I just read about this charming episode at Big Fat Deal (in which a couple of male ballroom dancers on Dancing with the Stars criticized female dancers on the show for their weight), and I am incensed. First of all, do NOT fucking presume to tell me why I watch or should watch a TV show. I don’t watch DwtS, but if I did it would be for the same reason I watch So You Think You Can Dance–for the dancing. Especially do not presume to tell me that, effectively, the reason I watch it “should” be to get inspired by stick-thin dancers. I may be inspired by their dance ability or someone else’s writing or artistic ability or accomplishments, but I am not “inspired” by images that encourage me to get on some kind of impossible hamster wheel so that someday–if my dreams come true–whatever man is making this kind of ludicrous pronouncement from on high might declare me worthy of being looked at as a sex object. I have more important things to do than make a career out of looking acceptable to men. Especially if “acceptable” means “thinner than women who are professionals in a field that is already well-known to be fraught with eating disorders and unhealthy weight standards.”
Also, I bet you a million dollars that whatever BMI is represented by these two dancers is at least 5 points below any level at which male dancers would start to get any grief about their unsuitability as role models. But, you know, these two guys are just concerned for our health. I’m not sure what’s worse–the sexism or the idea of two out-of-touch dudes riding up on a white horse to save stupid fatties (who might otherwise actually be fooled into thinking that these two women [link also via BFD] are plenty thin enough). Who will end the OBESITY EPIDEMIC if van Amstel and Chmerkovskiy are prevented from conveying the important, totally health-related message that although Burke and Schwimmer may look just fine to obese, ignorant hayseeds like ourselves, they are actually “heavy” (per van Amstel)?
All I can say is, thank god weight standards for women are so objective, beneficial, and completely unrelated to men’s sense of visual entitlement. I don’t know what I’d do without these guys looking out for me.
I know this won’t actually help, but since I never miss an opportunity to plug the show IRL, why not just cut your losses and start watching SYTYCD instead? Love. Well, except for some of Nigel’s more fatphobic and homophobic moments, but that’s another post.
ETA: I found out this morning (thanks, wriggles) that the men are claiming they were misquoted. I did skim past the comment on BFD that made that point last night, but I was typing this at about 4 a.m. and the comment didn’t really sink in for whatever reason. Anyway, here (van Amstel and Chmerkovskiy, respectively) are the links to their explanations so you can decide for yourself. FWIW, the claim of being “taken out of context” is not that compelling to me because I’m not sure in what context such comments would be appropriate… and therefore Chmerkovskiy’s post is not that convincing to me (and I don’t really like how he appears to pin the blame on van Amstel), but as I stated in comments, it’s possible a language barrier is making his “tone” read differently to me than what he intended, so just know that he did claim he was taken out of context, and draw your own conclusions from his words. van Amstel’s post is quite full-throated and I appreciate his clarifying the situation.
Even if the two men are the victims of misquoting or having their words twisted by the reporter, I think it’s really interesting and says something profound about our society that the reporter’s misquote took the form of totally ignoring the men’s main point (if they are to be believed)–that they personally had gained weight and were musing about their suitability as role models–and made it all about the women on the show. This is so typical and representative of the general view that women’s bodies are public property and women have a responsibility to meet the standards of the male gaze (no matter how stringent or unreasonable) at all times. Add in the fact that you can hide behind the Obesity Epidemic and “health” pretty much no matter what you say, and it’s like hatred soup (and although I don’t want to unfairly slam the dancers if they did not in fact say these things, in a larger sense it almost doesn’t matter whether they or the reporter said them… the thrust of the words is so predictable and telling). Mmmmm!
October 29, 2008 at 8:49 am
With all due respect to you scg, it seems that both men claim they were misquoted.
As for the ‘inspiration’ point, I don’t think it was made specifically at fat people, but more the general audience, as we know people of all weights feel they should always be striving to be as thin as possible.
I don’t know if you’ve notice but most feminists support this thin is best and because of this are happy to sell fat women out; merely in order to sustain this belief in the face of the continued failure of the dieting experiement. They are happy to go along with- a penis gives you the right to not only tell a woman how her body should be, but who she is, how she thinks- regardless of her interpretation of things. This has destroyed the credibility of fat women almost completely, to the point where we can’t even fully articulate our own truths without trying to crowbar them into the haters frame, and the sisterhood doesn’t give nearly enough of a shit about this as far as I can tell.
