Feed Me

Fatty McBlog has got a great post going on the topic of feederism, with some interesting video clips. (Clips are explicitly fatty, so have a care if you’re at work.) Since feederism delves into the realm of fat sexuality so deeply, I think most people are totally in the dark about the phenomenon. Instead they hang on to the notion that fat people must not be sexual at all because: 1) they’re so ugly no one would want to fuck them anyway, or 2) they’re so busy eating they have no time or interest in sex.

Wrong on both counts! Thank you, Fatty McBlog, for bringing fat sexuality up for discussion. I had the following to post on their site:

The feeder/feedee lifestyle carries a morbid fascination for me, too. I’ve read fan fic about the phenomenon - written from the woman’s (feedee) point of view - and it’s really interesting.

The women in these stories, and I would assume in real life scenarios as well, are breaking through the taboos and restrictions surrounding eating and women’s bodies. Through their eating and weight gain, they are taking back their bodies from a mysogynistic culture that dictates everything they should do with and put in to their bodies. That takes a lot of courage to do, and weight gain is just one way that some women do it.

It’s body modification in my view - just like tattoos, piercings, implants, etc. But fat still carries such a stigma, that people don’t want to consider it on those terms. They just see the fat, and say they are ‘totally grossed out.’

The feeder/feedee relationship is tricky. I think that the examples of extremism - women being widely prevalent domestic abuse, rather that events that strictly occur among feeders/feedees. There are plenty of asshole men that isolate their partners from friends and family, the men described in extreme examples just happened to use food as a means of control. The feeder/feedee relationship may have some elements of Dominance/submission to it, but keep in mind that true D/s is about consentual power play. Food and weight gain being another aspect of D/s is not that surprising.

Abstract Expressionist Daydreams

Would Jackson Pollock still have been a painter if he had access to this kind of digital fun??

I call it Fat Girl Gone Wild (with color), 2006.

Spirituality for the Harlequin Romance crowd.

A resident in my building lent me a book that she told me was really excellent. There were a lot of sprituality-themed books on her shelves, and being a minor theology enthusiast, I thought it might be worth a read.

She then handed me, God on a Harley by Joan Brady. I wish I was kidding about this…

The tagline reads, “If you’ve ever had a broken heart…” and the story follows Christine who, throughout the beginning, uses as many metaphors as possible to describe her heart being broken, shredded, and otherwise trampled on. She’s sad, she’s pathetic…yeah, we get it. Then God shows up - you guessed it! - on a Harley motorcycle to give Christine her own personal set of commandments, and teach her how to live again. When Christine described God as handsome with lovely sable hair - short in the front, long in the back - is the point at which I had to seriously consider whether or not I would finish this book. God cannot have a mullet. My brain can never reconcile the idea of any all-powerful creator with the coif made famous by Billy Ray Cyrus. The herald of the apocalypse will not be trumpets or the four horsemen, it will be God’s horribly unstylish haircut.

This book is bad. Just bad. You can’t even put it in the category of a good trashy romance that will provide a little masturbation fodder if nothing else. What I can’t figure out is why this thing has garnered such a high rating on Amazon….unless….those desperate readers really are using a mulleted God as masturbation fodder.

Eek!

A caretaker’s job is never done

Last night I headed to the grocery store to pick up a few items and ran into not 1, not 2, not even 3, but FOUR residents from my apartment building. They weren’t even shopping in a pack, they had made their ways separately. It was a weird moment, until one of them broke the spell and asked me for something, as if I were on the job even at the grocery store.

“Hey, wanna give me a ride home?” Yes, he said it just like that! The same dude that asks me to get him lunch when he’s sick, or to please pick up some medicine for him.

“Hey, you got yourself here, didn’t you?”

‘Bout damn time!

Emergency contraceptive drug Plan B is now available over the counter to women 18 years old and up. At long-fucking-last, the FDA has taken its head out of its ass and made a decision about making this drug more readily available to women. Of course, the super-conservatives have got their panties in a wad about the whole deal, but I think it is a vital step forward for women’s reproductive rights.

Take it from one FatGrrl who has suffered through one of those “Oh my god, the condom broke, what the hell do I do now?!?!” moments: this is a powerful option that women now have to walk in to the local 24-hour pharmacy, slap down their ID, and get a hormone-loaded dose of peace of mind. I was thankful for the choice I had back then (and forever grateful to the staff of Planned Parenthood-East Central Iowa), and I am even more grateful for the opportunity that women all over this country will have to make up their own minds - to choose a pregnancy when they want it, to choose a child.

