(This is a edited comment I left on one of my favorite blogs.)
Wonderful post. But the comments section here – mainly B.C.’s comments — make me want to scream in frustration.
Fat Acceptance… Just what MLK, Jr was fighting for–so chubby white women could avoid lynchings,
michelin men being burned in effegies on front lawns, etc.Fat is beautiful. Just what my family who ran like hell to get away from the lynch mobs in Mississippi was praying for–the rights of fat white people to feel good about themselves.
It’s true no one has been lynched for being fat (although fat people have died due to lousy good medical care for fat people). It’s also true that anyone who says “fat rights is just like the black civil rights movement!” is being an idiot.
But so what? Being Black is not like being fat is not like being female is not like being queer is not like being disabled is not like being Asian is not like being trans is not like being poor is not like being…
No marginalized group’s experience is exactly like any other’s. No one’s experiences are interchangeable. But the legitimacy of fat activists’ complaints doesn’t depend on us showing our experiences are exactly like the black experience, or the lesbian experience, etc..
It’s about justice.
The reason fat activists have formed a movement is that it’s unjust to be denied good medical care because we’re fat; we think it’s unjust that we can get fired for being fat; we think it’s unjust that we face job and wage discrimination because we’re fat; we think it’s unjust that we can be charged more for basic services (like insurance) because we’re fat; it’s unjust that people glance at us and assume that we’re lazy and care nothing for ourselves; and yes, although you’ll sneer at this as “the right to feel good,” it’s unjust that fat people are taught from childhood to think of themselves as deficient, wrong, and disgusting.
Anit-fat bigotry isn’t wrong because it’s the same as facing lynch mobs. It’s wrong because it’s unjust. It’s unjust because we’re human and don’t deserve to be treated as second-class people because of the shape of our bodies.
That — not the claim that being fat is at all like being black — is why fat activists fight.
See also: Kate Harding and Red No Three. (I didn’t read Red’s post until after I wrote this one, but there’s a lot of overlap).
we think it’s unjust that we can be charged more for basic services (like insurance) because we’re fat
Or not be able to get insurance at all. Just try getting private insurance if your BMI is over 30, even if you’ve never seen a doctor in your life.
And the guy who posted that obviously does not think anyone has ever been subjected to domestic violence solely because they were fat, or been attacked by total strangers with rocks and bottles and fists because they were fat. Or that any schoolkid has ever committed suicide because they could not take being constantly taunted about their weight while adults stood by and told them things like, “Well, they have a point, you really should be on a diet.” Or that no doctor has ever refused to treat a fat person unless they lost “enough” weight, and just let their cancer or their pulmonary fibrosis or their infection spread and kill them. Or that no one has ever internalized abject terror of fat until they developed life-threatening depression and eating disorders.
So true. Fat acceptance is not the same thing as the black civil rights movement. Nothing is. But it still needs to happen. Fat hate kills.
Yeah, I felt the same way when prominent pastors of black baptist churches came out against gay marriage and dismissed LGBT rights as not a civil rights issue, basically saying, “because we should know.” It was like civil rights became a brand of the black leadership, and they were trying to protect their copyright.
To some extent, I blame the news media’s default position that anything to do with African Americans is a civil rights issues, and vice-versa. But civil rights are not exclusive privileges, they are rights (right there, in the name) that all members of a civil society are entitled to.
And you’re right, Barry, not all oppression is the same, not all experiences by oppressed groups are the same. Yet you can still identify patterns of that oppression: negative stereotypes, scapegoating, denial of basic services, unfair or unreasonable discrimination, disproportionate share of suffering due to deprivation – and so on. I won’t make a huge list.
Fat activism is a demand for respect and a demand for civil rights. It shouldn’t have to leap some giant hurdle, pass some historically-rich litmus test or produce its own Rosa Parks to gain legitimacy. It should receive respect based on the merits of its argument.
As an aside, I look out my window: it’s snowing! The hell?
Maybe it’s not the most politically important thing but… designers charge more for plus sizes.
I fucking love that.
I think there should be incremental increases for every single size.
Of course, it’s probably more labor to sew details onto them tiny clothes.
Why wouldn’t plus size clothes cost more? They use more fabric. Fabric is the principal component of the items. That wouldn’t apply as much to, say, designer gowns where 90% of the cost of the $3000 item is the designer’s name on it, but it would certainly seem to apply to things like jeans or shirts.
I’m pretty pro-HEAS, but in areas where providing a good or service to a person costs more because of some intrinsic attribute of the person, I have no problem with them being charged more. For fat people, there aren’t too many areas like that; offhand, I can think of clothes, some kinds of seating arrangements, and (indirectly) furniture.
“t was like civil rights became a brand of the black leadership, and they were trying to protect their copyright.”
