This is an image from the Icarus Project, a radical mental health support network. I saw it when it was reprinted in a local zine (more on that later): You can find a larger version here. 
[Image description: It’s a poster headed taking care of the basics. It is divided into 5 parts: eating, sleep and rest, exercise, schedule and herbs, meds etc. Each has a cartoon drawing, half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as unhelpful, the other half with people who are doing things in a way that is portrayed as helpful.]
I wish I was disappointed; I wish I expected more of so-called radical organizations. But no, when trying to illustrate unhelpful eating patterns for depression they show a fat person eating a burger and fries, and they contrast this with thin people eating a home cooked meal served by a woman (the headline is my alternative title for the Eating Well illustration).
The illustration is not radical. Fat-hatred is not radical. Food-hatred is not radical. People can pretend that their disgust at a burger and fries* comes from their dislike of multi-national corporations. But their disgust at a fat body is in plain view.
* Which as far as meals when you’re depressed go seems pretty good to me. It has protein, carbohydrates and fat. It will fuel your body.
April Fool’s Day was over a month ago. You’re way late.
Seriously, though, I’m a little (okay, a lot) surprised that you found so much to dislike about this cartoon. Yes, the guy is fat. He’s also eating alone, in a filthy fast-food restaurant, and drinking a quart of soda. The 800 Calories of HFCS from the soda will help make him fat, sure: they will also raise his LD cholesterol, rot his teeth, and send him on a blood-sugar roller coaster that will sap his energy and do NOTHING to improve his mental state. The slop he’s eating will likewise raise his cholesterol, and will fill his stomach without filling his soul. A meal is an opportunity to bond with friends and family, explore different tastes, relax, take care of your body, support a farmer, learn to cook, etc; instead he is squandering that opportunity scarfing down shit in a roach hut. (And not only is he eating shit; he’s staring at an advertisement for shit while he’s eating shit.)
I don’t hate food; I love food. (I really love food.) I hate when shit is marketed as food. Just because not all fat people eat poorly, does not mean that eating poorly won’t contribute to fat.
(Is this a NZ vs USA thing? I understand that, on the whole, the food’s better down there; your cows eat actual grass and produce milk without having their udders injected with growth hormones. But surely you know that the US has an unhealthy relationship with food.)
Yes, the people at the table are all skinny, which is somewhat improbable, and the person delivering the platter is a woman — but even in an ideal world, women would still be doing approximately half of the cooking. I have a hard time identifying “Women must do all the cooking” or “All fat people make poor food choices” as the primary (or even a significant) theme of this poster.
(Somebody needs to tell that kid to put his butt in the chair if he wants to stay at the table, though.)
Maia, I hope you don’t mind that I edited your post to add a close-up of the panels you’re discussing. (This is a really minor nit-pick, but I wish you had mentioned the name of the cartoonist, Sophie Crumb; she’s a moderately big name cartoonist, and she as well as Icarus should be criticized by name for this poster.)
Yes, he’s a stereotypical fat slob loser, drawn with the eating habits that are frequently attributed to stereotypical media depictions of fat people.
I’m genuinely bewildered as to why you profess surprise that someone objects to negative anti-fat stereotypes.
There is no reason — other than anti-fat bigotry, combined with unoriginal cartooning — that Sophie Crumb needed to draw the example of bad eating as an anti-fat caricature.
FWIW, I knew plenty of people (in particular, 25 year old single men living in shared spaces) who used to eat fast food because in all seriousness it can often be darn cheap. It’s usually more expensive than cooking your own food (assuming you have a stove, and gas, and a sink, and pots and pans, and a fridge, and a local supermarket) but not THAT much more so–and those are a lot of assumptions that don’t work for many people. Last I checked you could get a McD cheeseburger, or a bowl of Wendy’s chili, for a buck each.*
And of course, it’s also, well, fast, and reliable–shopping and cooking take time. And time is money, or at least value. I am a good, very fast, cook, and cooking (and cleaning up!) for a family of 5 most nights still takes a lot of time. I don’t always have time to spare. Which is why when things get insane at work it becomes pizza night.