Next step: getting Plan B out to the teen girls that need it.

Forgot my Temple underwear…

…but watching this video on Mormon theology will be just as fun without it. A little taste of my homeland for y’all.

Perhaps getting out of bed really was the wrong decision.

It’s one of those blah Mondays.

1. I need to do the dishes. I really have to do them. And waking up this morning and seeing that they were not magically taken of care overnight by elves made me a little upset. (What the fuck are they doing? They can’t possibly still be making shoes all night; Nike has overworked, underpaid, and underfed 5-year-olds to do that.)

2. Finding Kiba on the couch trying to devour a plastic ruler made me a little more upset.

3. Knowing that I would have to go in to work and babysit the people in my department because a large amount of written copy was due from everyone raised my temperature a little more.

4. Then walking out the door to go to work, it occurred to me that neither the magic elves or Kiba were going to take care of the dishes while I was at the office. Fuck.

I don’t usually have Mondays like this, but everything today seems to be a reminder that I’d rather be somewhere else. ‘Somewhere else’ being a empty theater auditorium with stadium seating in which I am wrapped up in my favorite warm blanky and get to spend the day catching up on all the films I’ve missed since becoming a single mom. This would include Little Miss Sunshine, A Scanner Darkly, The Notorious Bettie Page, Quinceanera, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, because it may be dumb but some sacrifices I’m willing to make for Johnny Depp.

Infectobesity

Fat is a complicated phenomenon. Yeah, you’ve got the camp that asserts fat as being totally an issue of behavior (fat people just overeat and underexercise), and they will repeat it and repeat it and repeat it because that’s all they can manage. They are simple folk, afterall. But as research continues in the field of fat, people are beginning to understand that appetite and metabolism are influenced by many complicated factors. Recent research even points to another factor: everyday, run-of-the-mill microorganisms and viruses.

This article is long but well worth the read. It discusses at length the ways in which microorganisms affect the way a person uses calories and other nutrients found in food. An interesting example explains that looking on a box for calories per serving - say a granola bar with 150 calories - doesn’t necessarily mean that each person consuming that granola bar will get 150 calories from it. Little microorganisms in the body can affect people to such a degree that some folks may only get 125 calories from the bar, while others might get 162. Those microorganisms also affect fat storage, and this goes a long way towards explaining how two people on identical diets will experience different weight fluctuations.

“The biochemistry of the body of the obese person is very different from that of a lean person,” said Richard Atkinson. “If the obese person gets down to a lean person’s weight, their biochemistry is not the same.” Losing weight is hard, keeping it off is harder and, especially for some unfortunate souls, the body seems to work against itself in the struggle.

Does this mean cancel your gym membership, afterall there’s nothing you can do about this whole genetics + microorganism double-punch anyway? Wrong. Exercise and eating healthy is still important. But research like this reminds people that there is more going on than simplistic explanations (that lead to value judgements against fat folks).

As scientists continue to investigate how obese people are different, we can only hope that a side benefit will be a more largehearted understanding of what it means to be fat and how hard it is to try to become, and to remain, less fat.

Thanks to Masami for the tip!

BFF

Lots of little thoughts that kind of add up to a whole post.

1. Someone was reading my mind and gave me flowers yesterday. They looked like little white mums (I’d be more specific but I don’t really know shit about flowers - just that I like them and want them), and they’re very pretty.

2. I went to dinner with that same someone and we were seated at the very back of the restaurant where you couldn’t even hear - let alone see - another customer. Yes, it was Sunday and a slow day, but the gesture set off all of my fatgrrl alarms. It felt like we had been exiled to the back, as though the place was saying, “Yes, we’ll take your money, but we don’t need the skinny [read: good] customers being forced to watch a fat [read: bad] customer eat their dinner. Grrr….

3. One of my residents lent me the new Tool album. I am beginning to despair that nothing will meet the bar set by Aenima.

4. You know how sometimes there’s something that you have to do, or have to say, but you don’t feel any less like an asshole for saying it or doing it? Yeah. That sucks.

5. Beth f.i.n.a.l.l.y sent along some of the formal photos from the wedding. It’s nice to get a little distance from the whole mess and appreciate that it was fun to hang out with Beth (the bride) and Clare (sitting on the grass in the red dress).