Letters to the Editor
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so many things wrong that 1000 words couldn't begin to cover it
Well, I've just read my last Debra Dickerson article.
I could go on for pages, but I'll limit myself to this: It hurts me deeply when I see a "progressive" publication posting articles that are little more than thinly veiled fat hatred under the guise of concern for health. Feederism--that is, fat people being pressured to eat more by a partnet--is an entirely different animal than black women being proud of their bodies--or at least not actively self-loathing as most white women are. We can't have women feeling good about their bodies, after all.
Lard bodies? Honestly, Debra. Where are your manners?
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A Big Butt Does Not =FAT
Having a big butt doesn't mean that a person is fat, any more than having big breasts means that a person is fat. I've always heard that having the body type where fat is stored around your abdomen to be the most dangerous kind.
If you glance at those men's magazines catering toward men of color, you won't see any obese, or even fat women being celebrated in them. The women featured have trim, flat bellies, and the classic "coke-bottle" bust-waist-hip ratio that men of all cultures seem to prefer. So the author seems to be setting up a strawman argument.
Rather than being celebrated, I would argue judging by the recent flood of films released over the years, that both African-American, and mainstream culture seem to think there is very little more pathetic and funny than a fat black woman. Except perhaps a fat black women who seems to suffer from the delusion that she might have some inherant worth and attractiveness, despite her weight. That notion seems truly thigh-slappingly funny to many.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news...
...but Buffie doesn't look obese to me, either. The size of her rear end and her poor exercise habits aside, she wears a medium top and a size 13-15 in jeans, and neither of those are exactly hallmarks of being huge (and the latter is probably exclusively due to her hip measurements). Since she's obviously carrying very little weight in the stomach area, she's probably got a waist-to-hip ratio that most of us would kill for.
Most women would not, I'm sure, be able to gain that much around the hips without gaining too much elsewhere, too. And that is a problem. But for heaven's sake, can we get a reasonable look at what obesity really is? Her lack of healthy habits are bad, but then there really aren't a lot of models of any stripe who're eating what they ought to be by nutritionists' standards. Not a lot of the rest of us, either.
Buffie is a slim woman with a large rear end. And having women like that modeling is a valuable thing, because when I was young one of the chief problems my female friends had was thinking that they had to fit into a certain size before they were "thin enough". Well, some us were wide-hipped where others of us were not. That meant that if we had all been at good, healthy weights for our height, we wouldn't have been wearing the same sizes, and for some of us there was no way we'd ever get down to the size two or four that others idolized.
Some of us tend to have wide hips. Some of us have big butts. Curvy is good. Some of us are built straight and narrow. Lean is good. Our bodies have their natural shapes and we can't force them to be something else, so we might as well embrace it. The fact that some men prefer "curvy" and others do not does not necessarily have anything to do with promoting obesity or unhealthy habits, because many of us are curvy when we are not obese or unhealthy. Look at a "plus-sized" model sometime--they're almost never obese and many of them aren't even really overweight.
I'm not going to argue that obesity is good, but honestly, with everybody railing about the horrors of obesity, can someone, anyone actually find an example to rail about who is really obese? That these guys go for an image of a woman like Buffie is, if anything, proof that what they're really interested in has nothing to do with being overweight at all, it's just a matter of proportions.
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My butt
Sorry, but a big butt does not put women at greater risk for disease. Abdominal fat does, though.
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Non-shocker
Why am I not surprised that Debra Dickerson used to "harangue" her co-workers about their lunches? What a perfectly unpleasant thing to do. It matches Dickerson's writing style perfectly.
"Mainstream" fashion magazines are responsible for both large numbers of eating disorders and yo-yo dieting that leads to increased obesity, so singling out the "Urban" magazines for promoting big butts is idiotic. Magazine images damage women's self-esteem and health. This news brought to you by the coalition to repeat things everyone's known since 1970. Furthermore the reasons for increased obesity in minority groups can be more closely correlated with A) Poverty B) Education and C) Other cultural norms than with booty mags. Minority women tend to be poorer (meaning they can't afford as much fresh fruit and vegetables) and less educated (People with less education tend to be fatter, presumably due to a poorer understanding of nutrition science) than their white counterparts.
There's also the fact that 'soul food' is a nutritional nightmare, full of fried foods and fatty meats.
As for why fat minority women are more likely to see themselves as normal than their white counterparts, well you just said that more minority women are fat, so in the context of their friends and family THEY ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE NORMAL. There also may be a distrust of traditional authority at play here.
This article is a ridiculous attempt to offer scaremonger attacks against magazines that Dickerson doesn't like, precisely because she's the sort of person who would 'harangue' a coworker who brought in a cupcake instead of carrot sticks. She doesn't like fat people, she doesn't like people enjoying images of people she considers fat, and she likes playing holier than thou.
Address the serious social issues at the root of the epidemic of obesity among minority women and then we can talk about the booty mags. Until then you're missing the forest for a single leaf on one of the smaller trees at its edge.