Anyway having established that fast food /= always bad, I have to say that the dude looks like hell. I don’t think it’s the cheeseburger as much as the fact that he’s sitting in a dirty corner staring at the wall by himself. And the people eating dinner look far better. (to me the woman just looks like a participant in a shared meal who happens to be female, not like the food preparer necessarily.)
Is the issue here that there’s only a fat guy on one side? E.g. if the left hand stayed the same but there was a happy, fat, “well-eating” person at the head of the table on the right, would that then be OK?
*as compared to a pound of hamburger (can’t buy a single patty’s worth), a pack of buns (can’t buy only one), of cheese (ditto); etc.
That would be better, but it still wouldn’t be OK, imo. The left-side image is just too full of negative stereotypes about fat people to be rescued by a contrasting “good fat person” image.
Man, there is so much wrong with that. Let’s start with all the people out there who, like me, are vegetarians who eat much more like the second picture than the first, and are STILL FAT. “Eating well” (whatever the hell that means, since no one can agree anyway) is not going to make a genetically chubby person thin, period.
And yes, in an egalitarian utopia women would presumably be doing half the food serving, but that’s not what’s happening now, here, in the culture in which this was drawn. Why not show a man serving the food? Why not position the server elsewhere in the frame, so they’re just a genderless (although still virtuously skinny, of course) pair of arms? Why show someone serving at all?
And finally, the smug superiority is really obnoxious when the reason so many people (many of them skinny, despite the stereotype) eat crappy fast food in the first place is depicted right there: “good” food is a lot more expensive. Not everyone can afford to go to the farmer’s market, not everyone has a work schedule that lets them take the time it takes to cook that way, not everyone has a spouse who can spend their time on these things instead of trying to earn enough money to eat in the first place.
Oh, and an extra “screw you” to all involved if the implication I see in the “herbs, meds” panel is intentional: you don’t need those icky unnatural anti-depressant pills to function! Just take some fish oil and get over it!
Amp, it’s not that I don’t object to the anti-fat stereotype. Yeah, it would have been better had she drawn the same thing with a skinny guy instead of a fat one. I just have a hard time getting all worked up about it, considering the overall theme and message of the poster.
What I object to is that Maia completely missed the point of the poster, to the extent that she ended up promoting unhealthy eating. If you’re feeling cruddy every once in a while and drinking a quart of Coke at your favorite burger shack helps you shake the blues, then that’s great. But that’s not their target audience. Many people with chronic depression feel cruddy every single day, and they eat bad food on a daily basis because it requires no effort, because it tastes sort of okay, because they don’t think they deserve any better, and because they know it’s bad for them and they’re feeling self-destructive. A diet of fast food is not a “pretty good” meal to eat when you’re depressed. It’s a terrible meal to eat when you’re depressed, and I think it’s irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
Even if you’re mad at the cartoonist.
Sycorax, it took me a minute to figure out the “herbs, meds, etc” panel too. The woman on the left has run out of meds (“refill 3 weeks ago”) and she’s self-medicating (the malt liquor bottles on the wall). The one on the right has her meds with her, and is presumably taking them.
Although some doctors’ tendencies to insist that meds are the one-size-fits-all solution to any depression (whether or not they work) is a problem, if somebody has found meds that work then it seems like a good idea to encourage them to take them.
Also, Sailor and Sycorax, obviously if one’s only options are to eat fast food, then one must eat fast food. But depressed people who have options will also sometimes choose to eat poorly — I don’t see a problem with encouraging them to do otherwise.
I don’t think it’s the cheeseburger as much as the fact that he’s sitting in a dirty corner staring at the wall by himself.
Just to confuse the issue further, I’m going to suggest that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to eat by yourself occasionally. I spend 95% of my day in the company of family, coworkers, and fellow commuters. I kind of like having time to myself at lunch. When else am I going to do any reading?
A lot of it comes down to “tone,” which is hard to quantify, but pretty important to “reading” cartoons.
