This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, official sponsors of the Fatcunt Army production of Fats!
Recommended Reading:
[TW for fat hatred] Marianne: Keep Leveling Up
[TW for Tiller murder] Stephanie: Quote of the Day: Rachel Maddow
Steve: "This is the world that Fox News has created."
[TW for violence] Peter: White House Focuses on Domestic Violence
[TW for homophobia] Andy: Texas NBC Affiliate Asks, 'Will Gays Destroy America?'
And Digby makes the case for defensive voting.
Leave your links in comments...
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
Yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about the continuing need to honor the resolution's as-yet unfulfilled promise to meaningfully engage and involve women in peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peace building:
Women's participation in [peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peace building] is not a "nice thing to do." It's not as though we are doing a favor for ourselves and them by including women in the work of peace. This is a necessary global security imperative. Including women in the work of peace advances our national security interests, promotes political stability, economic growth, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Just as in the economic sphere, we cannot exclude the talents of half the population, neither when it comes to matters of life and death can we afford to ignore, marginalize, and dismiss the very direct contributions that women can and have made.Full transcript available here.
[Trigger Warning: Eliminationism, Violence, Highly Disturbing]
The children in Midland School District (Arkansas), that is. Clint McCance, school board member and local business owner, took to Facebook recently to protest Spirit Day and the existence of LGBTQI people. Said McCance in his status update (all spelling original to McCance):
“Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed therselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE.”After someone commented "Because hatred is always right....", McCance responded:
“No because being a fag doesnt give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then dont tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. I dont care how people decide to live their lives. They dont bother me if they keep it to thereselves. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. If you arent against it, you might as well be for it.”After that, someone else expressed the sentiment that he should STFU and what if someone's kids are reading his bullshit (ok, slight paraphrase) and, of course, he responded:
“I would disown my kids if they were gay. They will not be welcome at my home or in my vicinity. I will absolutely run them off. Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs. See it infects everyone.”You, McCance, should not be welcome in the vicinity of civilised society, much less be a sitting member of a school board. I went looking for contact information for Midland School Board but it appears the district has scrubbed that information from their site. There is this site the district also has but there isn't school board contact information.
The purpose of the Arkansas Department of Education is to provide the highest quality leadership, service, and support to school districts and schools in order that they may provide equitable, quality education for all students in Arkansas public schools. With a staff of approximately 300 professionals, the ADE is firmly committed to this mission.Polite, yet firm, generally works best--even though McCance's comments were absolutely rage-inducing.
[Trigger warning for body policing, disordered eating, fat hatred.]
"Maura Kelly is a very provocative blogger. She was an anorexic herself and this is a subject she feels very strongly about."—Joanna Coles, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, on standing by the magazine's contributor Maura Kelly, who penned a detestable fat-hating piece in which she claimed to "find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room."
Coles, as Kelly herself in her failful apology, is invoking Kelly's history of disordered eating in the most ignorant and opportunistic way. The implication that all superfat people ("morbidly obese," as Kelly assured us she was exclusively speaking about, to justify her bigotry) arrived at our respective weights via disordered eating is flatly inaccurate. Not all of us do.
And even worse than that repeated expression of wrongity-wrongness is the fact that Kelly and Coles are relying on it in order to, unbelievably, try to cast Kelly as some sort of ally to the superfat. "This is a subject she feels passionate about," where "this" equals disordered eating.
Well. That's certainly an interest attempt to rewrite history, but I haven't forgotten (in 24 hours) that Kelly was not writing about disordered eating, but about her visceral revulsion at my and other superfat people's very existence in her presence.
And, somehow, I'm just not feeling the ally love.
FAIL.
[Trigger warning for fat-shaming and discussions of body image and body policing.]
Yesterday, I wrote a post in which I shared an experience of being fat-shamed in public. One of the things that crops up in my inbox, in comments here, and in comments elsewhere, when I or another author shares an experience of being fat-shamed, is the surprise at how blatant and how frequent fat-shaming can be.
There are also vanishingly few spaces where people can share stories of being fat-shamed without fear of ridicule and/or victim-blaming—which is a tragic deficiency, since the telling of shaming stories we bury in a leaky vault somewhere beneath our sternums can be an important catharsis, a relief from the oppressive burden that is carrying around anguishing secrets. It's difficult not to succumb to fat-shaming that one internalizes without release.
