North Star Liberal, which decided to launch by calling Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, fat and mannish. Of course, it’s okay because they also mocked the appearances of male politicians, which, er, only makes things worse. Also, it’s “snarky,” which is evidently now code for “place where people who claim to be liberals can ignore liberal values.”
For the record:
1. Fat jokes aren’t funny.
2. Jokes that portray women are mannish aren’t funny.
3. A site that claims to be “liberal” would understand that.
Yeah, you can steer clear of them. They aren’t liberal in any meaningful sense of the word.
UPDATE: I guess we can at least be glad they pulled the part making fun of Paul Wellstone’s death — which they used to attack Minnesota State Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, Minn. Incidentally, where were Paul and Sheila going again when their plane crashed?
On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58 years old. The other victims were his wife, Sheila; one of his three children, Marcia; the two pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess, his driver, Will McLaughlin, and campaign staffers Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son Tom Rukavina serves in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy
Oh yeah.
You guys stay classy, now.
While I fully agree with you that fat jokes aren’t funny and that sexist jokes aren’t either, I am curious about your use of the word liberal (N.B. – I’m from Canada, so to me Obama seems like a conservative). While I can see how you might associate caring for others’ rights as being a liberal value (e.g. the right not to be insultingly generalized down to a caricature of yourself for being female, for instance), I’m a little hesitant to call it a strictly liberal value. Is understanding that sexist and sizeist jokes are inappropriate something that no conservative is capable of? It seems like even the american “left” (and I use the term loosely) is falling into value-based politics on this one.
It isn’t about ideology, it’s about personal decency.
Well, you have to be careful with the whole linking of morality to liberalism thing.
Some views of liberalism would–for example–suggest that fat jokes, or making any non-progressive comment, are “non liberal.”
Some other views of liberalism would suggest that it is more important to preserve open discourse and public debate than it is to stifle or condemn certain communications, even unpleasant ones.
The speech thing tends to be a very interesting indicator, which is why you get a huge number of “liberal” colleges with extraordinarily “anti-liberal” attempts to restrain speech, conduct, and/or thought.
If you claim to be able to determine whether someone is liberal by whether they think fat jokes are funny, i think your liberal definition is a bit skewed.
The speech thing tends to be a very interesting indicator, which is why you get a huge number of “liberal” colleges with extraordinarily “anti-liberal” attempts to restrain speech, conduct, and/or thought.
It seems to me a bit of a stretch to compare university policies with someone saying that he finds the type of rhetoric wielded by a particular blog does not accord with his values.
Can you be a liberal if you think black face is funny? What about if you think Jews run the international banks?
I actually tend to agree that liberalness is something multi-polar and spectrumy and it’s silly to revoke a “liberal card” based on a single trait. People can be sexist and liberal, just like they can be feminists and racists, although both sets of people are welcome to stay away from me. Or they can be liberal and sexist in some ways (such as thinking women are on the whole stupider than men) but not sexist in others (such as supporting equal pay). Lots of contradictions and ambiguities are possible.
But I get a whiff off your post that you’re being super-dismissive of Jeff because he used fatphobia as his standard and you don’t think fatphobia should be important enough to be used that way.
Also, I totally almost grumped at you for bringing the fat jokes thing into the Jewish identity thread where it seemed like it should have no relevance until I noticed that I hadn’t clicked where I thought I’d clicked… :-D
I think that you seem to be responding to this as if Jeff said, “No non-liberals are moral in this specific way,” where what I think he was more saying is “all liberals ought to be moral in this specific way.”
‘All Xs are Y’ is different from ‘No non-Xs are Y.’
—Myca
Myca — I hadn’t read it that way, and it’s probably the way it was intended. Certainly liberals (and everyone else, for that matter) ought to be concerned with the use of stereotypes and their effects on others. I guess it brought up the question for me of “can a liberal be a liberal and still be sexist (sizeist, racist, etc.)?”, which then led me to the question of “can a conservative be a conservative and not be sexist?” – the answer to the latter must, I think you’ll agree, be yes; nothing about conservatism dictates that any conservative need be a sexist. But perhaps you’re right about the “not-x” thing.