Yes, it would be possible to draw a fat person, sitting alone in a fast food restaurant, enjoying a big mac, in a way that’s not objectionable. If I had to do that, I’d draw the person looking content, perhaps enjoying a book while she eats. I’d draw her so she looks together and likable.
Sophie Crumb’s drawing makes the fat person an object of contempt. He’s wearing a dirty t-shirt, staring blankly at the wall while he eats. He doesn’t look smart, or content, or self-possessed. The “tone” of the drawing says that this person is grotesque.
It’s not any one thing; it’s all of it together, and how it was brought together by the artist.
But the “bad” pictures are supposed to be “bad”. I agree that making the person in the bad-eating picture fat is anti-fat; making the scenario he’s in unpleasant and unhappy-making is the (unobjectionable) point of the cartoon.
The dude doesn’t really even look that fat, at least going by American standards. Yes, I know, the fat American is a stereotype, not accurate across the board, etc etc. However – the US does have a larger proportion of obese people than most other Western countries; leaving aside the distracting and irrelevant arguments about what constitutes obesity and whether you can be fat and fit, said high proportion will tend to normalise it in people’s minds.
It could simply be a case of the artist having drawn a guy who was a little overweight but certainly not humongous without consciously meaning anything at all by it. Which rather puts a different slant on it; it’s cultural background noise rather than conscious fat hate.
Mike: Even if the cheeseburger guy is supposed to only be “a little overweight” (and I don’t see it: he’s got multiple rolls of stomach fat, which puts him at well above average size for an American), look at him in comparison to the “good” panel. Everyone in it is almost literally half that guy’s size. If he’s supposed to be the size of an average American, then everyone else on the poster is well below that average. Either way, the guy eating the “bad” food is pictured as significantly fatter than the ones eating the “good” food. And in a culture that wasn’t constantly telling fat people how lazy & disgusting we are, and how we owe it to society to stop being fat at everybody, that could be a value-neutral thing, but again, we don’t live in such a utopia.
I agree that if you took the image out of context that might appear to be what’s going on. But in the context of this poster, the implication is that his generally run-down appearance – bags under his eyes, unwashed etc – is the result of his poor self-care. We’re not encouraged to have contempt for him, just to see that his eating habits are not helping his wellbeing. His being fat is unneccessary – he probably should have been drawn as a malnourished-looking thin person – but not centralised. It would have been much worse if they’d had a pretty healthy-looking fat person eating a burger.
Nor do I see any of the ‘food hatred’ Maia found in this poster. The second meal doesn’t even look like it’s any smaller – there are several dishes and everyone’s tucking in with gusto. And something that’s really good about it is that it attends to the aspects of good eating that aren’t just about food as a delivery system for nutrients, but as a rich social experience. I agree with Dianne that eating alone isn’t per se bad, and I did have some concerns about the implication that it would be possible for everyone to eat in company – but if you’re depressed, it probably is a good idea to try to eat in company, which helps to keep you eating regularly and sufficiently, and the Icarus project is making a particular effort to ensure that people diagnosed with mental illnesses are less isolated and are able to access the kind of support network that social eating is a part of. I also found the ‘herbs and meds’ panel very good at being non-judgemental about people’s different options, basically saying that you should find a regime that works and stick to it. Having read some of the Icarus project’s material and knowing of some people who’ve done very poorly after having been pressurised by quasi-Laingian groups like this to come off medication, I found this panel pretty reassuring. (The woman whistling happily has fish oil, Lithium and another unidentified bottle in her bag.)
And I agree with Bjartmarr about Maia’s hamburger and fries endorsement; what the hell.
The good and legitimate criticisms of, specifically, the fact that the guy eating fast food was drawn as fat, when he shouldn’t have been, and the person carrying the plate of food was shown as female, when it might have made a stronger egalitarian point if she hadn’t been (to be honest, since there are clearly many people, male and female, eating together at the table, I don’t see this as vital), had their edge blunted somewhat by addition of a mess of concerns that arose out of a bypassing of the context of the imagery.
