago, several other bloggers and I were discussing this recent post on the blog Every Woman Has an Eating Disorder. The blog author instinctively knew a coworker was pregnant long before she told her. How? She noticed she had gained weight. Her male coworker, however, remained completely oblivious. Women are socially conditioned to *notice* these sorts of things… the slightest bit of weight gain, a new hairstyle, new outfit, etc… Women are not only cognizant of the bodies of others’, they also tend to scrutinize them more closely. It’s understandable why this phenomenon exists amongst women: When you’re groomed since birth to fit a specific cultural mold, you tend to unwittingly internalize it.

I’ve never had many “girl” friends – most of my friends have either been guys or women like me, who tend to buck feminine stereotypes. Maybe this is why I’ve never engaged in the kind of competitive ordering highlighted in this Allure article.

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Readers here are probably familiar with the awful and scary Faith Hill photoshopping controversy that circulated the blogosphere recently. And of course, many of us have seen Dove’s Evolution video, which chronicles the transformation of an ordinarily pretty woman to billboard supermodel in under 60 seconds.

But you’d think a celebrity like Keira Knightly, who already fits a cultural mold unattainable for 98 percent of American woman, would need no additional digital manipulation to airbrush her into even more of an unrealistic perfection. Apparently not, according to This is London’s Evening Standard news.

The news organization reports that editors from top-selling “glossies” are to hold a summit to discuss a voluntary code on digital manipulation. The concern comes as the British Fashion Council demands magazines act after last fall’s Model Health Inquiry gave a “stinging” critique of the industry’s unhealthy size-zero culture. The move also comes at a time when eating disorder specialists issue cautions that cultural obsessions with extreme slimness are pushing more and more people into dangerous diet-binge cycles and even eating disorders.

Professor Janet Treasure, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said such disordered behavior may permanently alter the way people’s brains react to “rewards,” making them susceptible to other addictions, such as drugs and alcohol.

And finally! Someone with a degree makes the connection between the promotion of a thin ideal and the so-called obesity epidemic. Whenever I’m interviewed by reporters about issues related to obesity, I’m inevitably asked for my thoughts on why America is fatter. I always respond by asking, “What came first? The so-called obesity epidemic or dieting?” Treasure also makes this chicken-and-egg connection in the British Journal of Psychiatry, where she also urges the British government to tackle society’s obsessive eating habits.

“Although it may take time to change the ‘thin ideal’ we should remember what has been achieved with cigarette smoking. People are just beginning to listen to the wealth of scientific evidence about the harm that fashion industry images cause.”

Treasure isn’t the only one speaking out. The anti-obesity scourge has attracted the concern of the American Medical Association and most recently, this Canberra Times editorial for the potential harm such zealousness may have on young, impressionable children. As editors there opined:

Education about healthy eating and exercise is an important tool for any young mind, but how much of it now veers to scare tactic? And how much of it takes into account the rising levels of eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia?

Regular blog readers may remember a September posting on a publication of the Women’s Forum Australia titled “Faking It: The Female Image in Young Women’s Magazines.” The report found that thin, sexualized and digitally enhanced images of women are linked to poor body image, depression, anxiety and eating disorders amongst girls and women and contributes to self-harming behaviors and poor academic performances. For young teenage girls, such images inspires desires to lose weight and the initiation of dieting, regardless of current body weight. Finally, the five year study found that reading dieting advice in magazines was associated with eating disordered behaviors in teenage girls.

As for the British magazine summit, eating disorders activist Susan Greenwood isn’t holding her breath. The chief executive of the eating disorder charity Beat warned that the industry - much like the Council of Fashion Designers of America - has a history of paying lip service to the issue. As she noted:

“There was a summit at Downing Street back in 2000 on digital manipulation and body image issues with fashion magazine editors and what’s changed since then? Nothing.”

Change is glacial, for sure, but for our sake and the sake of future generations, I prefer Treasure’s more positive outlook.

While looking for an old paper yesterday, I stumbled across some notes I made while researching women’s magazines in the 1950s for articles and advertisements related to women, food and body image. I thought I’d share a few snippets here from the notes I made. Many of these would be hilariously funny if they weren’t the same kinds of things we still see in magazines and the media today.

Ladies Home Journal Jan. 1957
“The Diet That Turned Me into a Model”
As told to Dawn Crowell Norman

“Every time I see a young girl who is overweight, I want to tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Let me tell you about my own life as a fatty – let me help! …Roy, my husband, would never have looked twice at the old 175-pound Linda… When I am occasionally tempted to eat more than I should, it’s Roy who puts his foot down! ‘Don’t forget,’ he teases, ‘you were once a fatty!’”