Would it be wise as this point to make distinctions between conservatism and liberalism as economic, rather than cultural, standpoints? Certainly I can imagine a self-described economic liberal still being a racist, while I have a harder time imagining a self-described idealogical liberal being a racist. And then what does that say about idealogical conservatism? Have I just labeled them as bigots? I think I’m running around in circles…
I agree that the proper phrasing is as “people who are not moral in this specific way are not liberal,” not “only liberals are moral in this particular way.”
However, if you write in the context of an implied liberal/non-liberal dichotomy, though (or with any other dichotomy) then there is appropriately a sense of “not-A = B.” On this blog, “non-liberal” often seems to be a synonym for “conservative” in many respects, so I don’t think that the “not-A = B” interpretation is completely out of left field.
I suppose so in theory, though with some difficulty. In any case we’d probably agree that the person was an asshole.
I am super-dismissive because he classified something as “non-liberal” based on two points about inappropriate jokes. That the two jokes in question weren’t on the level of SuperObviousShit like, say, blackface, makes it even more interesting.
BTW, I couldn’t read the post in question, because it seems to be removed as far as i can see. See:
http://www.liberal.mn/2009/11/18/we-are-very-sorry/
Wow, good for them.
I do think that in the big venn diagram, the racism circle and the sexism circle have more overlap with the conservative circle than they do with the liberal circle, but none of these circles exist entirely inside or outside another.
Where the anti-fat circle lies, I’m not sure. I would be mildly surprised if it overlapped with the liberal circle more than the conservative one, but only mildly. I think it overlaps with both way way too much.
—Myca
“I would be mildly surprised if it overlapped with the liberal circle more than the conservative one”
I would not.
I agree w/r/t racism/sexism.
Hmm, what are some other interesting ones?
there’s criminal defense. Conservatives seem more likely to be against a strong criminal defense, which I think of as a liberal value. Liberals tend to support it more, but also tend IMO to vary more: they are more likely to think it is necessary and also more likely to be willing to make exceptions for, say, rape.
There’s free speech, of course. That one tweaks both sides. At the moment I’d say that the free speech often targets liberal excess as much or more than it targets conservative excess. So you might end up with places like thefire.org, which are espousing a liberal value (free speech) but which I suspect are conservative in their underlying outlook.
There’s AA and its offshoots of course, which pretty much represents a classic balancing between the liberal goals of “equal treatment for all” and the liberal goals of “equality for all.” Again, you get people on both sides of that one, though any people on the same side may be there for very different reasons.
But all in all, what with so many areas where liberalism varies, it’s pretty hard to read just a bit of something and conclude “Yeah, you can steer clear of them. They aren’t liberal in any meaningful sense of the word.” I mean, isn’t that sort of snap judgment a comparatively non-liberal act?
Yeah, although to apply it to this post ignores two things that are implicit in this post. A) hyperbole, B) Jeff’s clear desire to irritate the writers by calling them non-liberal, and C) the implied alteration of the sentence “They aren’t liberal in any meaningful sense of the word” to “They aren’t liberal in any sense that interests me.”
I mean, this is good snark, let’s not ruin it by pretending it isn’t.
Any subject matter can be funny.Just ask George Carlin. That doesn’t mean any particular joke is funny, or that even successfully being funny justifies making fun of someone.
@Doug S.:
I found that sketch insulting and completely unfunny, actually, and stopped listening midway through. I think a lot of things can be funny to a certain audience, and given this is a free country I would not attempt to prevent comedians joking about sexual assaults or mannish women or anything else.
I do think there are many people who joke about very dark things as a coping method, and that is the case in which rape can be funny. If a survivor of a sexual assault chooses to portray humor in their situation or a situation theirs, as a coping method, I see nothing wrong with that. I likewise would have less of an issue with New Yorkers or the family members of victims joking about 9/11 than anyone else making those jokes.