I have a friend who has serious problems feeding herself when depressed. Problems eating at all. I’ve sat downstairs in a two storey house feeling worse and worse, and knowing that I needed to eat, but not being able to get it together to walk up the stairs and heat in the microwave the rice that I’ve got sitting there. At other itmes I haven’t had problems eating, but I’ve had problems eating meals. Rather than eating anything that’ll fill me up and keep me going I can only deal with my immediate hunger.
My friend has explicitly said, and I’ve experienced the same thing, that when eating is difficult, the insistance that you ‘eat well’ can push it over the edge to impossible. I don’t get depressed much anymore, but when I’m stressed I have to explicitly give myself permission to eat whatever it is I can, just so I can feed myself. I have to turn off the voices about how I should eat, so I can eat at all. The political saying “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, well soemtiems when you’re depresssed, the perfect is the enemy of the ‘at all’.
I actually think it’s part of a wider problem with the cartoon. The advice comes down to, have people who will cook and eat with (or for) you. That’s not something you can get together when you’re depressed. Which is my other problem with the cartoon in general, that the ‘good’ seem impossibly far away from the ‘bad’. One of the least helpful things I’v ever had say to me when I was depressed is “Are you doing X, that’d help.” Because the whole point is that if I could do X I wouldn’t be depressed. When I was depressed hills would seem like an insurmountable obstacle, I really couldn’t walk up them. The first thing about self-care and depression is to make it seem do-able. The message shouldn’t be “If you stop watching TV and smoking and drinking, but climb a hill with a friend you will get better.” Because that makes getting exercise seem an impossible distance away. But “OK you’re watching TV and smoking, how about when you’re done, you walk the long way to get another packet of ciagerettes.” The smaller something seems the easier it is to do when I’m depressed.
Maybe it’s not like that for everyone. But I know it’s like that for me, and other people I’ve talked to. And that makes the poster actively not useful for us.
I would completely agree with this, if the poster weren’t intended to be used as part of the Icarus project’s mutual support groups and similar enterprises. If this were something made by the Department of Health, I would be shaking my head. But in the context of a real attempt to actually provide the structures which it identifies as being important to overcoming depression, I think it works. The fact is that no poster which touted itself as being, in isolation, helpful for depressed people, and which didn’t just have a list of phone numbers and web addresses where they could get help, would be a good idea. This poster seems like it’d be useful for people who were already working their way out of depression or were working towards dealing with a lifelong or long-term psychiatric diagnosis, as an identification of ways to keep their lives under control – one element of which is to make eating an enjoyable and meaningful as well as a way to get vital nutrients, including the micronutrients which have been stripped from fast food. These are long-term strategies, not short-term direct advice to a depressed person about primary ways to deal with their depression.
I’m not saying I don’t recognise all of what you’ve been describing. But the problem was the context of the injunction to ‘eat well’, not the notion of eating well itself. And I’m reasonably satisfied that the Icarus project is providing it in the right context. I could be wrong, though.
I hear you, Maia.
Probably the worst state of depression I was ever in was post partum after having a C section. I subsisted on apple juice, chex cereal, and pepto bismal for probably 12 weeks or so. And even that was a fight. Cook dinner for a group (or have it cooked for me?) you’ve got to be kidding me. I remember a well-meaning person brought over frozen home made chicken soup and a bag of egg noodles (I guess they don’t freeze well? so she put them separately?) The very idea of cooking up a bag of egg noodles and defrosting a bit of soup in the microwave was so overwhelming that I eventually just chucked it all. The thought of it even in my freezer made me nauseated.
Sure, eating well may help with depression, but the main problem I see in this cartoon is a) it equates fat people with depression; and b) it equates happiness with being at a big family/friend dinner. (and thinness as well.) I think if I were depressed and looking at the big family dinner thing, the fact that I didn’t have access to that and getting something like that together would be nearly insurmountable would make me even more depressed. People tie too much up into food anyway. There are too many emotions and diseases and social constructs attached to it to say that “this picture of this perfect meal” is the path out of depression. Very biased and not well thought through.
