How fat-shaming is like racism

Written 16 -26 June 2016

On Friday 10 June, my daughter, who’s doing her final year at high school, made a speech to the entire school, in Assembly, about how society engages in fat-shaming, with the full compliance of the seemingly-benevolent diet-pill industry. In her speech, which won her the school’s annual Public Speaking Competition, she shared her own journey of self-acceptance, saying how confident she was that she did not need to be thin in order to achieve her goals and dreams.

The next morning, I was listening to a local talk radio station, when I heard the presenters discussing the sentences meted out to two people who had made racist comments on social media: one had been fined a huge amount of money, and the other had received a sentence of a few months’ community service in a township. They spoke about how these sentences could act as clear deterrents to the rest of the population.

The very next thing they started talking about was how fat some politician had looked in a dress she’d recently worn. They went on to say she should have known better than to have worn it! I got really angry, and sent the following SMS to the radio station: 

“ To me, fat-shaming is no different to racism. It labels and shackles people, especially women, relegating them to second-class citizenship, and holding them back from living their best lives. Maybe we should look at the actual average size of people, and get designers and clothing shops to break the fat-shaming cycle.“

A few minutes later my phone rang, and, as I suspected, it was the radio station, wanting me to air my views live on air, which I happily did.  I had a chance to say quite a bit, but the presenter wasn’t interested in engaging with me - he was more interested in being right, and having the last word, before he ended the conversation. I felt like I do in all other similar situations – it doesn’t phase me at all. I know there’ll always be people like that, who use you for their own purposes - in his case to help fill that particular half-hour slot - and who, as long as it fulfils their agenda, will pretend that they’re actually interested in what you have to say. A radio presenter isn’t always right, and doesn’t always have to terminate someone’s input with yet another assertion of how right he believes he is – that’s just verbal masturbation.

Why does it seem as though I’m personalising this tirade? It’s because some radio presenters start to see themselves as above reproach, often crossing the line, but because they’re so highly regarded, they get away with it. This presenter said in so many words, that, if he walked into a place where he could choose which assistant he would go to for help, he would steer clear of the fat employee! This shocked me. It always shocks me when people who themselves have been discriminated against, so readily don the hat of the oppressor, when it comes to other forms of discrimination.

So, in the absence of a self-righteous, elevated-to-celebrity-status-for-no-apparent-reason radio presenter, let me say what I did not have time to say on air – why I believe that fat-shaming is akin to racism.

Fat shaming is about looking at a person, focussing on her physical appearance, and making assumptions and decisions, based on her physical appearance. Sound familiar? It is about deciding that that particular physical aspect  implies that the person is less intelligent, less capable, less competent, less desirable and less deserving in every way.

When you are teased for being fat, in your childhood, and called names because you’re rounder than someone else thinks you should be, it’s hard to outgrow the shame that you felt at that time of your life. It will always be a sensitive subject for you. I found a photograph of myself at about age 16, wearing a red one-piece swimsuit, taken at the beach, with my dog at my feet. I was a healthy, relatively happy, physically active teenager. The photo was obviously intended to be sent to someone in a letter, because I’d written on the back of it, besides some information including the date, the place and the name of my dog, “As you can see, I am very fat.”   Looking at that photo now, I feel so sorry for my 16-year-old self – I wish I could tell her to focus on other things, to free herself from the shackles, and to be all that she was meant to be.

Fat-shaming can be as blatant as name-calling, or as subtle as “Thank you for your application. We regret to inform you that you have not been successful.” While there are obviously occupations – like deep-sea diving, or sprinting – that depend on certain physical criteria, most jobs just need you to be in a state of average-to-good health, in order to function effectively. What annoys me is how people are excluded from jobs because they’re perceived as fat (“It’s not the image our company wants to portray”), regardless of their level of education, or their skill at that particular job. Sound familiar? This impacts on the person’s ability to earn a certain income, which is the deciding factor for everything else – where she lives, whether she owns a car or not, which schools her children attend, how she takes care of her family, and so much else. These are the same struggles you have when you’re excluded from positions  because of your “race”.

When you’ve been fat-shamed, and made to feel inferior because of that aspect of your physical appearance, you start to internalise that inferiority. You carry it around, and it informs everything you believe about yourself.  Years, even decades, after the last incident of overt fat shaming, you still feel the effect - that I’m-not-good-enough twinge, like a psychic scar that throbs when it’s cold. Again, exactly like internalised racial inferiority.

And fat-shaming is not just about being called names – it’s an overriding theme in mainstream culture, which clinically separates people into two groups, with every individual from as young as four, with relentless media promotion, knowing which group he or she belongs to. You know how apartheid taught you to “know your place”? It’s exactly the same.  