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Ladies Home Journal May, 1957
“Is College Education Wasted on Women?”
Dr.Nevitt Sanford

“Psychology and psychiatry have contributed their share to the notion that the best way for a girl to show that she is healthy, wholesome, mature, well-adjusted and the like is to get married and have children.”

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Good Housekeeping Aug., 1958
“How to Bring Up Perfect Little Ladies with the help of Wash and Wear”
Janet Livingstone

“Being a lady is a life’s work, and the sooner your daughter begins mastering the tricks of the trade, the better. Once she has discovered the sorcery of a smile and the magic of ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ she’s ready to go on to the next lesson: the gentle art of looking like a million bucks.

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Good Housekeeping Aug, 1958
“The Date Line: Facts and Fancies for the Girl in School”
Jan Landon

“’Calorie wisors’ are new defense weapons developed by some N. Carolina boys to protect their wallets at drive-in restaurants… the boys attach a mirror to the back of the car’s right-hand sun visor; put next to it a list of calorie values of typical items on the menu - hamburger with ten french fries, 450; banana split, 530; Coke, 75; etc. - and slyly suggest girls check their makeup before ordering!”

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In his Husband and Wife Diet Cookbook (1955), Dr. P.W. Punnett suggests one way for women to shed pounds is to simply stop “constantly nibbling candy and nuts and cake and cookies between meals and in addition to their regular meals.” Whereas, he continued, a woman most often gains weight simply because she eats “twice as much as she really needs” – primarily, “foods like pie, cake, ice cream, candy, nuts, mayonnaise, and sweet desserts” – overweight husbands ought not to “be ashamed if the pounds have sneaked up on you.” He attributed men’s weight gain to extra-fatty meats, gravies, alcohol and inactivity due to work-related advancements.

CNN Headline news tonight ranted about a site that encourages adolescent girls as young as seven to give virtual dolls breast implants, dress them in lingerie and put them on crash diets. The UK-based ‘Miss Bimbo’ web site describes itself as a “virtual fashion game for girls” and encourages them to compete against each other to become the “hottest, coolest, most famous bimbo in the whole world.”

[Girls] are told “stop at nothing,” even “meds or plastic surgery,” to ensure their dolls win.

Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game’s clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars.

Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site. And bagging a billionaire boyfriend is the most desirable way to earn the all important “mula” or bimbo dollars.

The advice on feeding the dolls is even more spurious, encouraging them to feed the dolls “every now and then” even though they want to keep their Bimbos “waif thin.”

My husband registered for an account - with no urging from me, let me add. The user console says the target weight for his “bimbo” is 127 pounds with an ideal height of a “slinky 5′6″.” This combination would result in a BMI of 20.5, the very low end of what the U.S. government considers to be average. His “bimbo’s” IQ is listed at 70, which signifies her to be mentally retarded.

Edit: With his initial $1,000 Bimbo dollars, Brandon purchased and fed his “bimbo” vegetables and had her go dancing. She gained more than 2 pounds in two hours. What kind of message does this send to young, impressionable girls if vegetables make their dolls gain weight?

The British site claims to have nearly 200,000 players, most of whom are girls aged between 7 and 17. The game is free to play, but if contestants “fail to find a boyfriend to be [their] sugar daddy and hook [them] up with a phat expense account!” they have to send phone text messages at $3 a pop or use PayPal to top up their accounts.

Apparently the site isn’t a new and disgusting phenomenon; it’s sister web site “Ma Bimbo” launched last year has been roundly criticized by dieticians and parents. One parent threatened the creators with legal action after his daughter ran up a $200 cell phone bill without his knowledge.

Meanwhile the site owners, two college-age men who also appeared on CNN news claiming the site to be “harmless fun,” insist the site does not promote boob jobs and crash dieting, but rather “reflects real life.” Hmm… waif-thin, big-breasted, mentally retarded women bagging billionaire boyfriends and dressing in sexy lingerie. Is this real life or some college boy’s fantasy?

During The Morning Show with Mike & Juliet in which Mo and I appeared alongside the one-woman-anti-obesity-organization-founder MeMe Roth, Roth didn’t quite seem to get the connections between feminism and fat rights or feminism and body size acceptance or feminism and eating disorders or feminism and well, anything else. Her exact words were, according to Paul’s analysis: “…somehow obesity and feminism are connected…”

This is, of course, amongst a great number of other things MeMe Roth doesn’t quite *get* that make perfect sense to logical and rational folk not blinded by zealous fanaticism.

