No Fat Chixxz

My friend Sarito and I were just having a little discussion about "that woman on TV who's so breathless about getting down to a size 2." I assume she's talking about Kirstie Alley and Jenny Craig, both of whom/what/which Wendy McClure did an awesome job of lambasting in BUST last year. One of my favorite quotes went something to the effect of "At Pier 1, you buy overpriced crap made out of raffia; at Jenny Craig, you eat it."

As someone who has struggled with both her weight and the allegedly well-meaning but incredibly nasty remarks about my weight from those who claimed to be "just trying to HELP!!!!!", I find the whole weight-loss industry at once necessary and repugnant. I certainly can't fault Ms. Alley for wanting to shed tonnage--although I can certainly take umbrage with her spiritual practices and her lack of talent--but I wish to hell someone in the mainstream besides Naomi Wolff would finally just come out and acknowledge what this starve-yourself-to-Auschwitz-proportions marathon is really all about: Dicks.

Look. I'm a feminist, not a man-hater. These two things are not synonymous. Obviously, all men are not created equal in the sense that they do not share one immutable, collective mindset about how women should look. (Case in point: my awesome dad, who married my mom before she went batshit, and who even at her thinnest sorta resembled an apple propped up on toothpicks.) But we can't dispute that it's a bunch of totally phallocentric, well, dicks who are making these decisions about how women should look and think and be, and that we've bought and continue to buy into it, and then act like a bunch of Alexis Colbys when some skinny bitch steals our man. Okay, yes, this is extreme, but some of us never do outgrow junior high.

Think about it: If Kate Moss and her ilk were not shoved down your throat every day, if everyone from that asshole football player on down to your well-meaning but misguided Aunt Ethel weren't telling you that fat is bad and no man will love you if you don't lose some weight, would you give a good goddamn? No, of course you wouldn't. You might want to lose weight for other reasons, like diabetes prevention and the fact that you can't do certain yoga poses as easily as you used to, but if pissing off men were not the dangerous business that it is, if you weren't so utterly brainwashed (and I include myself in this, in spades), you would not be pinching your barely existent thigh fat and moaning about how corpulent you allegedly are. Hell, you might even like yourself, hard as it is to believe. I once told a therapist that I wouldn't care if I was fat if it weren't for the fact that everyone made such a big fucking deal about how godawful it was, and I don't think she believed me. But why not? We're humans, after all. We create this stuff, folks. If female bonobo monkeys can go against all traditional ideas about sex as purely reproductive and fuck each other bald, then we can get together and decide that we're not gonna take it anymore, can we not?

Here's a weight loss commercial I'd like to see: "Okay, here's the deal. I'm fat. Well, not really fat, but heavy enough that I can't get acting jobs that don't call for some incredibly degrading role as the 'Fat Chick,' which the script writer includes to make the skinny people feel good about themselves. Now, I'm damn sick of this, but I can't singlehandedly change the culture, and I've got to pay my rent. And I just don't have the balls, or ovaries, or energy to keep making my 'Fat Chicks are people too' speech to seriously fat, hairy, patriarchal prick producers, and I don't have the talent of Kathy Bates or Tovah Feldshuh to pull this thing off. That's why I choose Weight Watchers!"

Pretty good, huh? Cuts right through the bullshit. So next time someone tells you "No fat chixxz" and then has the unmitigated audacity to chide you for not eating that slice of cheesecake, recite this ad, and then kick them in the balls. Or ovaries, 'cause it ain't just men perpetratin' this shit.

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Calling All Geeks!: My friend Zoie requested some pictures of the cats. If someone has a "real" scanner (meaning one that is not part of a fax/printer/copier gadget) and the time to show me how to futz with HTML code, give me a shoutout posthaste.