Letters to the Editor

• "I'm just ridiculing and humiliating you because I care so much about your HEALTH"

  [Read the article: Healthy, my ass]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  There is so much ignorance, misinformation, and hatred here that my head is literally spinning. It's hard to even know which part of Ms. Dickerson's "screed" against her black sisters (let alone all of womanhood) to address.

  So I'll try to stick with TWO of the most egregious examples of willfull stupidity and simply wrong facts:

  Type II Diabetes is a DISEASE. It's not a moral judgement that you are eating too much, or "punishment". Certainly poor diabetic control, in the form of poor diet or lack of exercise can worsen your disease, but it does not CAUSE diabetes in the first place. You have to be pre-disposed to diabetes to get it, and right now there is NO WAY to determine which people have this hereditary pre-dispostion (though you can make certain guesses if many of your family members develop it).

  I notice that lofty proclaimations about who gets diabetes and for what reasons are shouting out of the imbecilic mouths of people who A. do not have the disease, B. have maybe heard a few "soundbites" about it on Fox Network and C. already have an internal hatred and bigotry towards fat people. THE MAJORITY OF FAT PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE DIABETES.

  If you do NOT have a genetic pre-disposition for diabetes, you can eat yourself into stupefication, and not develop the disease. (I personally know of a man, in his 50s, who weighs over 600 lbs and is not diabetic at all.) On the other hand, once you clearly have diabetes, it cannot be "cured" by any type of diet and exercise -- only managed.

  In addition, there are also age-related forms of diabetes. My 85 year old aunt has diabetes like this, and has lost part of her foot to it -- however, she is and has always been slender. Being slender your entire life is NO GUARANTEE you will not develop Type II Diabetes in your later years.

  For once, I'd like to hear in Salon from an DIABETIC ENDOCRINOLOGIST, not some big mouth, self-hating black woman who likes to lecture other people about their lunches.

  Secondly: As a young woman, I studied Fashion History at a university, with the goal of museum curatorship. So I know something about what clothing "used to be like" and how it has evolved. There is a lot of blather all the time about how you can "prove" women are heavier (no comment about MEN of course) because someone "can remember" that in the 70s a woman with a TWENTY SIX INCH WAIST used to be considered a "fat size 12".

  This is nonsense, not the least because I was a teenager then and this is simply untrue. Since clothing started being manufactured (rather than all made by hand) in the late 19th century, there have never been ANY standards in this country for sizing -- each manufacturer pretty much just makes up his own. Clothing can vary dramatically in size from store to store, and from garment to garment within ONE store. Cheap clothes often run smaller than pricey clothes (smaller seam allowances, flimsier materials) but on the other hand, truly "designer" clothing runs even smaller than that (think Prada).

  When you try on vintage clothing, you need to remember that women in the 40s or 50s wore girdles and even corsets -- and were willing to be VERY uncomfortable -- and that's why the waists are so small relative to modern clothing. I don't know about you, but I'd rather NOT wear a girdle and be comfy than suffer for beauty! (Not that styles don't change and come around again.) They also fit differently in the bust, because women used to wear those huge pointy bras. In addition, clothing used to be routinely altered to fit the individual (rare today, except for men's suits), so a dress marked "Size 8" may well have been taken in (or let out) for an individual woman.

  Here's what IS true: Americans today, for all the flaws of our heatlh care system, are healthier and live longer than at any time in history. This is indisputable fact! Diabetes only SEEMS more common because (thank god) we are able to diagnose it EARLY and we have wonderful new treatments that really help to control it. It no longer is the absolute death sentence that it used to be, but a manageable chronic illness.

  Any look at old photographs of real people will show you without a doubt that they were mostly about the same size as people are today -- the chief difference being that they didn't have to hate themselves for being normal. Lily Langtry, a famous beauty of the 1880s, weighed 200 lbs (a fact she was not remotely embarassed to admit, as it carried no shame then), and has a small (corseted) waist and big butt, very similar to "Buffy" featured here (who as many have already pointed out, is a beautiful woman with toned arms and legs, small natural waist and flat stomach).

  Isn't time we stopped used A NUMBER ON A SCALE to determine our value as human beings????

  Permalink Thursday, June 7, 2007 09:01 AM