Big Fat Blog – one of my favorite blogs, by the way – has an occasional feature called Three Quick Questions, which is billed as “the world’s shortest interview.” (I’m tempted to start a feature called “One Yes or No Question,” in an attempt to steal the title.) I’m the subject of the most recent “Three Quick Questions.”
I yak on a lot about fat people in the media, and whether or not fat-acceptance and left-wing politics go together. If that sounds interesting to you, please check it out.
You should check out works by Susan Koppelman. She is a mentor of mine and I had the opportunity to sit in on the first Fatness Awareness/Fatness Empowerment forums that she hosted at the MPCA conference in Cleveland last October. Her stuff is very insightful and offers a way to escape the media-induced bs that is fed and indoctrinated into people.
I’m about to read it, but I thought I’d note you linked to the comments, not to the actual post. I’m forced to suffer the indignity of scrolling up.
Ok, read it. Nice interview. Especially how it directed me to the post on absent fatsos, which I somehow missed when you originally posted it.
No! No! NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Can you ever forgive me?
(P.S. I’ve fixed the link now.)
Nice interview.
I’m a new reader, and haven’t caught up completely, so this may be something you’ve discussed elsewhere, but I wanted to comment on the issue of right-wing vs. left-wing and fat discrimination. I see a fair amount of lefty disdain for fat people that seems to lump them into a stereotype of SUV-driving, Wal-mart shopping, fast-food eating, red-staters. It may be the reverse of the stereotype of the vegetarian, walking or bike-riding, organic blue-stater. Just goes to show that 1) fat discrimination is truly a deeply-held cultural idea, and 2) there are prejudices and inconsistencies and jerks everywhere.
A few thoughts: Tom Arnold has suggested that the media might look a lot different if it came from iowa instead of hollywood and new york. The information revolution, videoblogging and such, increasingly means that media does come from iowa and places like that. Websnark, http://www.websnark.com, is rarely overtly political in the way you are, but is worth reading. And fat. I’m aware that I have major issues with fat acceptance myself.
I’d be happy to be a subject for the one question interview.
I always get a little twitchy when I here about the new media coming from Iowa and places like that, rather than Hollywood and New York. After all, I was born in New York City. What makes news from Iowa better than news from New York?
I know that you didn’t mean anything negative, Vark. But there’s a cliche that people in Iowa are somehow more genuine and real than people from places like New York and Hollywood (and Portland?), which I think should be resisted.
News from Iowa is no better or worse than news from New York.
Disintermediating technologies have changed the economics of news, however. Pre-Internet, it was not economically sensible for news to be generated in Iowa (other than news about things actually happening in Iowa). It made more sense for there to be a few centralized news agencies – so if you were born in Iowa and were interested in news, you generally moved to New York.
Nowadays, it makes no sense to centralize in New York. Nothing wrong with New York – but when it costs ten times as much to do business there, and there’s no longer any particular advantage to having your office in that incredibly pricey tower, then Iowa starts to look better.
So instead of three news cities we end up with 300 news cities. New York is still important, because the local news for New York is probably 10% of the total news generated – but news that happens in Iowa is no longer processed through New York.
There are cultural implications from this economic shift. In the olden days, if you really liked news but also really liked Iowa, well, you’d either go to New York and be miserable, or stay in Iowa and get a job at the local paper and use 30% of your talents. Now you no longer have to make that decision; you can stay in Iowa and still fulfill your dream. Which means that news is no longer largely produced by people who are alienated from the place they live in – instead its made by people who like their community, else they wouldn’t live there.
That’s going to have some profound effects, but we don’t know what they will be yet.
It’s not that there is anything wrong with the people in New York or Hollywood, but the people in both of those places generating the images that we see in the media are in no way shape or form a representational cross section of the populations of Iowa, Portland or New York. The real population of this country is now 50%+ overweight and climbing and yet the % of positively portrayed fat people on TV is near O%.