I have struggled with depression for years, and the overall message I took from this poster is that it is dangerous for a severely depressed person to live alone. Are you a depressed teenager thinking of leaving your parents’ home, because you are unhappy there? Stay! Eating regular meals with your family, going to bed when your parents tell you, all that unexciting stuff really works against depression. Are you a depressed adult whose depression is so well under control that you’re wondering if you should quit your comfortable job with the regular schedule, to take a better-paying job with lots of travel? Don’t risk it!
I think it’s a worthwhile message. Living with people who care about me really has been helpful for managing my depression. (It’s not essential, and there are other ways I can get support while keeping my space to be alone, which is unusually important to me.) Being close to people who care about you does not necessarily mean marriage. For young people, it often means living with parents. It can mean sharing a home with a group of close friends who share meals and activities, and notice when one of them is having problems. For someone who prefers to live alone, as I do, it can mean visits and phone calls. (Sometimes we eat together, but it’s often enough to remind me to eat, and suggest something I can prepare without hurting myself.)
Some of the images on the poster are very problematic, but I think fairly minor changes would help a lot while preserving the message about depression. In the “eating well,” section, the “bad example” could be the same figure shown as a bad example in the other sections–unkempt, looking sick and miserable, and fairly thin. The “good example” would connect to less sexism with a man, or a figure of unspecified gender, putting food on the table…or just with a cheerful group eating food that is already on the table. I like the “good example” image in the “sleep and rest” example. The person sleeps alone under a patched cover, smiling at his or her dreams. The poster shows good sleep as sufficient sleep on a regular schedule, not sleeping with a spouse surrounded by material comforts.
In very basic terms, this artwork sends a message that says that if you’re fat and alone and poor, you’re “doing it wrong” and if you want to do it right, you need not to be fat, alone or poor, not conditions that can easily be changed. And in fact, terribly hard to change at all for anyone, but especially by someone who is mired in depression. It’s also particularly galling to equate fatness with lack of self-care, which is clearly being done here.
If you’re depressed and a part of your depression is over your fatness, as is quite easy in a fat-hating society, a message which reinforces the wrongness of your very body is not one that is going to be encouraging in any fashion.
There are just multiple problems with this depiction.
Depicting the unhealthy person as a fat fast-food eater, is just being lazy. This is how I feel whenever I see anti-fat messages in cartoons as well. They’re being too lazy to actually come up with an original joke/statement.
I don’t really know what would be a better image though, I mean aside from not having that image at all. How about, since we’re talking about depression, showing someone sleeping in bed all day vs the person eating healthily. Cause I’ve been depressed and remember that you loose your appetite and want to sleep tons. I also got the version that caused me to desire to wear lots of black clothing, white face powder, and copious eyeliner.
Jackie – Your comment really gets to the heart of it for me, and the problem with illustrating ‘eat well’. Because that can look so different for different people. Because food has been given so much meaning in our culture, the pressure to ‘eat well’ can be as harmful as the ‘eating well’ is good, if that pressure is done in the wrong way. For that reason I think the illustration should have been eating vs. not eating. And it’s interesting that the others were on/off. Although I do still see problems with the other images.
Acheman – you have a lot of faith in an organisation that is happy to trot out ‘eww fat people’, a fatih I don’t share.
I was going to add my 2 cents to this discussion, mentioning the whole “cooking food takes a lot of effort and money” issue in particular, but you’ve all already said it so well.
Good discussion.
Just wanted to add that it would make sense for many more of these pictures to include fat folks, given the well-documented fact that so many psych meds cause not insignificant weight gain.
I know my meds made me fat–but they also made me well (along with social supports, regular exercise, and a whole-foods-based vegetarian way of eating).
So I would have liked to see larger people at the “healthy” dinner table, and also engaged in the healthy activities.