It didn’t have to be this way, but it did evolve into this.
it’s funny how everytime this comes up in my local pape on it’s blog site, no on ever thinks to ask black gay men what they think on the issue. Instead you get middle-aged Amen Corner women presuming to pontificate on gay marriage because they are the (community) authorities on matters of race and also civil rights and perhaps also because they are unused to being contradicted on this kind of question. Too funny, too sad.
Good post. I’d also like to add that while of course the oppressions suffered by different groups is never the same, it’s still valuable to compare and contrast.
I’m big on the cross-disciplinary study anyway, and I believe all social movements can learn from each other, even it’s mainly by finding the differences. My thing is language attitudes and minority languages and I find that theorists in the field waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel simply because they don’t know that certain issues have already been hashed out by feminist/anti-racist/queer theorists.
Now… my question is why hasn’t anyone realized these things intersect? Fat people can be black or white or latin@ or asian, and the implications for each combination are different, but have similar qualities.
As someone who sews (or used to before my illness), I can tell ya that the fabric for a size 24 isn’t all that much more than it is for a size 12 (maybe around 1/4 yard, depending on the piece), especially considering the wholesale rate clothing manufacturers get as opposed to me buying it from some boutique fabric shop at $15 a yard. And there’s not really all that much extra labor involved either. The 50 cents extra it might cost to make a piece could easily be recouped by eager, grateful fatties like me looking for a decent deal on clothes and willing to advertise our find to others. There’s a reason that plus-size clothing at Walmart doesn’t really cost much more than regular sizes (yeah, the illness put a dent in my wallet too).
Other than that, don’t have much to add comment-wise regarding the post except amen!
Indeed, no one has been a bigger supporter of the Harvard East Asian Studies (HEAS) program than you, Robert. And, as Gaius Valerius Catullus remarked in his Catullus, ad optima exemplaria emendatus, “Splendidas quatiunt comat t Sed moraris, abit dies ; ProHeas, nova nupta.” Truer words were never spoken. For all I know, THOSE words were never spoken.
In other words, what does “pro-HEAS” mean?
If that were the case, Robert, then all clothing of all sizes would be priced on a scale relating to how much fabric it took. Preemie baby clothes would be dirt cheap, and a size 2 adult would cost slightly less than a size 6 adult would cost slightly less than a size 10 adult. Except oops, it doesn’t work that way, does it? Just as Roberta points out, manufacturers easily eat the extra costs of more fabric if the size range is within “normal” (guh) sizes, and also eat the extra cost of more detailed construction on smaller sizes.
You obviously don’t sew. I’m another who does, and I can tell you that there’s far more cost (in labor and funds) to garment construction than how many yards of fabric there is. How simple or complex the pattern is to draft to different sizes is one aspect; so is how simple or complex the finishing features and construction. And having looked at many many patterns I can tell you that the size difference of a pattern piece from a size 10, say, to a size 18 is still measured in fractions of an inch, not even close to justifying a price hike like the ones plus sized consumers have to pay for badly constructed and fitted clothes.
OK, I concede that I don’t know everything there is to know about clothes. Perhaps there’s less justification for price discrimination that I would have initially thought.
HEAS should have been HAS or HAAS, I dunno. Healthy at any size, in any event.
Close, but no cigar (typical liberal, taking away cigars!).
The term is HAES, which stands for Health At Every Size.
Yeah, that.
This sort of off-topic topic has me intrigued. I am a fairly standard size so I have never thought much about price differences in clothing size. So first I have a question:
Is this pricing issue true only in stores that sell a whole range of sizes or is it also true that on average clothing costs more at plus-size or big-and-tall stores?
Second, it might be a cost issue but not related to amount of fabric. In order to encourage the most number of shoppers, stores prefer to carry a wide range of options. But I imagine it might be difficult for a store to titrate the number of dresses it needs to carry in sizes that are outside of the most common. So that at the end of the season, a store might have a lot more large sizes left on the racks than smaller sizes. That unsold clothing, even if it gets moved to a discount branch, etc, still constitutes a loss. A small price increase in those less-demanded sizes might help alleviate that loss. I base this hypothesis on one observation: if you ever hit a shirt sale at its end, you usually find a few S and a bunch of XXL, but no M, L, or XL.
When I buy (new or used) clothing I’m paying for (not necessariy in this order): a. good design; b. quality of fabric; c. brand reliability/sewing/contruction; d. size; e. fit.
I feel like I’m paying for the “priviledge” of buying a plus size version of an item from a big brand retailer, like LLBean, or Lands End, which usually sells an attractive, sturdy type of item (if a bit boring-ok). While I find Lane Bryant’s prices to be fair, sometimes even less than other retailers known for smaller sizes, but the quality of the clothing at Lane Bryants is lower, sometimes much lower, than the other retailers mentioned above.
