A while back I saw this comic strip. Can’t remember the name. The setting was white suburbia, a family, which as my friend Sara points out “really narrows it down.”
The female lead of the comic strip (let’s call her Wilma) has a black friend of, shall we say, “a certain size.” Wilma spends three panels hinting around about an exercise class to her black friend (let’s call her Joyce). Telling Joyce the time, the location, the cost, how much fun Wilma’s having taking it. “How very nice for you,” Joyce responds, walking away with wobble lines emanating from her large rear-end.
In case you missed it, that’s the punchline. The joke is, see, Joyce is fat, but she doesn’t realize that about herself. Poor Wilma is trying to help Joyce help herself, but Joyce is so deep in denial, so far up that river in Egypt, that she simply can’t be helped.
And as I read this I’m thinking, okay, what’s wrong with wobble lines? This woman looks good to me. Maybe she looks good to herself. Maybe she already has an exercise program that she likes just fine. I do.
I look a lot like Joyce. Larger breasts, though. I weigh more than 200 pounds. I’m pretty sure. I haven’t weighed myself in three weeks, but that sounds about how I feel. I’m maybe 5 feet, 8 inches tall.
At the Y in April, I was on the treadmill, doing my 40 minutes, all of it uphill. The man next to me asked how much I weighed, and seemed deeply shocked at my answer. “But you are fat!” he exclaimed. “And you are always here, working out so hard!” Well, yes. I am. I do. And I would say I’m in shape. Round is a shape.
I’ve subscribed for a few years to an online dating service. I read the ads for entertainment, even when I’m not interested in meeting the men that posted them. In the singular they’re funny; “Satisfaction guaranteed EVERY TIME,” says Marv’s headline. There’s a man with the user name “Tumbleweed Heart,” and another whose user name is “Asslicker.” En masse, the profiles I read are pathetic and provoking. There are canned phrases one can use to describe both one’s physical type and the physical type one desires: “Slender, Average, Athletic, A Little Extra Padding, Rubenesque.” I have chosen to describe myself using the ALEP option. By far the most widely sought qualities, though, are “Slender” and “Athletic.”
Very few subscribers advertise for a specific ethnicity, but there are some of those, too.
Then there’s the men who are asking for skinny black women to email them. I raise my voice and wave my arms at the computer screen in exasperation. Skinny! Black! They exist, of course, but statistically speaking? So do microscopically small black holes.
I think black women in the US are far more likely to be fat than women of other races. Women are more likely to be fat than men; we’re built to store it up, cause we might need it to support a pregnancy. And in the US blacks are often the descendants of survivors of slavery, which tilts the genetic pinball machine in favor of holding on to that fat for dear life. Dear, dear, sweet, sweet life.
There are some who want me, right now, the way I am, so round, so firm, so fully packed. So brimming with dear life.
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The joke is, see, Joyce is fat, but she doesn’t realize that about herself. Poor Wilma is trying to help Joyce help herself, but Joyce is so deep in denial, so far up that river in Egypt, that she simply can’t be helped.
Hmm…I haven’t seen the cartoon that I remember, but my take on it would have been that the joke is that Joyce is trying to find a nice way to tell Wilma to fick off already. That she understands Wilma’s “gentle hints” and doesn’t want anything to do with her or her gym. But I suspect that this interpretation may make little sense in the overall context of the cartoon.
Argh! Comics where the punchline is “but she’s fat!” should have died out by now.
But I love to read the personals. When they used to be in the actual newspaper, I would go through and do statistical analysis on them some weeks.
The percentage of men who did not list any athletic hobbies but wanted slim, slender, fit or athletic women was always close to 90%. And the number who specificed bra size was always low but significant.
The number of women who wanted someone taller than them was a little lower, but still 75% or higher every week. (this is when they were charged by the word, so it’s someone who took one of their 36 words or whatever to put that in.)
The number of people who specified race was really high too, with women almost always specifying same-race and a minority of men specifying other race. I wonder what the difference is with the online ads – different audience, just that it’s a decade later, or if people assume since you can see their picture only same-race people will respond.
And around here the number specifying “Christian” was always close to 50%, which I always thought was funny because everyone’s definition of “Christian enough” is different.
I miss personals with word-count limits, because it really makes people pare down to what they *really* think they want.
I have 2 daughters. I have no idea what kind of shapes they’ll have as adolescents and adults but I want them to be proud of themselves whatever those are. And so I detest the social pressure to be certain size and shape. It really irks me particularly when women in the media who have a voice to speak out play into them, too, by asserting that it’s just feeling good about yourself to go on diets or have plastic surgery, and that it’s got nothing to do with a social construction of beauty. My kids will be hearing crap like that and its equivalent from their age group. It’s scary.
So what? Why are you complaining about other people’s personal sexual preferences? Besides, there seem to be at least enough skinny black women to model for ABW t-shirts. http://www.zazzle.com/angryblackwoman I don’t see a single model who seems like she weighs more than 160 lbs.
There is more and more evidence to support the idea that vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency is a major, major contributing factor in obesity and overweight. And basically African Americans have extremely high rates of vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency, even though these days it has become an epidemic across the board. Vitamin D is such a slow vitamin at building up or depleting in the body that short of either prescription dose supplements or certain drugs that can help the body get rid of it (BOTH something you do NOT want to do without a medical professional monitoring it and doing blood tests!!!), that the timescale is almost multi-generational. Lack of this vitamin is showing itself to be a major risk factor for diabetes, cancer, PCOS, autoimmune diseases, and more.
Of course, the population wide obesity epidemic is also heavily related to high fructose corn syrup. But I suspect vitamin D is a major reason why it is so much worse in African Americans?
Blame slavery? No!
What about all the famines in Europe? What about the starvation experienced in the American colonies. What about the fact that so many European immigrants to America came fleeing famine in Ireland? Or so many East European immigrants came fleeing mass starvation?