This is a laudable aim, so why are they suggesting that depression is caused by what you eat, staying up late at night etc? That sounds like it reflects the current sterile lifestyle choice debates. Part of the body’s attempt to keep you out of the danger zone, that which would end with suicide, is to try and raise you mood and prevent anymore strain on an overtaxed system. This is self-nuture and it’s important to know if your going through depression, it is unfair to represent this as a sign of self-abuse.
I think it’s great that people want to take more control over their lives in this way, but they must be careful not to accept other people’s cliches unexamined, that defeats the object.
Really, why does fast food get so much bashing, when food served in restaurants with waiters is frequently just as bad, if not even worse? (I agree that giant cups of soda are awful, but what’s wrong with your basic cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato on a bun that isn’t wrong with a steak and potatoes dinner at, say, Chili’s?)
B. Adu (comment 23), asks, “so why are they suggesting that depression is caused by what you eat, staying up late at night, etc?”
In my experience with being depressed for decades, I have found that keeping a regular schedule for food and sleep makes a HUGE difference in controlling my symptoms. If a person is not depressed to start with, skipping meals and staying up all night is not going to cause depression…that’s not how it works. Depression makes me want to stay in bed for 4 or 5 days at a time, drifting between deep sleep and half-sleep. That’s not an effective way to nurture my body. Depression makes me forget to eat for days, then eat whatever food is immediately available. That’s not nurturing, either.
Breaking out of that pattern can be really difficult, and sometimes I need help to do it. If I wasn’t depressed, it would be easy to “take care of myself” at the level I need for depression control, (not going more than 20 hours without food. Not staying in bed for more than 14 hours at a time. Taking meds twice a day. Going outside in daylight at least once every 2 days), but when the depression is bad it’s a terrible challenge for me. When I can keep it up for a couple of weeks, it helps, but it’s hard to keep up with when I don’t want to bother with anything. I found the Icarus poster encouraging. I don’t see how you regard it as reflecting “current sterile lifestyle choice debate.”
“Just wanted to add that it would make sense for many more of these pictures to include fat folks, given the well-documented fact that so many psych meds cause not insignificant weight gain.”
I’d just say they *might* cause a significant weight gain, but they might not as well. I’ve gone from anti-depressants to hormones – the latter is supposed to increase fat and slow down metabolism…yet I don’t gain a pound. Though yeah I’m somewhat depressed. I still eat usually 2 meals a day, with snacks. Everything fat, ice cream, small cakes, chocolate chips cookies and I got no idea where it goes but it doesn’t stay on me…
Depression tends to make me lose weight, hormones apparently don’t affect my weight. So I oscillate between 100 and 108 lbs, usually the lower portion of it. I’ve not managed reaching above 110 lbs in a couple years and I eat anything that’s supposedly bad for your body. I’m finicky so I don’t eat fruit or vegetables unless in certain ways (canned fruits, dried raisins, apple pie is limit, as for vegetables: in sauce, soup I eat roughly 1/4 of the variety, I eat my hamburgers and hot-dogs plain because I don’t like any of the toppings).
‘If I wasn’t depressed, it would be easy to “take care of myself” at the level I need for depression control’
Exactly, depression is not a lifestyle choice, a collection of lifestyle choices, or even the product of a collection of ‘bad’ lifestyle choices, it is for want of a better word, an illness. If you can do the things they say are you depressed?
You describe how you go without food, and then you eat lots of food, anyone who does the former tends to do the latter, that is not specific to depression, it’s clearly the body rebalancing itself, and perfectly natural, why should this be represented as self-abuse, it’s absurd.
As depression is an imbalance of the nervous system, it’s going to affect the function of your body, effect not cause. Depression can make you vulnerable to feelings of failure about coping with life, I genuinely do not think it’s a good idea to set oneself for more failure of the failing to care of yourself kind when it’s not that way at all.
I thought the point of this project was a different way of seeing depression, from the point of view of those affected, free from the baggage that others bring to it, I think that’s an interesting idea. It might be better to advise people of how to try and see their depression, whilst there in the midst of it.
Sycorax:
It doesn’t make him unusual, though. Not average does not imply unusual, either.
