Here is a smattering of observations from readers:
I feel more stigma now for my weight than anything I wear.
... society continues to undermine women, despite our (relatively) newfound career freedom, by severely objectifying our bodies - fatness being the ultimate stigma.
But of course everyone knows that only women who are capable of keeping their bodies in check are capable of anything beyond the most rudimentary tasks. If you can’t keep yourself thin, you can't do anything, can you? -Nanifay
Turns out, this issue has ACTUAL SCIENCE behind it. Did you know, for example, that overweight women earn less, while overweight men earn more? How is that fair? Answer: It isn’t. No dice if you’re “average weight,” either – you have to be RAIL THIN (25 pounds below the median, to be precise) in order to reap the salary benefits. If I lost 25 pounds, I would no longer be able to support the weight of my own head. But hey, I'd make an extra $16K!
And lest we forget, it’s not just women’s weight that is policed by the patriarchy Gestapo, it’s also our faces:
I recently learned that not wearing make-up was making people thinking of me as less professional. Sad face. – Kate Dino
Sadface indeed. We all know that having wrinkles, acne, uneven skin tone, flat eyelashes or mussed-up hair is directly correlational to job performance. AMIRITE, ladies? Who here finds it hard to think when her lipstick shade is a bit off? Can I get a hell yeah? Ugh.
Meanwhile, there are definite benefits to looking the part (besides being seen as professional and getting paid more):
Most of my life I've tried to appear as anonymous as possible, probably following the example of my Communist Dad who thought you should dress for rallies and demonstrations in such a way as to give you time to dodge a blow while the cop was momentarily unsure if you were a dirty Red or a respectable bystander. – John Burke
Smart thinking, those Red Diaper babies. I get pulled over way less now that I have brown hair instead of pink. A friend of mine quipped that when she quit driving a hippie car, and started strapping a baby in the back, she was harassed a heckuva lot less by the coppers. Although it’s not surprising, it’s still kind of shocking. “Racial profiling” is in the news a lot, but that’s clearly not the only kind of profiling that goes on.
Thanks for being a bunch of smartiepants, guys! And keep those comments coming – I get a wonderful surge of a feeling I can only describe as “validation as a human being” every time someone comments.*
*Unless you are a crazy person who is threatening me ‘cuz darnit, who told ladies they could have opinions anyway?! Then I just mock your poor grasp on grammatical conventions and picture you drowning in a lake of fire.
Ugh, I get this all the time.
ReplyDeleteBut because I am an overt weirdo, even when I try to be inconspicuous, people usually say "Well, Joy, maybe where there's smoke there's fire!" -- as if the fact that my hair never lies flat even when I spend time on it or that I don't camouflage my leg hair means I totes AM crazy and thus maybe deserve to be hassled*!
(Because what else can a woman expect, going out of the house looking that way**?)
So maybe a professional person writing about this will help people to realize: this type of thing actually happens!
* I don't even think I look *that weird*, but I'm routinely profiled and have been detained for no reason on several occasions. Once I was arrested without provocation; when I wouldn't stop demanding an attorney, I was drugged against my will to shut me up. In the morning, when the police realized they had no legal reason to detain me further, they literally set me loose in the streets to walk home. This is not an isolated incident; I understand it happens quite frequently.
** "Thanks, Mom!" By the way, what else does this sound like?!
transitioning rapidly from "goth teen with dyed black spikey hair in michigan" to "bottle-blonde 20-something with a tan in LA" gave a fast, brutal education on how fast people infer your worth from the external
ReplyDeleteI have to agree. You (Sarah) were here for my transition from short brown haired tomboy to long blonde haired push up bra wearing business woman. Sad thing is it I've received 3 raises since 'converting'.
ReplyDeleteif for some reason you "let yourself go" after you have gotten to a certain level of grooming, too, then you are PUNISHED for it. i went through a major depression where i couldn't care less about hair/makeup and i became a job pariah
ReplyDeleteFar from being just a body-issue, there's an actual honest-to-god evolved response to obesity, similar to the arachnid response. It's one the folks developed over some hundreds of thousands of years. Food for though, yeah? I'll find the links when I'm home.
ReplyDeleteActually, Andrew, that sounds like evolutionary psychology, aka bullshit. Along the lines of "men like lipstick because red monkey butts mean estrus!", etc.
ReplyDeleteEspecially because our cultural standards regarding "obesity" are constantly changing. For example, the BMI charts, which have been recently acknowledged as crap science, classify many people as "obese" who are not in fact "obese." This is well documented.
Also, the occurrence of 400+ pound people seems logically like a post-agricultural revolution phenomenon, so I doubt people "thousands of years ago" would have necessarily come into contact with many "obese" individuals.