I do not think it is funny or ethical to mock or attack others a) as a a way of indirectly benefiting from or belittling someone else’s personal tragedy (and I do see sexual assault as both personal and tragic) or b) to celebrate your bigotry against people you see as Other in some way. Rape jokes, fat jokes, blackface, and jokes about mannish women all meet this personal definition of poor taste, imo. I suspect it is a definition of poor taste with which many liberals agree, though I could be wrong.
That George Carlin video was truly glum making, although I think though his point about how you construct a joke is true. The problem is so few have the talent or intelligence to be able to prove it much.
As for fat jokes, you rarely hear any. Such is the delight at the absurd ‘telling it like it is’ angle that all you have to say is so and so is fat or fat people, they’re so fat aren’t they? And people collapse into paroxisms of very convincing laughter.
I especially love the-preceded with a ‘cute’ little snort-thing people do as if to say, “I’m trying to hold myself back (because I’m a good person) but I just can’t because it’s just so damn funny”.
I just want to tell those people, please don’t tax yourself; go right ahead and laugh your arse off.
Um, no one is going to point out the basic credibility problem of Jeff “Reagan Was Great!” Fecke passing judgment on who is and is not a liberal??
I think that what I trying to say was that “That’s not funny” isn’t a very good response; the problem with these types of jokes is that they’re mean and hurtful, not that they invariably fail as jokes by being not funny.
Wow, that would like a self-proclaimed feminist who praises the work of an anti-feminist. How could anyone find anything said by such a person to be credible?
The answer is twofold. First of all, it’s possible to be a liberal and be impressed with Reagan, or for that matter to be a feminist who is impressed with some of Robert Franklin’s posts. This is because liberal/not liberal and feminist/not feminist aren’t the only possible scales we can use to measure being impressed. I.e., one might think that Reagan’s policies were awful, but still think he was a great president because he communicated so well or won the cold war or some such.
(I don’t agree with that assessment of Reagan — but it is not a view which automatically subtracts all credibility from the person forever.)
Second, and more importantly, there is more to everyone than their worse or most foolish moment. Granting for the sake of argument that Jeff showed a lapse of judgment by saying Reagan was a great president, that doesn’t mean that every single thing Jeff writes is poisoned by that one error. Judged not by that one instance but by the totally of his work (or at least, his work that I’ve read), I think Jeff has shown many dozens of times over his genuine commitment to liberal and feminist politics. That should more than outweigh his Reagan mistake.
There are mistakes which would outweigh everything else, or at least require public repudiation. For instance, if Ann Example wrote a long post on how Hitler was right to kill all those people, then that might outweigh a hundred other posts. But I don’t think Jeff’s Reagan comment rises to that level.
@B. Adu – I actually can’t think of a single fat joke I actually thought was funny. I mean, I can think of funny examples of every other kind of humour – racist stuff, rape jokes, incest jokes, dead-baby jokes, etc. I don’t necessarily approve of them, but they got a giggle out of me in an “I’m going to Hell” sort of way.
But I honestly can’t think of a funny fat joke.
I thought about the elements of humor, or at least of a good joke, a few years ago. The elements I came up with that every joke needed was: 1)familiarity of subject; 2)an unexpected twist, and 3) truth. Timing is important in telling the joke, but not necessarily in the humor itself.
The reason why I bring this up is because in order for those jokes (fat, racist, etc.) to be hilarious to you, you would have to believe the premise behind them. I would have to believe on some level that fat people are x, some race of people are x, women are x, etc. in order for those jokes to really be funny – not polite laugh or giggle, but real humor. Beware the person that belly laughs at this crap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqz1ojIQTBk
Doug, I don’t think that’s funny, by and large.
To me, a funny fat joke is one based on reality. A fat joke based on the reality that fat people are larger and heavier than thin people could, I think, potentially be funny. (Although “tone” matters too; if the joke seemed to be coming from a place of mockery or contempt, as most fat jokes are, then it wouldn’t work).
However, a joke based on disparaging fat people with stereotypes — such as that fat people eat enormous quantities of food all the time, or that they’re incapable of exercise, or that they’re just fundamentally, physically gross — is a lot less likely to strike me as funny. And most of Weird Al’s jokes in that video fall into this category, alas.