True enough, although it does bear mentioning that all of the people engaged in self-destructive behaviour elsewhere are pretty skinny, too.
*shrug* I don’t see it as a deliberate slam against fat people, but I’m not going to out and out tell you that you’re wrong, either.
B.Adu:
I think it’s more about maintaining a sensible life style when you’re not depressed, so as to avoid situations like extreme fatigue etc that can make you more vulnerable to depression when (if) it hits.
I don’t see it as a deliberate slam either. With all due respect, so what? That it wasn’t intentional doesn’t make it okay.
No, of course it’s not OK if someone draws an image which another person finds hurtful.
It is, however, germane. It’s the difference between unconsciously causing offence and being a bigot, which is what some people have said they believe the artist to be.
I’m not saying she should be given a pass… But she shouldn’t be getting nailed up anywhere, either. I can appreciate that others may see it differently from me, and that they may see it as being anti-fat. I did say that I’m not going to tell anyone that s/he is wrong; my opinion is basically “not proven“.
If you have a look at Sophie Crumb’s (regularly published in MOME magazine) and her mom Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s (autobiography “Need More Love” for a good overview) comics/graphic stories you will get a lot of information (often very biting and very funny) on their body image issues.
Although I don’t think Sophie’s choice of a fat person on the “bad” side in the poster above is intentionally hurtful (aka bigoted), I do think she sees the world as skinny = healthy, possibly just “normal”. I think it’s worth noting everyone else in the poster is skinny…which seems to mean that skinny is normal, to her.
I think she and the Icarus project should be called on it. Sophie could probably use the feedback (if nothing else to expand her idea of “normal” sized people) and certainly a alternative mental health organization can use the information, so they can expand their capacity to treat all mental health consumers with respect.
Eva FTW. Informing people of (possible) unconscious prejudices so they can learn is not achieved by alienating them.
Mike – what does FTW mean?
How would expressing my dismay on my size being equated with not taking care of myself in the context of mental illness be alienating to the artist? It’s alienating to ME that the artist depicted a fat person in that role, and that role only, of all the people drawn for the poster.
Also, in Sophie’s case I think she is very aware of body image prejudices, at least how it impacts on her – not neccesarily how her prejudices may impact others. She writes & draws stories about them in her comics.
If the issues were completely unconscious she wouldn’t be creating comics that depict how crappy she feels when her mom encourages her to go to the gym with her and Sophie interprets this, in the strip, as a criticsm (which, actually, it might be, on an unconscious level, on her mom’s part, as depicted in the strip).
It’s easier to see other people’s faults, but often those faults, in a general sense, are the ones we have to work on ourselves. I think Sophie may still be young enough (under 30) to not see how the prejudices she’s fighting off from her family she may also being dishing out to other people.
So when I say “called on it” I mean to tell her that the issue of how people are depicted has an effect on the people who are being targeted – and as someone who has been inside the comics world her whole life I think she knows that – but perhaps she doesn’t know the way fat mental health consumers experience it. And that’s germaine – she drew a poster for a mental health organization! If she’s gonna get alienated by feedback about it why bother illustrating for the organization? Why bother illustrating anything at all, if she doesn’t get to grow as an artist and as a person? Graphic artists don’t last very long if they aren’t flexible and open to criticsm.
FTW means ‘For The Win’. He’s being nice. I agree, but I did want to take you up on one thing; it’s this
The thing is, most people see the world as skinny=healthy, because that’s the medical advice they’ve been given. Personally, I was talking about and advocating Fat Acceptance long before I encountered the term, as a (thin) teenager; but because everything I’d ever read, including science magazines and similar health materials, said that being fat was bad for one’s health, I always expressed it in terms of trade-offs (it’s no use being ostensibly physically healthier if you get that way through an unhealthy relationship to food) limits (people who are not medically overweight shouldn’t be thinking about losing weight) limitations (dieting is a bad way of losing weight) no-guarantees (I knew that I was thin but very unfit indeed) universality (almost everyone has unhealthy aspects to their lifestyle, including many health nuts) and privacy (although you can’t say that people have no right to be concerned about others, there have to be limits to the extent that someone’s bodily states are considered available for public scrutiny.)