Other than the little Venus figurines, that is. Since most evo-psych people think the Venus figurines count as porn, it will be interesting to see how they reconcile that with the theory of obesity aversion.
(They'll have to admit that either men do in fact whack off to things they abhor -- are even genetically predisposed to abhor! -- or that 'obesity' was actually sexxay to prehistoric masturbators.)
Joy, in response to your first comment (btw, I cannot figure out how to thread comments on this thing! grumpypants!), I completely understand. Even when I'm in my corporate tool getup I still look like a poseur - my hair is never as flat or as shiny as the other ladies, and I hardly ever remember to not rub my eyes when wearing mascara.
ReplyDelete**Sounds like rape apologists, that's who!
C S, the same thing happened to me in late adolescence, when I lost some o' the ol' babyfat, got contacts and grew some boobs. Suddenly, I had friends! It was amazing.
ReplyDeleteJen, that's why they call it selling out. You n me, sistah. We are sellouts! But it sure is nice to pay the bills, yeah?
Andrew, interestingly, the study cited above shows that, while being heavier than average for men is beneficial professionally, the trend reverses once they reach obesity. Being "heavier" for women starts at "above underweight" and is detrimental from there on up. So while there may be a conditioned response to OBESITY, that's not primarily what these articles are talking about - they're talking about normal- and slightly-overweight people. But they do confirm that obesity is professionally harmful, for both men and women.
joy - I have never thought of the venus figurines as obese. But I do think that, if we're going to go down the evolutionary discussion path (egads, let's not!) that above-average weight would be evolutionarily GOOD. Because it means you have FOOD. Obese, maybe not so much (but like you said, our ancestors would not have encountered much of that - no HFCS, nomadic lifestyles, periodic famines = very little chance of that), but festively plump? Definitely gives you points on the mating scale.
Sarah -- excellent point! Nobody in their right minds would want to mate with someone who was only going to starve to death anyway.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't think the little Venuses are "obese" either, but I figure evo-psychers would.
Yeah, the more I hear from evo psychers here and on other blogs (not to be confused with actual psychologists doing actual research and not being d*cks), the more I reach the conclusion that they're a faction of MRAs who have co-opted a random branch of experimental psychology to illogically justify being a*holes. For example! Not once in the original post was the word "obesity" used. And yet, here we are discussing arachnid responses to obesity.
ReplyDeleteIt would have followed logically if Andrew had brought up "arachnid responses to slightly overweight people" but he didn't. Even if there WERE an arachnid response to slightly overweight people (which there isn't), that sure as shit doesn't account for the fact that slightly overweight men are paid more than their average-weight counterparts, whereas slightly overweight women are paid less than their average-weight counterparts. What, this evolutionary response applies only to women? That doesn't even make sense, considering most women naturally have higher percentages of body fat anyway, which ties into fertility and their ability to carry fetuses, which is a huge ACTUAL evolutionary thing. Following that convoluted path of logic - if anything, slightly overweight women should be getting paid MORE than their average and superskinny counterparts.
Yeah, that's true; I was thinking more along the lines of non-gender based discrimination, but the Iceland study puts the nail in that coffin... I can't find the study I remeber reading, but here's a reference to it from the Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/revealed-why-slim-people-dislike-the-overweight-459459.html
ReplyDeleteThis: http://www.mendeley.com/research/waisthip-ratio-and-cognitive-ability-is-gluteofemoral-fat-a-privileged-store-of-neurodevelopmental-resources/
ReplyDeleteI think it's a matter of what you can exclude people for. It's all about competition. Fat woman are easy to exclude, because no one cares about them. So much fun to feel superior to the fat girl!
ReplyDeleteI say if you are young and cute and that gets you somewhere, use it while you've got it. But don't expect it to last forever. You're not a man. You can't get away with the things they do.
It's not fair, and woman always get forced to compete against each other for the favors of men (who have virtually all the power). As long as we live in the patriarchy, that is how it will be.
In my old age, I know how to defend my territory.
I told all this to a male acquaintance who had defined me as "overweight," and he was shocked that I was so "untrusting." Why trust a system that is stacked against you, I say.
One thing that grinds me is that if I were a man I would be considered quite nice looking for an old person, but since I'm a woman I'm just old.
Hattie, I get that "untrusting" thing a lot, too. Or people think I have an anger problem, or am bitter because of some personal beef with the world - but it simply isn't the case. Anger and mistrust are the only sane reactions to a system that is so clearly unjust. A keen sense of injustice is, after all, one of the things that separates us from other species, right? Anyway, yes, I suppose I ought to trot out heels and lipstick more often in an attempt to get as much benefit as possible from my youth while I still can.
ReplyDelete