The retailers charge what they think they can get away with. I wonder how often people protest the price of items that are 15% or 20% higher but only a fraction larger? I think I’m going make some noise about this the next time I shop and see what happens.
nobody.really
It is quite certain that those words have never been spoken. It should be “prodeas” not “proheas”, and “comas”, not “comat”.
Quid sibi vult?
Eva, one other thing to consider is tooling and inventory costs. If the pattern is cut by machine the larger base might require it’s own die, or program. If it’s the later than you’ll have costs associated with change over and quality control. Additionally if they have to buy 15 XXL shirts, and hold them for 6 months before they sell (compared with 150 M shirts that will sell in 6 weeks) there will be costs associated with that.
I don’t know much about making clothing but I’m pretty knowledgeable about making a lot of other things. You’d be surprised at how the costs climb for low volume runs.
I find it far more likely that retailers charge more for larger sizes for the simple reason that they can get away with it.
The reason that they can get away with it might have to do with fat people having fewer choices, or it may just be that people expect to pay more for bigger clothes (due to more fabric), so they do.
This should be relatively easy to settle if it were possible to get hold of a decent set of statistics about the sales of different clothing sizes. The point about larger sizes being rarer and so selling less just sounds wrong, because there’s no corresponding phenomenon with small sizes, although all the same issues with smaller runs ought to apply. There are several explanations I can think of for this:
It’s possible that there are a greater number of unique large sizes – in other words, that the right tail of the graph would be longer, with the ‘hump’ appearing to be shifted to the left. This could be because of a genuine distribution difference, or it could be that people who require clothes that are much smaller than average have an easy-ish recourse in children’s clothes, which in the UK at least aren’t taxed, whereas people who require larger clothes remain within the adult-clothing market.
The other explanation I can think of is that whereas there are higher overheads for small clothing, which would appear to mandate higher prices, most people probably believe in an unreflective kind of way that when they buy clothing, they are mostly buying fabric, and won’t accept higher prices for small clothing. I’d also suspect that the clothing industry prefers to maintain this illusion, since people probably feel subjectively more like they’re getting a ‘fair bargain’ when they feel that prices are based on what they receive rather than external market forces. I’m leaning towards this explanation myself, but it would be much easier to answer it with stats, and although the stats are out there of course they are very commercially valuable and so can’t be obtained for free, as I discovered after a frustrating google search.
Also,
Not true. You are assuming that latin was only ever spoken in accordance with strict classical grammar rules.
Acheman
It’s a poem by Catullus – I suppose it’s possible that sometime, somewhere an aficionado of Latin poetry – one with a really bizarre speech defect – might have recited the “s” as a “t” or the “d” as an “h”, but what are the chances?
Since the error was generated by an English speaker, it’s more than possible that another speaker of Latin as a second or other language might have generated it, and if they did so, the possibility that it would have been spoken is fairly high, given that silent reading was uncommon. When the Empire was full-blown there were many such speakers; they probably learned poetry by heart, but their slight infecility with Latin grammar may have caused the production of a few errors in the recital. I can imagine such a situation occurring with the greatest of ease. It’s our own ideas about the infallibility of the ancients that suggest otherwise.
A serious note to justify this comment: one thing I did come across in my Googletrawl to find clothing size statistics was commentary on the way women’s sizing in particular serves to normalise certain sets of bodily proportions over others. Whereas men’s clothes are usually sized by reference to specific measurements of the clothes – collar size with shirts, for example – women’s clothes usually have the same sizes available for all items. As a result, if, as is pretty common, a woman has a different size in trousers to her size in t-shirts, there’s a corresponding implication of ‘ill-proportion’, which is hard to shake off. And it’s significant, too, that men’s trouser sizing acknowledges that leg length and waist size are (oh marvel of marvels!) relatively independent of one another. The article didn’t, however, discuss the obvious exception posed by the S M L XL etc system, which is used for clothing for both genders and which obviously has its own strongly normative connotations; one of the reasons it was relatively easy for me to imagine the clothing-size distribution having a left-skewed hump was that this sizing system presents it as such, creating a ‘normalised’ range S-L, with XL, XXL, XXXL and so on presented as ever more elaborately marginalised.
With regards to clothes:
(uses Australasian sizes – I believe size 6 here = size 0 in USA?) Generally a pattern is made at the standard size, eg. size 10, and graded up to size 12 and 14 and down to 8 and 6. Grading means you add or take off a little to create different sizes. This is only really an approximation, and you can only do this a certain amount before you actually need to change the SHAPE of the pattern, not just the SIZE.