I personally don’t give a rat’s arse whether feminists want to be thin or lose weight, but it’s their preparedness to abandon us to an unjust patriarchal character assasination that’s so appalling, it’s as if we don’t count as women; the point about feminism is that a threat to any women’s credibility is a threat to all women’s credibility as this can easily become a threat to their autonomy, as has happened repeatedly throughout history.
Obviously in this case, the glittering prize is to be able to continue to believe that diets work-therefore there must be something wrong with fat women- trumphs the acutal feminism of believing in women, notice I said believing in-not believing women. You don’t have to agree with fat womens conclusions to believe that there must be something wrong with the picture as sold to us, if so many fat women are ‘failing’ and beginning to object to that being a cause of harrassment and ridicule of us.
It’s not just that fat women have been sold out by feminists, they don’t even have the dignity to sell us out at a good price, all of this and more is why I can no longer be bracketing myself with them anymore.
All this hurts far more than whatever a couple of silly dancing popinjays may or may not have said about some other prancing women’s butts.
October 29, 2008 at 9:22 am
Lose weight. You’ll feel better about things.
October 29, 2008 at 10:05 am
On the men issue/entitlement thing. I have some overweight male friends that tell me they get passed by women all the time. They don’t insist on slim women so why not date an overweight guy and ignore those demanding fit guys like myself? I never hear them talk like they have entitlement issues, in fact, they sound pretty non-demanding. There is someone for everyone out there.
October 29, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Wow, wriggles, you are amazing. I agree 100% with all of your points. I just had to quote part of your awesome comment.
I do have one issue with your comment and it may be due to the sense I take from it rather than the actual sense it was meant in. It sounds to me like you’re saying to some extent “forget men, our real problem is these nasty women” (oversimplified), and I think the patriarchy–well, and fat-hating society and misconceptions about the efficacy of diets and so on–is exactly the reason why these “feminists” behave the way they do. If the two dancers were quoted correctly, you may be right that they were just two insignificant pompous men and who cares what they think, but I see their comments as a symptom of a larger problem, where women’s bodies are public property and open for criticism at a much lower BMI than men’s. I mean, I know you see it that way too, but I don’t think those “feminists” behave that way in a vacuum.
On the misquoted thing, I just checked out the comment that links to the men’s claims that they were misquoted, and it looks like this is indeed a possibility so I will edit to reflect that. I will say I was a little skeptical of Chmerkovskiy’s claim (van Amstel’s was much more full-throated), and I wasn’t too impressed by his willingness to (if I’m reading it right) sort of throw van Amstel under the bus, but it appears to me that English is probably not his first language so it’s possible his intended “tone” didn’t come across in the post.
Regardless of whether either was misquoted or “taken out of context” (and if that’s all it was then I’m not sure in what context it would have been appropriate to comment negatively on the women’s bodies… I prefer to believe van Amstel’s claim that he was straight-up misquoted), it sure says something interesting about our society that–if what van Amstel said was true–the reporter totally overlooked the meat of his quotation about how he personally had gained some weight, role model blah blah blah, and made the women’s bodies public property through the fabricated quote instead. Again, if his version of things is true.
October 29, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Wriggles, if these thin women have done this much damage in the past how are they able to keep on doing this when clearly they are near impossible to find? When the majority are either overweight, obese, or larger it seems kind of hard to believe they are be subjected to such enormous peer pressure. From what I see in DC and Maryland, thin people would be the ones peer pressured for being too thin. I encounter thousands of people a day. I am not disrespecting you; I really want to understand how this is possible.
Most of the time I see a slender woman with one chin English is not her primary language.
October 29, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Yay, trolls: I has them!
John, hahahahahhaha. No, seriously. Reading anything else I have ever written: FAIL. But you amuse me so I’ll leave that one up.
Richard–I’ll respond to your first comment in case you actually want to engage on this topic. First of all, and you would know this if you were at all familiar with me rather than just driving by, the assumption that I or other fat women only care about weight because nobody will screw us is one of my all-time pet peeves. This is not central to my point, but it so happens I am happily married for 10 years this past May, and if I weren’t I’m not too worried about my ability to find a date. I agree with your last statement; there’s someone for everyone, and if someone doesn’t want to sleep with me than I certainly have no interest in trying to force them to change.