So. Let us share our stories, for ourselves, and toward the goal of challenging that particular piece of thin privilege that is ignorance to the ubiquity and effects of private and public fat-shaming.
The companion thread with a discussion of engaging in fat shaming is here.
[Commenting Guidelines: Fat hatred, including admonishments to lose weight and/or suggestions about how to lose weight, is off-limits, as it is in any other thread, and will be removed and its purveyors banned. This thread is specific to fat-shaming and fat hatred; it is not a general body policing thread. However, fat-shaming is not just used against fat women and men, so thin and in-betweenie women and men who have been fat-shamed are welcome and encouraged to participate.]
[Trigger warning for fat-shaming and discussions of body image and body policing.]
Part of coming to Fat Acceptance, whether one is hirself fat or thin, is teasing out internalized fat hatred for examination and dismantlement. For most of us, fat or thin, that process includes revisiting times when we have expressed narratives of fat hatred, or fat-shamed other people—sometimes intentionally and cruelly, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes in a desperate bid for self-preservation lest a group fat-shaming turn on us.
Like telling stories of having been fat-shamed, confessing stories of having fat-shamed someone else is an important part of awareness-raising about the endemic bullying that is fat-shaming. And it's also part of the personal process of letting go of judgments—of self, of others.
So. Let us share our stories, for ourselves, and toward the goal of creating a new understanding of what fat-shaming actually is: Not a "helpful" expression of "concern," but dehumanizing bullying that robs fat people of their dignity and self-esteem.
The companion thread with a discussion of having been fat shamed is here.
[Commenting Guidelines: Engaging in fat-shaming and fat hatred here is off-limits, as it is in any other thread, and will be removed and its purveyors banned. This thread is for people who want to be engaged with ending fat-shaming, not for people interested in perpetrating it.]
[Trigger warning for violence.]
Tim Profitt, the fuckhead who stomped on activist Lauren Valle's head Monday night, explains that the whole thing is just a big misunderstanding:
In the video, it appears to some that 23-year-old Lauren Valle is wrestled down to the ground by Rand Paul Supporters and then stomped on.Yeah, see, except the police don't arrest people who haven't done anything wrong, which is probably why even though they were "alerted" to Valle's presence, they chose not to physically attack and restrain her, unlike some other violent dipshits I could mention.
But to Tim Profitt, the the situation is much different. He says what the video doesn't show is Valle's aggressive behavior. Profitt says she rushed Paul's car three different times; each time refusing to stop. He says at the time, he didn't know what she was trying to do.
"We thought she was a danger; we didn't know what she was doing."
Profitt explained that he used his foot to try and keep her down because he can't bend over because of back problems.
..."If she can hear this, all I was trying to do was hold her until police could get her."
Is it wrong that I feel relieved, that I feel thankful, that this chapter is only two pages long? "Once you've paid five dollars for a gallon of gas, three-fifty suddenly sounds like a real bargain." Yeah, and once you've read all twelve pages of chapter nineteen, the scant two in chapter twenty is like a Tuesday night rimjob.
The other nice thing is that we've made it more than half-way through the book, page number wise. This must be what Lewis and/or Clark felt like crossing the Continental Divide. It's all downhill from here. No doubt, in more ways than one.
This chapter is another cab ride. There's a lot of movement in this book. In taxis. In limos. On planes. Down halls. Up elevators. As if to suggest the story is going somewhere by virtue of the characters doing so. It's a cheap visual trick employed by filmmakers all the time. Unfortunately this is a book, not an episode of Criminal Minds.
The cab ride is nothing more than a short, silly conversation between Noah and Molly. Of course, there's the requisite proselytizing along the way. Noah suggests there was no clear indication when the NWO was going into effect, not in the Powerpoint. It's happening as they speak, according to Molly. How can she tell?
"The economy is crashing, Noah. There's no net underneath it this time. That's why they're rushing through all this stimulus nonsense, both parties. All the cockroaches are coming out of the woodwork to grab what they still can. It's a heist in broad daylight, and they don't care who sees it anymore. That's how I know.