To make a size 16, you might make a size 20 pattern, and grade down to 16 and 18 and up to 22 and 24. So you have to pay someone to draft and test an entirely new pattern, which is comparatively expensive (comparative to grading). If most people are size 12-14 (?) then most people would be covered by the 6-14 basic pattern. To make the “plus sizes” there is extra cost. However, surely there are quite a lot of people in the 16-24 range so the extra cost wouldn’t be that much when spread out? I haven’t worked in the industry so don’t know what the actual costs are, but to charge a significant amount more seems a bit suspicious.
Larger people aren’t just larger, they are a different shape from smaller people (speaking generally, because obviously pretty much everyone is a different shape from everyone else) and so making patterns for larger people that aren’t crap is difficult for those who are not specialists in that area – most designers and pattern-makers are trained in the sample size – size 10.
The sensible thing to do would be to make the “base” or standard size the same as your average person :D Then all the models would have to be average too….
With regards to amount of material, in home sewing the width of the material sometimes necessitates buying twice as much material when you bump up to a larger size, but in industry they would be making multiple garments so they can lay out the pieces far more efficiently meaning this wouldn’t happen.
One would obviously need more material for a size 24 than a size 6. So, although there wouldn’t be much difference in material from a size 14 to a 16, they might price one band (16-24) more expensive than the other band (6-14) based on average costs. However once again, labour is the expense in modern manufacturing, not materials.
I wonder if the price increase really does have any substantial justification in costs? Obviously we can argue whether it does or not, but only the manufacturers would know. Small manufacturers would have this as more of a concern than larger ones as they have to spread the pattern making cost and possibly others over fewer items. Other than that, it seems like a bad business decision overall because it annoys people and does not generate loyal customers…
POC are MORE oppressed than fat people (you know she’s actually thinking ANYBODY), and we don’t like you making comparisons to our oppression, so we’re going to take our ball and go home and not play with you any more.
I’m sure the author of that Oppression Olympics piece will be missed.
^^^ The board welcomes S/He-Who-Needs-to-Get-a-Clue.
Also not specific to black people, when it’s pointed out that there are some similiarities between the purported duty of a fat person trying to force themselves to become slim(mer) and a gay person trying to force themselves to become straight(er), you get a whole lot of upset and gays were put in Auschwitz et al. This kind of misplaced propretorial sensitivity is not unique to (some) blacks.
What I love is that when shopping for shorts for my little girl, I find that boys’ shorts are both more modest in cut (more fabric) yet cheaper in cost. It can only have to do with cultural norms–that even a *toddler* girl should be showing more skin than a boy, and should pay more for the privilege!
There is nothing The Man likes better than to keep the inhabitants of the various corrals on his plantation separate.
God forbid we should ever, you know, work together against our common enemy.
Twenty years ago, when I could still buy clothes in “regular” stores, I noticed that the 12-16s always seemed to sell out first and the stuff on the extreme discount rack always seemed to be 4s and 6s. So I asked the clerks. They told me that manufacturers would only fill orders with an equal number of all sizes offered. If a retailer wanted to order a dozen units in a size 14, they had to take a dozen units each of all sizes 4-16, whether or not they thought there was any chance of the size 4s selling. The unsellable small-sized garments amounted to an surcharge on each order. I don’t know if that system is still in place.
In the cases where clothes for fat people use lots more cloth than clothes for thin people, it’s because the pattern makers scaled up from the fit model in all dimensions, including length. 3X t-shirts are as much as a foot longer than a small. Which means, after they make me pay extra for the extra fabric, I pay a seamstress even more to hem the damn things back to a wearable length.
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big and tall and plus sized clothing costs more because we are a captive audience. especially when talking about designer clothes like Nautica or Polo. Manufacturers and stores charge more because they can. it is as simple as that.
Just like a movie theater that charges $8 for a bucket of popcorn or a $7 beer at the ballpark. Retailers when asked often resort to the “more fabric” argument. This argument is crap. If that was the case a small would cost less than an XL because there is more difference in fabric between a small and an XL than there is between an XL and a 2XLT. If pricing by size is the norm, why are mens shoes sizes 6-13 all the same size; or mens suits, sizes 40S thru 48L all one one size, or bras, 30A thru 38D all one size. Retailers also pass the buck to the manufacturers, saying they have no control over the pricing since items such as Nautica or Ralph Lauren polo shirts come into the store pre-priced, and pricing is dictated by buying agreements. They fail to understand that when price goes down, sales go up. If the big and tall sizes were the same as the regular sizes, they would probably sell more. Add to this the marketing advantage of being able to advertise to big and tall and plus size customers “come shop at our store, we don’t charge you more for your size”
Bottom line, they do it because they can, and because we let them. More people need to let them know we don’t like being discriminated against.
6ft, 265,
52L suit
2XLT shirts
42 inch waist.
19 neck, 37.5 sleeve, dress shirts.
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