So the issue is not individual men or these individual men (and I’m sure your friends are nice guys and everything), it’s the existence of a social structure that makes women’s bodies public property for negative comment, and secondarily the fact that the standards to which women are held in the court of public opinion are much more stringent than those for men. And most importantly, the issue is what this MEANS about how women’s bodies are thought of vs. men’s on average and in a larger societal sense. Like I said in my post, if someone was going to criticize women on TV for being poor “health” (ha) role models, this criticism would generally kick in about 5 BMI points lower for women than it ever would for men in an equivalent position. Why is this? What does it mean? That’s what I am interested in.
On your second, I’m sorry you can’t seem to find any thin women to fuck (come on, your language is pretty insulting there), but again the point I think wriggles was trying to make is not “a thin woman was mean to me.” The point is larger trends in society that privilege the thin body and empower people of all kinds (thin men, thin women, and even other fat men and women) to view fat people as less than human. “Overweight” people may be the numerical majority but you would have to be seriously deluded to believe that there is any social advantage to being fat in our society. And the “feminists” wriggles describes are only too happy to jump on the bandwagon of scapegoating fat people, which I think is a sort of power grab or effort to survive by transferring hostility away from yourself and onto another group. Fat people make an especially convenient group to do this to because popular mythology says all you have to do is get off the couch and stop slamming donuts and you too can be socially acceptable–so if you’re fat you must be a truly bad, lazy, gluttonous person and deserve whatever you get.
wriggles, sorry if I am putting words in your mouth here.
Richard (again, if you really want to understand more about my perspective), here are some posts you can read to understand my POV a little better and that better articulate some of the points I was trying to make:
Kate Harding: “In Which I Ramble About Attraction”
Me: “What floats your boat”
Hoyden About Town: “Women still the sex class in international elite sports” (on another topic but illustrates why these discussions about women’s bodies are never really about “health” or how well they can function–it’s all about “packaging” women to make them beautiful to look at, whereas with men how their bodies function is the primary concern)
October 29, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Shorter Richard: Justify your existence! JUSTIFY IT!!!
October 29, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Hahahahhahaha!! I <3 Sniper.
October 29, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I just don’t understand the mentality of messing with people just because they are a certain way. I have never heard of anyone being badgered for sitting on the couch downing ice cream. That sounds like those cheap infomercials only idiots pay attention to. I agree, being at a certain weight or feeling immense dissatisfaction with your body is not the road to happiness. These are not just old propagandas created by some patriarch; they are the life blood of the diet pill/gimmick industry. They prey upon people’s trust and insecurities and they are sickening and should be held accountable.
The fast food industry is no better with their implied happiness and feelings of euphoria if you eat this or that. Billions is spent on this industry and then a decent fraction of that is spent on diet gimmicks for the same reason. It’s insane and if you folks wake up some people to this rat race, good for you.
I am surrounded with overweight men and women where I work and I hear their stories all day long and when I tell them half of what is being said in these forums they look confused. Maybe DC and Maryland are bastions for overweight people to the point they don’t experience these things you mention.
I want to understand this point of view many of you have even though I have my own preferences. I am happily married and no, I am not out looking for thin women to have sex with, I already have one. Suffice to say, she is not from here. I am merely making observations and questioning what people believe to be true. The more logic, science, and facts to back it up the better.
October 29, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Read the links. Wow, sure a lot of four letter words but it’s their page so oh well.
I pretty much agree with the messages except I don’t understand the huge preoccupation with caring about other’s opinions. If someone thinks you’re too tall or too short, fat, skinny, etc who cares? Really, the only person you should be worrying about is yourself because there is someone out there for everyone and they are going to think you are the perfect one for them. “A troll would think…” So? Unless you are interested in that troll it really doesn’t matter.
Seriously, if you walked by some guys and they were staring at you like you were a goddess would it matter? They are not you or your husband so they don’t matter if they approve or disapprove and this applies to “trolls” “douche bags” or anyone else. I just don’t get this.
The reality side is health and no about of sermonizing or propaganda is going to change that. There are increased odds of health problems associated with being overweight and they go up exponentially with weight so end the mystery and see a doctor. Everybody regardless of weight should. Living in Baltimore exponentially increases your chances of getting killed but so does living in Afghanistan and people happily live there to this day. Nobody should live in fear based on some statistics, that’s nuts. It is not up to society to judge anyone one for their size or health, it’s up to that person and if they feel happy being a certain size let them be. I have always thought that.
October 29, 2008 at 6:17 pm
If someone thinks you’re too tall or too short, fat, skinny, etc who cares?
There’s this thing called “society” which affects how people are treated in the workplace, in the doctor’s office, in the public sphere – heck, everywhere! I’m pretty sure you could find out more on the internet.