I thought Bill Cosby’s early Fat Albert sketches were funny.
Cosby: “…so Fat Albert was running up those stairs, and I was pushing him the whole way cause I wanted him to move faster, and I was laughing inside so hard cause I knew they were gonna lean out with the Frankenstein statue and they were gonna go “rooooahhhhh” and Fat Albert was gonna be so scared and he was gonna look sooooooo funny.”
“And we finally got up to the top of the stairs and they leaned out with the Frankenstein statue and they went “roooooaaahhhhh.”
“… I forgot I was behind him. Later, when I got out of the hospital… “
And note Maco that in that case, the joke wasn’t “Fat Albert is such a fat pig!”, but “ha, the narrator was so engrossed in playing his practical joke that he forgot about the relative mass of he and Albert, and when Albert got scared he flattened the poor stupe”. That is, the figure of fun is the narrator, not Albert.
Oh well. I tried. :(
Silenced @ 22,
I actually can’t think of a single fat joke I actually thought was funny.
Funny’s probably a little ambitious as the fat ‘joke’ has not really evolved past, fat people being fat being just achingly hilarious.
But one that actually counts as a joke that made me snort was from a UK comedian called Jimmy Carr;
Wordplay.
As for that Weird Al Yankovic video, I found it more intriguing than offensive. The intro scene expounds on a theme about blackness and fatness that hadn’t quite occured so clearly.
Then you’ve got a fat character in the MJ role, whose virtually constantly moving exuberantly and confidently-whilst at one point singing about how he never moves- and not out of breath, at all. Plus all the other fats in the background moving freely and with abandon.
The bit where he removes the grate cover is screwy, he gets hold of that toy- I don’t know what it’s called- that turns when you blow on it. He holds it up to the wind that’s strong enough to blow him backwards and yet it barely turns!
An ill realised concept, or deliberate subversion?
As a very fat person and an FA advocate, I’m usually vehemently outspoken about ‘fat jokes’ and weight-based stereotypes. However, I *love* Weird Al’s ‘Fat’ video. Not only is it a very skillfully done parody of the ‘Bad’ video (which is itself funny, in less-intentional ways), but it shows fat people being active and athletic, and the fat backup dancers are really very talented. In essence, it presents fat people as subjects, not objects, which is key. Weird Al’s one of the few people I’m willing to forgive for having donned a fat suit; his proud declaration ‘I’m fat!’ throughout the song is something of a rallying cry for me. :-)
And now it appears that North Star Liberal is gone.
“And the whole world calls me fat and I’m proud so just tell me once again: Who’s Fat!”
@Myca #12: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the anti-fat circle fell much more on the liberal side than the conservative one. From what I’ve been able to tell the hierarchy of liberal dislike seems to run conservatives > smokers > overweight people. In that order. No amount of arguments that the latter two groups are mostly poor people will dissuade them. Pointing out that a lot of poor people are obese because cheap food is godawfully unhealthy and that’s all they can afford doesn’t budge them. There’s just something about the two that makes people that claim empathy channel bootstrap conservativism. It’s about personal responsibility!!!111one
Note: I’m not claiming smoking = obesity. I only mention it because that’s the order it seems to go in.
@Jeff: The problem with raising “True Scotsman” tests for political ideologies comes when you’re forced to decide exactly how many deviations from the “true” is allowable before a person is no longer considered in the group.
While I also find pretty much any *ism you can think of abhorrent, I can’t think of any real solution other than creating multiple subclasses of liberal/progressive to fight with one another. That or gently but firmly correcting people when they’re being asses, which you did a good job of. (IMO)
Mandolin:
JThompson:
Yeah, like I said, I would only be mildly surprised. The thing is that upwards of 90% of the fat-acceptance activists I’ve run across are on the left, so while it’s possible that the left contains both more politically pro-fat people and more politically anti-fat people, that does seem counter-intuitive.
—Myca
No, actually. I’d expect that to be precisely the case.
Conservatives mostly don’t care, Myca. It isn’t on our radar. If you meet someone who cares a lot about fat issues, they’re likely either to be a fat-acceptance activist (liberal) or a public-health scold/advocate (liberal).