"They've doubled the national debt since 2000, and now with these bailouts, all those trillions of dollars more—that's our future they just stole, right in front of our eyes. They didn't even pretend to use that money to pay for anything real, most of it went offshore. They didn't help any real people; they just paid themselves and covered their gambling debts on Wall Street." She looked at him. "You asked how I know it's happening now? Because the last official act of any government is to loot their own treasury."
"You're wrong—you won't be okay. No one will. If they accomplish half of what we saw on those screens then money won't protect you. Nothing will."
After a time her clasp on his hand tightened for a few seconds, but it didn't really feel like affection. It was more like the grip a person might take on the arm of the dentist's chair, or the gesture of unspoken things an old love might extend at the end of a long good-bye.
We've done this one before, but not for a long time...
What's the best compliment you've ever received?
(I totally can't answer this one, because no matter what I say, it reads like I posted the question just to crawl up my own ass, lol.)
...we're having some pretty wacky weather here.
Now, Dudley's the laziest dog in all of dogkind on a regular day, but, this morning, with the wind howling through the tree branches outside and the rain pelting against the windows, I couldn't rouse him from bed for love nor money peanut butter. When I finally managed to convince my dog it was time to get out of bed (!) and go do his morning business, the wind was so wild that we were literally dodging airborne garbage bins.
As I bent over to pick up the mess, I thought: Please Maude, do not let me die by getting hit in the head with a flying garbage can while picking up dogshit.
The wind has kept up all day, and, even for a typically windy area, this is total fuckwind. SpikeTV for Men presents XXXtreme Wind!!!11!
I like this sort of storminess, with all its electric whooshing and ominous jangling of distant windchimes. I like the sound it makes on the pavement with crunchy leaves; I like the patterns it draws across the sky with clouds of unusual color.
Of course, I have the privilege of being indoors. And human.
When I had Dudley out around noon, a squirrel with an impossibly large walnut in hir mouth ran up a tree right beside us, near the corner of the house. Zie paused, eye-level with me, clinging to the branch as the bullying wind knocked hir about, and gave me a wide-eyed look, as if to say, "What. The. Fuck." before carrying on, up onto the roof, and disappearing somewhere into the tops of the trees in the backyard.
Since we're on the fat tip today already, I thought I'd take a moment to note that I am absolutely certain it's just a coincidence that the hate mail I'm getting from Dan Savage readers—who evidently can't read a byline—is loaded with fat hatred.
Typically matched with misogyny.
"Fat bitch" and "fat cunt" are, as always, favorites among my correspondents, who are always helpful in reminding me that I am both fat and female.
In case I forgot.
[Trigger warning for violence.]
"I'm sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand's safety."—Tim Profitt, the fuckhead who stomped on activist Lauren Valle's head last night.
Profitt, it turns out, is a volunteer campaign coordinator for Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul. Or was.
The Paul campaign has cut ties with Profitt, "removing him from his role as Bourbon County campaign coordinator and banning him from campaign events." Commenting on the campaign's dissociation from Profitt, Fox News host Shep Smith said, "I suppose if that's the worst that happens to you after you make a conscious decision to step on a woman, then you've probably come out pretty well."Criminy.
Deeks: Free lunch today for being such a dedicated and loyal employee.
Liss: LOL! How nice!
Deeks: Nothing says 'thank you' like a lukewarm buffet!
Liss: Totes. "Load up on the the pudding! We APPRECIATE you!"
Deeks: Ooh Powerpoint! So Overton. Turkey loaf and the NWO.
Liss: LOL!
Deeks: Just FYI: 30 years of service = free iPod.
Liss: What? LOL!
Deeks: Cheap ass cheapsters.
[Later]
Deeks: You know what the world needs? A direct-to-video animated sequel to Buckaroo Banzai.
Liss: Obviously.
Deeks: I bet something like that could be made for like a million dollars. And it'd be a total money maker.
Liss: You're absolutely right.
Deeks: I should work in Hollywood. My farts are better than most ideas coming out of that town.
Liss: Agreed. We should start our own studio. www.awesomefilmz.fart.
[Trigger warning for fat hatred and body policing.]