Jesus. It’s like when one of my students asked me “why do people have racism?” Of course, that individual is 11 years old.
October 29, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Yeah, Richard, on a personal level I sort of think you and I are on more or less the same page. (apart from the cussing, which I am a fan of, you I guess not so much).
As a matter of fact, I really appreciate your lack of judgment and apparent understanding that–even though you and I may differ on how dangerous it actually is to be overweight; my stance is that we are getting taller and fatter all the time, though actually not as much fatter as the current panic would have us think, and anyway despite the constant dire warnings that life expectancy will start to decrease because of obesity, it just keeps going up and up–there are other issues mixed up in there other than just “fat is dangerous, therefore fat is disincentivized, the end.”
For example I liken your Afghanistan example to one that is brought up a lot when we discuss fat people being denied health insurance (which does happen–fat is considered a pre-existing condition on some plans). For some reason the same denials of coverage are not extented to people who participate in competitive or extreme sports–monetarily they’re going to cost the insurance company a lot, so why not deny them coverage as well? Because snowboarding is not stigmatized and being fat is. All I ask is that people think critically about what part of their revulsion toward obesity might be social conditioning or moralizing rather than pure “concern about health.” Anyway, again I do appreciate your perspective. And BTW thanks for taking the time to look at the links.
As Sniper says, though, it’s where it starts to affect your rights and perceptions of you on the part of the people who can actually do damage in your life (your employers, the government, etc.) that it becomes more of a problem than just “stop worrying about what other people think.” (”I’m pretty sure you could find out more on the internet.” Hee!) In the second post I wrote on this blog I went into some of the potentially very damaging stuff that can happen to fat people up to and including programs that propose to take their (or rather our, since even though I wear a size 10 and pretty much “pass” in society, I’m in the “overweight” BMI category) kids away, presupposing “child abuse” simply by virtue of the fact that the kids are fat. To me that is absolutely chilling, and it’s not the only example (in addition to the insurance thing I discussed above) of a situation where corporations or governments deny or attempt to deny basic rights of fat people.
The other piece of this puzzle, which I imagine you disagree about but that’s OK, is that there are a lot of people out there who I don’t believe are cut out to be thin. These are the kind of people who go on WW and lose for a while but end up gaining without increasing their food intake. Or the kind of people who develop anorexia but only end up in the normal-weight or overweight range instead of at the underweight level you would expect. I, lucky for me, am not one of these people, but I hear their stories all the time. It adds a whole extra sinister dimension to this idea that if you don’t want your kids taken away (or to lose your insurance or your job), you can just lose weight. For many people it’s just not like that.
If you haven’t already you might check out the book Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata of the New York Times. It summarizes what she believes to be the state of current research on weight and dieting and for me supported a lot of what I’ve seen just walking around in society–people are various sizes and nowhere near all of that variation can be explained by a straight-line correlation to how much they eat. It is much more complicated than that. In many respects I am lucky because I eat far more than many fat people, yet I am thinner than they are. Why? I don’t know. Luck of the genetic draw, I guess.
Finally, I have both a personal stake and an interest in the feminist issues that I brought up in this post. It’s not really just a question of some random people thinking in a vacuum that I’m too fat, so I ignore them, presto, the problem goes away. I think a lot of fat hatred is rooted in misogyny and I think it is interesting and important to call out those patterns when they come to my attention.
October 30, 2008 at 8:22 am
Thank you so much scg for your kind comments, they are much appreciated.
I want to thank you for your comment about how what I said comes across, to be fair, Richard picked the same point, so I want to address it.
My issue is with the nature of what it means to be a feminist has been breached in a way that feminist must wake up to.
It goes beyond mere agreement or disagreement, like Melissa on Shakesville defending Sarah Palin against sexist made against her.
Let me put it this way, when I spoke of ‘fat women’s credibility’, take away ‘fat’ and it reads; women’s credibility, millions of them, and that’s what I’m talking about.
That kind of loss both exposes how shallow our credibility as women is and is itself becoming a potential threat to our autonomy- that sane sober women cannot be trusted to know what has and hasn’t worked for them is being re-inforced as a reasonable idea, it isn’t; don’t we tell our doctor if the prescription s/he wrote for us doesn’t work? It’s the whole basis of the doctor patient relationship, how can that faith be so abruptly withdrawn?
If tomorrow a group of eminent scientists calls a press conference saying that yes diets and other weight loss methods are as highly ineffectual as they seem, it would totally change the position of fat people (so much for the so-called ‘moral’ basis of healthism). But our own testimony, even though the evidence is all around.