It was only reading the scientific coverage on this blog which alerted me to the fact that the medical evidence tells a story which is rather more complicated than that. That information isn’t easy to come by, and the story it contradicts comes from an apparently trustworthy source: I’m sure others will dispute this, but in my opinion, most areas – mental health is another one where this doesn’t hold, incidentally – the health advice and information that, for example, the NHS gives out is pretty good.
I now make a point of challenging people when they bring up the medical effects of being fat – but I still think that my earlier arguments hold, and also that arguments based on the a simplistic fat != unhealthy shouldn’t be the whole basis on which FA proceeds. The fact is that for some people, fat is a sign, not a cause, of poor health, just as for some people thinness is a sign of poor health.
And I genuinely don’t see why FA or the valuing of food shouldn’t also allow us to recognise that there are good and bad meals – I use the word ‘meal’ rather than ‘food’ because it’s often just as much the way that food is eaten that is healthy or unhealthy as the food itself. In fact, valuing good meals – meals with symbolic value, meals we enjoy, meals with lots of interesting vegetables – can be part of what it is to value food. I think that steering away from being moralistic or medicalistic about food shouldn’t mean avoiding all value judgments about eating whatsoever. I have so far steered clear of my own experiences with eating and mood, because I’m not comfortable discussing those aspects of my life in this setting, but I will say that there have been and are times when the problem I have with food is that it’s empty and meaningless and just a way of getting energy into my body, something I think about and care about too little, and in that context it can help to be reminded that the way I eat can impact the way I feel later.
Another internet acronym is TL;DR. It stands for ‘Too long; didn’t read’. I wonder how many people are actually reading the longer comments.
Sorry. Lolcats and too much intarwebz have rotted my brain. It’s “for the win”, as opposed to FAIL.
Well, it’s not, and I probably wasn’t clear there. I meant that a lot of people’s automatic assumption of guilt (i.e., bigotry) vs giving someone the benefit of the doubt is alienating to someone who is probably an ally or likely to become one.
Fair enough; I wasn’t aware of that. As I said, I’m more comfortable giving prospective allies or people who should be allies the benefit of the doubt; as I’ve said before, intent is important. Douchebaggery is not the same as unintentionally causing harm; while it may have some of the same effect part of the time, I find that unintentional harm at least gives one some slight hope of reform and the chance not to be hurt later.
Absolutely. Minor nitpick – people under 30 aren’t automatically un-self-aware, and vice versa for those above it. Experience is not age, after all.
Probably not; thinner people tend not to know, as a rule, what it’s like to be part of teh dreaded FATZ! unless they’ve been fat already. And even then, they can be arseholes.
Sure. I guess it’s a question of how legit criticism is perceived by the criticised party, and how much of that comes down to how the criticism is couched in the first place. I think criticism, in order to be positive and have a useful end effect, should not descend into blaming. It’s understandable, but it rarely has any use.
All I’m saying is:
I’d like it if Sophie knew she caused some harm (whether it was intentional or not) and if she isn’t able to absorb the information, that’s on her.
The rest I’ve extrapolated from her & her parents’ comics and other published works, which, even if they are autobiographical, should probably be taken with grains of salt.
Having said that, since all this autobiographical information is available, it encourages me to feel that Sophie would benefit from some fat advocasy feedback. If she’s doesn’t want it there isn’t anything I can do about it, but if (in theory) I don’t try, how will I know what she’s up for?
Which begs the question, when you give someone the benefit of doubt does that mean not communicating that harm (intentional or otherwise) has been done? I hope not.
If we don’t communicate with allies and potential allies when an honest mistake has been made, what do we do when intentional harm from allies comes our way?
Oh, no, absolutely not. I’m of the firm belief that communicating harm in a non-hostile way is the best way to go about it. Along the lines of, “You may not know what you’ve done here, but…”