I am a feminist. I am not ashamed to identify as a feminist, unlike many other women on my college campus. In fact, part of the reason this blog is named as it is, is because feminism has inextricably come to be known as the dreaded “F” word, as if the title of feminist itself is pejorative. It just happened to be oh-so convenient that fat and food also started with the letter F, making for a titillating blog title. Hence, the birth of The-F-Word.

For anyone who remains baffled by the inclusion of feminism in my platform, perhaps you should start with this New York Times article (h/t Sweetmachine).

A new study finds that women who describe themselves as feminists are more forgiving than other women when assessing the attractiveness of women who are either very underweight or very heavy.

Writing in the journal Body Image, researchers said the findings added evidence to the argument that women who considered themselves feminists might be less likely to be taken in by the notion that the most important thing for women is to be thin. That belief, especially in younger women, can lead the way to an eating disorder.

Next, you may also want to check out Susie Orbach’s seminal work, Fat is a Feminist Issue, or Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth or Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project or any number of books that also address the issue.

There’s more to weight and feminism, too, that the study or the article doesn’t address. My graduate thesis focuses on the evolution of beauty and aesthetic standards for women as they evolve in tandem with the women’s rights movement. As I shared in a snippet of a recent paper, weight control and standards act as a form of social control, filling women’s time and attention, keeping them busy and hence distracted from activities that risk disrupting an established gender order. “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty,” writes Naomi Wolf. It is “an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

Eating disorders do not discriminate by gender, race or age, but of cases reported, about 90 percent of them are female. It is no irony and no coincidence that a sizable number of our nation’s best and brightest girls and women turn to food and weight and eating disorders to express themselves, self-destructing in the process. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg aptly notes, “Sadly, the cult of diet and exercise is the closest thing our secular society offers women in terms of a coherent philosophy of self.”

In short, society encourages women to change their bodies so they don’t have the time nor the effort to change the world. This is why I am a feminist. This is why my site and my eating disorders awareness, body size acceptance and fat rights platforms are feminist.

It seems fat-hating advice columnists are on a rampage this week. First Dan Savage, now Ask Margo.

If you, like me, had no clue who Ask Margo is, here’s a primer: Margo Howard is the daughter of Eppie Lederer, who wrote an advice column as Ann Landers for more than 40 years. Howard spent eight years writing the Dear Prudence column for the online magazine Slate. She now answers readers’ questions about life and love using her own name, Dear Margo, which appears on Yahoo news.

Today’s Ask Margo column is titled “When the Truth Hurts,” and the letter writer asks:

DEAR MARGO: I have a friend at work with whom I am relatively close. She regularly talks about how she can’t wait to get married and how her house will look and the kids she will have. The problem is that she is extremely overweight and does not take any care with her appearance. She comes to work with clothes that appear not to have been washed recently, no makeup, and sometimes her long hair is still wet. I am surprised she is still employed, but she is out of the public eye and does a good job.

Do I talk to her about her appearance and hygiene, or do I just keep my words to myself?

Appropriate answer, short and quick: “Keep your nosy mouth shut and your critical opinions to yourself unless asked.”

But since everyone knows those poor fat women are just delusional and in dire need of someone to constructively point out just how very fat they are, Margo recommends otherwise:

DEAR CON: This is one of the challenges of friendship: when to risk hurting someone so that she, or he, can confront what may be a blind spot in order to make a necessary change.

In the situation you describe, where the friendship is deeper than office cordiality, I would be inclined to have the difficult discussion — because without it, this girl has no hope of getting closer to the life she aspires to.

As gently and supportively as possible, tell her she is doing nothing to advance her goals and, in fact, is sending signals that say “I don’t care.” Suggest that she would have a better shot at gaining a loving partner if she were to deal with her weight and her presentational self, and look as though she wanted to be her best self. (You might wind up as her coach.)

If she is resistant to your suggestions, at least you’ll know you did what you could to be a helpful friend.

Helpful friend? Gee, I’ve had enemies who’ve done much the same sort of thing. If one of my so-called friends ever said such a thing to me, I’d be tempted to punch her in the face. (Ask Margo is not liable for any violence that occurs as the result of her ill-informed and very bad advice).

Oh, woe to the fat girl, who “has no hope” of achieving what surely every woman aspires to. If only she loses weight, pretties herself up and fixes her hair, then, of course, she too can have the female American dream of the perfect nuclear family.

The only weight CON’s friend ought to drop is her dead-weight, superficially smug and overbearing so-called “concerned friend.” And a true “loving partner” will love CON’s friend for who she is, not who she could be once she loses weight and puts on a mask of make-up.

At least there’s one advice columnist who seems to be genuinely trying. Check out Robin Abraham’s - a.k.a. the Boston Globe’s Miss Conduct - ingenuous call for how to address the issue of fat people who use public mass transit.