It’s as if only certain men are allowed to define reality. Our crime is not being fat, it’s having the nerve to behave to contradict the establishment, we are constantly asked if we are doctors, what about the science, as if we are absolute, non-entities.
In this maelstrom of hatred, it may be easier for women to miss this attack on (mainly) them, than I appear to be giving credit to, but how are they going to find out?
If not by listening to what we say, by responding to it-not just regurgitating the programming- by engaging with us because we are all supposed capable of reasoning for ourselves. It’s the disconnection that upsets me, if those of us do not defend SP like Melissa, we are selling her out and ourselves for political expediency, in a similar way, we have been ‘let go of’ for what Kate Harding called the ‘fantasy of being thin’.
October 30, 2008 at 8:25 am
‘But our own testimony, even though the evidence is all around.’
Sorry, that should read ‘our testimony, counts for nothing, even though the evidence is all around.
October 30, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I wish I could quote your whole comment because again, I totally agree. I have always felt that fat is a feminist issue and fat rights are a human rights issue, but you articulated exactly how doctors’ and society’s negating our life experiences as fat people, and discounting our stories either as lies or that we must not know what we’re talking about, is one of the most critical aspects of this discussion.
Feminism, as you say, is supposed to be about giving women a voice, not silencing them and telling them “we know what’s best for your body, you don’t.” And your example that if tomorrow it became widely accepted that diets don’t work and there is a genetic basis for being fat, we would suddenly be considered OK, but when it comes from our own voices and our own knowledge of our own bodies, that same information is minimized and negated. That makes the issue of fat sort of critically feminist in a way that I think I understood instinctively, but had never seen written out as you have done above.
As I think on it now, it has connections to issues like childbirth/parenting (being told that we can’t possibly know what’s best for our own bodies during the birthing process, or that formula is automatically better for babies than breast milk), and to women’s health care, especially in past times (being told that we are “unclean” or “hysterical” and women being ill or dying because the medical establishment refuses to see their concerns as significant).
Thank you for giving me a new way to think about these issues. I still think that the feminist thinking around this issue is not the “fault” of women, but I see now that this was not necessarily your point–your point as I understand it is that we need more FA activism within feminism because the issue is so central to feminism.
This is secondary, but it occurs to me that there is also a “patriarchy hurts men too” angle here. Often even in feminist spaces you see so much energy taken up with “I need to lose 5 lbs., I’m in such bad shape, why can’t I make the time to get to the gym more, I feel bad about myself when my size 4 jeans don’t fit.” Thin women are also being hurt by having to put so much work into the beliefs FA tries to combat, largely because they don’t see or no longer believe that fat is a feminist issue, nor do they see the illogical/moralistic nature of some of the arguments about the obesity epidemic–many mistakenly seem to believe (at least on an unexamined level) that it’s really all about health. You’re right, Melissa is a rarity (unfortunately she’s also a rarity in calling out so-called “fauxgressivism” like the Sarah Palin sexism watch you mentioned) but she should be the norm within feminism.
October 30, 2008 at 2:29 pm
“There’s this thing called “society” which affects how people are treated in the workplace, in the doctor’s office, in the public sphere – heck, everywhere! I’m pretty sure you could find out more on the internet.
Jesus. It’s like when one of my students asked me “why do people have racism?” Of course, that individual is 11 years old.” -Sniper
I am amazed that this goes on since where I live; work, shop, and commute, the majority of people are overweight/obese. When I stand in the check out aisle and the cashier is large, the people in front of me and behind me are large too; I have to admit I have never seen any harassment on them ever. The same thing happens when I go to buy a coffee, get my oil changed, buy cloths, etc. I see these large people getting treated just like me so I wonder where this demeaning behavior is coming from.
I ride the train, subway, and commute to DC every day. Union station is huge and there are crowds of people moving all around so it’s not like I live overseas surrounded with thinner people. To prove this I will take some random pictures from my cell phone and post them through a third party with a URL link if that is ok with this site’s policies. Enlighten me on this, please.
October 30, 2008 at 8:17 pm
You are welcome to post a link to whatever you wish as long as it’s not offensive, but I would encourage you not to potentially embarrass fat people by taking their pictures. Especially since if it’s me you’re trying to convince, there is really no need… I already know that overweight and obese (by BMI) people are in the numerical majority, and I would guess most other people don’t have much of a quibble with that either. I just think it’s more complicated than that. For starters, you cannot seriously look at me with a straight face and tell me that being fat is not stigmatized and negatively portrayed in this country. Whether or not you think that is justified, it is the case, so being “in the majority” does not help fat people to influence public opinion in that respect.