That and conservatives don’t seem (in my experience) to have as much of the “beauty makes you moral” stuff.
Although I think much of the difference is urban/rural. Again, in my experience, the more urban an area is, where there are more people concentrated, there’s also more thinness pressure and pressure to look perfect. And since urban areas trend liberal… there’s a correlation that doesn’t have much to do with causation.
From what I’ve been able to tell the hierarchy of liberal dislike seems to run conservatives > smokers > overweight people. In that order.
I’d say it’s conservatives and fat people just about tied. I don’t know where smokers are, but not only do I feel they are off the pace, they can also be seperated from cigarettes, a fat person cannot seperate themselves from their own body.
I think that there is felt to be some kind of symbiosis between fatness and conservatism in the minds of many, maybe even by conservatives themselves, which maybe accounts for their slightly less hysterical attitude toward it.
I can’t help wondering whether this is an opportunity for liberals/left to kill two birds with one stone, attack what they feel is conservatism by giving vent to the inner conservative they themselves have (obviously) been repressing.
The poor people are unhealthy because of what they eat/don’t eat, do don’t do, doesn’t scan. I grew up in a modest income/ poor area of London and the picture on the ground is not that simple.
As far as I can tell, it’s not the poorest who are the fattest, but those between the poorest and the middle class who seem to be the plumpest/ fattest.
Which again may account for some of the hostility, those people are some kind of threat to the position of the middle/ upper middle class liberal/lefties, so the hostility might be an instinctive lever to keep them in their place.
Madolin @37,
I also thought that divide might be about rural surrounds lots of irregualrity of nature, urban, surrounded by lots of man made angularity.
“I think that there is felt to be some kind of symbiosis between fatness and conservatism in the minds of many, maybe even by conservatives themselves, which maybe accounts for their slightly less hysterical attitude toward it.”
I think so. I have a fatphobic vegetarian friend — another usually liberal trait, veganism and vegetarianism, and obviously not all vegans and vegetarians are fatphobic, but I find that sometimes the idea that morality and food are connected in one way (and some vegans/vegetarians do think this for reasons I can’t fault them for) are more susceptible to the belief that morality and food/fatness are correlated in many ways — anyway, he’s also one of the most radical leftists I know.
I think he’s ducky and he’s gotten better about some of the fatphobia since we started talking about it. But when I met him, if he wanted to describe Republicans, he’d almost always use the word “fat.” As in, “We protested the Republican Convention when it came to New York and they’d shout back at us, enormously fat and (long description of fat as disgusting ensues)…”
“Surely fat is not the problem?” I’d ask.
And he’d think about it and say, “No, you’re right.”
But if you think about it a lot of the fat stereotypes and conservative stereotypes are linked. In my experience, conservatives are more likely to be chill about women who’ve had a number of children and are fat as a result. (Of course, the women still have to pay lip service to weight loss and they have to diet…)
And the archetype of the pot-bellied blow-hard family patriarch is strong.
Of course, another correlation besides urban/rural is age. Are young people more likely to be more fatphobic in an overt, conscious way? It would make sense to me if that were the case.
I should note, though, that I do think covert fatphobia is pretty much ubiquitous and spectrumless. I’d rather talk to someone who doesn’t think consciously that because I’m fat I’m immoral, but there are a number of studies that show people who look at photographs of fat people think they’re less intelligent, less competent, and so on, and those kinds of calculations tend to be done subliminally. It’s not just liberals and young people who are paying fat people less and hassling them at hiring.
I suppose I see the “food/diet purity as morality” as being something that a certain subset of progressives espouse, but generally I see fatphobic attitudes as better correlated with attitudes on the right.
“I shouldn’t have to pay for a fat person’s doctor visits, which is why we shouldn’t have government-run and tax-subsidized health insurance.” Substitute “for a lazy welfare mother’s bunch of kids,” “an illegal immigrant’s children to go to school,” etc.
“I don’t want to have to look at disgusting fat people, so they should keep it out of the public eye.” Substitute gay or lesbian couples/families, transgender people, religious/cultural apparel of non-majority cultures (I’m thinking turbans, hijab, and so forth), etc.