I mean, I’m not going to stand here and tell you that people regularly refuse to wait on me in stores because I’m fat, or whatever. But if you go back to my second post as I mentioned before (and there is a recent update on junkfoodscience.com about a program in England where people’s kids have been taken away from them because the kids are fat), I listed some important encroachments on people’s rights or fair treatment that have either been proposed or enacted on the basis of weight. These are official policies too and don’t really touch on “soft” discrimination like hiring managers refusing to hire fat people or perceiving them as lazy, even though if you asked them I’m sure they would swear up and down that they weren’t doing that. The other thing I would point out is that if you are thin, there is really no reason for you to notice the treatment of fat people around you. I’m not comparing fat phobia to racism, but I’m white and live a pretty sheltered existence, so although in my day-to-day experience racism does not really appear to exist (I’ve never been walking down the street and heard someone called the n-word, for example, though it would seem this not only happens but is fairly common), I would never claim that it actually does not exist.
Again, Richard, I appreciate your live and let live attitude, and I do sort of see why you would be skeptical about this, but I think if you spend a little more time looking into this (Shapely Prose and Junk Food Science are good places to start–I try to think critically about what is posted on JFS because I don’t always agree with the conclusions there, but Sandy is very thorough and always provides the information you need to draw your own conclusions) you might come to see what I’m talking about. Or not… all I ask is that you approach it with an open mind.
November 3, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Sorry for not getting back sooner. The pictures I have taken are purely public and since there are cameras all over the transit system it’s not like it’s violating any privacy. I am hesitant now on post them since the interpretation of what is considered fat is up to personal interpretation and that would simply get us nowhere so I will do this later with less precedence.
It’s kind of odd nobody chimed in after you scg but that’s ok. I just wanted to know where this resentment and anger comes from so I took your suggestion and read a lot of KH’s pages ( I have read many before and I even got the distinction of being called a douchehound – see “turn that douchehound upside down”) . I get most of the same message by volume but still no concrete instances of where someone is treated differently based solely on their weight. I read lots of stories about how kids were teased in their school days but not a lot of instances in adult years. The adult instances would be ones that could be pressed in court but don’t seem to happen as much as they should. Injustice should always be reported but when it isn’t it makes others question the validity of its occurrence.
What really blows my mind is the blaming of childhood bullies and child peers for the teasing. I don’t know one person that wasn’t teased for being too, fat, thin, tall, short, weak, freckled, etc. I was a lanky kid that got picked on by the bigger kids and I moved on with my life and so have many of my other friends. Nobody was immune. You either learned to fight better or learned some other way of diffusing the situation. I wise man once told me that “challenges in life don’t build character, they reveal it”.
I am not talking about child abuse, which is clearly wrong on all levels and those that have suffered from it NEED to get professional help. I read some stories about how parents would turn their backs on their kids or call them terrible names for being fat and it made me sad. I have two daughters and the thought of hurting their feelings like that makes me sick to my stomach. My biggest crime in this odyssey is not understanding this point of view since I have never seen discrimination other than against myself, a white male. That is a different story I am sure most are not interested in.
November 3, 2008 at 9:45 pm
As another example, see also First, Do No Harm. It details fat people’s negative experiences with health care providers. And every time there is a thread on that topic somewhere, tons of commenters chime in with their own similar bad experiences. This gets into the realm of putting people’s health at risk. There are other topics I could bring up, but I’m kind of tired of discussing this and I think we may just have to agree to disagree.
I will say that if you have really never seen discrimination except against yourself as a white man, then I’m not sure we can find common ground. I think that racism, sexism, prejudice against the disabled, sizeism, ageism etc. etc. are all alive and well and extremely common in our society, and true discrimination against white people because they are white is almost nonexistent. Have you read the blog Racialicious? It has opened my eyes to a lot of things that I, as a fairly well-off white woman, don’t really have to worry about in my everyday life.
I’m going to go ahead and close comments because I am not willing to entertain a discussion on whether racism and sexism are real, and I’m afraid that’s what this might become.
Again, Richard, I appreciate your tone and willingness to talk things out in a space that does not share your point of view, but I’m sorry to say I think you’re dead wrong in your view of who suffers discrimination, and seem unwilling to see all the privilege folks like you and me have in U.S. society as it currently stands.