“It’s their choice, so discriminating isn’t like discriminating against [insert something conservatives think it’s not OK to discriminate against, which I’m hard pressed to identify frankly but I hear this argument anyway].” Substitute GLBT people, the homeless, etc.
“Those people are just lazy – they should get up off the couch.” Substitute immigrants (who should “go back where they came from”), people of color (who should “stop looking for handouts”), union members, public servants, the unemployed, the homeless, etc.
“Telling me I can’t make fun of fat people is just being politically correct.” Substitute Obama and African-Americans in general, people of color in general, GLBT people, poor/homeless people, religious minorities, pretty much any marginalized group under the sun.
“We shouldn’t be encouraging fat people by [de-stigmatizing fat, offering stylish clothing for fat young women, accomodating fat bodies, etc.]” Substitute any kind of social safety net for immigrants, the homeless, the poor/unemployed, single mothers, etc.
Maybe I just spend too much time (and too many Sanity Watchers points, as they say at Shapely Prose) reading the comments section of the SF Chronicle online, but the ugly and apparently conservative rhetoric that pops up in response to any mention of a marginalized group maps fairly easily onto the common responses to fat people.
And I would disagree that conservatives are more comfortable with women who are fat from childrearing. I would describe the women’s magazine/beauty pageant vision of female-ness as deeply conservative, deeply invested in traditional objectification of women, and entirely predicated on the idea that women are primarily valuable for being attractive and thus propping up the masculinity of the men whom they are (monogamously) partnered with. Isn’t it a common conservative attack to mock the femininity of progressive women? (the “hairy-legged mannish feminist” stereotype comes to mind, as does the “no man would want a woman who was so bitchy, shrill, etc.” attack.) Filling women’s time with impossible standards for appearanct that take hours of exercise, hours of beauty routines, and a calorie intake so low as to impair brain function fits very well indeed with a conservative view of how much women should be involved in the public discourse.
In my experience, conservatives are more likely to be chill about women who’ve had a number of children and are fat as a result.
Yes that comes up in a lot of other groups of class and race.
And the archetype of the pot-bellied blow-hard family patriarch is strong.
Ditto, I think that in a capitalist patriarchal system, men obviously tending to have ownership of the lion’s share of wealth, are allowed to look prosperous.
Women are supposed to look, like they need to have their needs met. Whereas amongst the more modestly incomed, a woman that is plump or fat looks as if she might be capable of wresting something out of the little alloted.
Presumably, if you wish to live a single income with a few children kind of life, that sensibility might overlap with those of other classes.
I’m of course not talking about what things are deemed to represent, rather than what is or isn’t true about actual people.
I should note, though, that I do think covert fatphobia is pretty much ubiquitous and spectrumless.
Agreed, and I think that regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, fatphobia tends more to undermine your beliefs, but for different reasons.
Elusis,
I see fatphobic attitudes as better correlated with attitudes on the right.
That’s why left/liberal adherence to them is so incongruous, why are they regurgitating deeply conservative tropes so vociferously?
For some reason, another famous, or possibly infamous, “fat joke” has come to mind, and, despite my better judgment, I feel compelled to link to it.
Be warned, the skit is not safe for brain, as it consists of Monty Python at their most horrifying. Once you watch it, you can’t unwatch it. You have been warned.
“I think that in a capitalist patriarchal system, men obviously tending to have ownership of the lion’s share of wealth, are allowed to look prosperous.”
The problem is, in the context of US-style capitalism, the ‘fat industrialist’ has always been the stereotype advanced by (usually left-wing) critics of capitalist practices, not by the capitalists themselves. Fans of industrial capitalism have contrasted the ‘energetic’ and ‘active’ leader of industry with the aristocratic ‘fat-cat’; that latter’s wealth was/is inherited, not earned — thus the image of the lax and fleshy aristocrat.
I must admit, I wasn’t thinking of that high in society, more of the business owning middle/ upper middle classes.
It seems that this weight war is mostly between those classes and those who aspire to be bourgeois.