While it might seem like I’m referring only to ‘morbidly obese’ (no less of a slur because it’s a medical term) people, the most blatant effects of people who feel fat-shamed are all around us. At a gathering of friends or family, no matter how much of a good time you’ve had, when it comes to a certain time in the gathering, all of that changes – I’m talking about photograph time. Watch people when group photos are taken. People who regard themselves as fat automatically adopt a set of defensive behaviours we’ve learnt over time, usually through those same glossy magazines that devote monthly articles to how fat people can look slimmer. Those of us who perceive ourselves as fat and who’ve taken on the mantle of shame that society has insidiously suggested we wear, will either stand behind someone (usually with no part of the body visible), or at the very least, stand at an angle. Magazines and television programmes obsessed with telling women how they should look and what they should do to compensate if they don’t look like they should, can get really specific about how one should lean slightly forward, put the weight on the front leg, and tilt the head just so…….. I mean, really??? Have you ever seen how (predominantly-female) audiences applaud when these tips are given, as though they’ve just discovered the secret to eternal life?

We all buy into it, stoicly avoiding horizontal stripes, bold prints and bright colours. It becomes such a part of our thinking, that we don’t even see the funky outfits our essential, free-as-a-bird selves would naturally be drawn to, and instead make our way to the rails of shapeless, darker-toned items. These days, you even have entire shops dedicated to “plus-sized” women. I’m still trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not. Now you’re labelled by just walking into that shop. You tell me you’ve walked into one of those shops and not felt a slight twinge of something negative, and I’ll applaud you. Even when you know the issues, and intellectually grasp the multi-layered ramifications, you are still tainted by years of being socialised into the skewed, hegemonic version of what’s acceptable and what’s not – basically, you know your place.  

And have you noticed how boring some of those clothes for ‘plus-sized’ women are? The message is clear, even from designers – if you’re bigger than a certain size, you don’t deserve to look cute, pretty, stunning, gorgeous, sexy, or any other adjective we automatically associate with slim women. The truth is that you can be an obnoxious individual, but have all kinds of positive attributes inferred on you, simply because you are slim. Let’s face it, a slim, chain-smoking woman, wearing a pencil skirt and stiletto heels, is always going to be more likely to land a job than an overweight non-smoker.

So many other issues arise from keeping women, in particular, in a state of belief about themselves as inferior, and we see this over and over again in the prevalence of abusive relationships. Keep a woman believing that she doesn’t deserve love and acceptance, and she’ll remain in an unhealthy situation for years, trying one thing after the other to figure out how she can change herself, to make the situation work. For some of us, we end up replicating this toxic dynamic in a series of relationships, wondering why we keep choosing partners so clearly wrong for us. Until we reach a point where we know the truth, love ourselves, and understand how worthy we are of being loved, we will remain stuck in successive variations on the theme. Until a disenfranchised population rises up against oppression, the abuse will persist.

I now live in a post-apartheid South Africa, where our constitution guarantees freedom from all forms of discrimination. Excluding people from living full lives as citizens, because of a physical feature, whether it be skin colour, disability, or weight, is a form of discrimination pathologically similar to racism, and has to be challenged at every possible opportunity.

Still dancing

Written 17 June 2016

Yesterday was Day 413 of my dancing challenge and I did Dance workout No. 148. So many things pull me away from my 3-times-a-week goal, that the frequency has dropped dramatically. But I refuse to give up. I love dancing, it makes me happy, and I’ll keep at it. With my new job, I come home about two hours later than when I was teaching. This not only means I have a lot less time in the evening to achieve everything, but I’m also a lot more tired, especially after the one-hour drive home in peak-hour traffic (which I find rather stressful).

The truth is, I’m still trying to find my equilibrium. I’d given myself three months to get my act together, but some things take longer than we think. I just need to be patient. The latest complication is the biting cold weather. When you’ve left home in the dark, worked a full day, and returned in the dark, cooked supper, spent some family time, ironed clothes and made lunch for the next day, all you want to do is have a hot shower and get to bed. My big time-guzzler is Facebook – I have to set my alarm in order to tear myself away from it. I recently decided to skip Facebook every now and then, even for two consecutive nights, because it cuts into the time that I could be doing something else.

Like I’ve said in so many other posts, dancing makes me incredibly happy – it’s just hard to get started, especially on a week night.  Or a cold night. The thing with exercise is, even if you’re freezing when you start, after you’ve warmed up, you don’t even feel the cold. For me, sticking to my dancing goal requires a lot of discipline, and sometimes I find it hard to prioritise dancing around my room when my body’s clamouring for sleep. 

Another complicating factor is any commitment between work and home that adds even an hour to my day – it just messes up my evening. Getting home after 7pm automatically means there’s no time to dance. Do that more than once a week, and the whole week feels wrong. I need routine in order to fulfil my Trudy agenda – which means scheduled sessions to dance, play my guitar, write and read. Four things that mean the world to me, and that make me feel balanced. When I haven’t done one of them for a long time, I can feel myself moving away from my essence. Not a nice feeling. 

But when I do dance, I feel like I like to feel – as free as a bird, and in tune with my essential self. I’ve always loved exercising to music.

For now, this is my workout playlist – called “Dance, Mama, Dance”. J The first seven tracks are from the soundtrack of the movie, ‘Chef’ – lovely, rhythmical salsa:

1.       Track 1 – Pete Rodriguez – I like it like that

2.       Track 7 – Roberto Roena -  Que Se Sepa

3.       Track 8 – Louie Ramirez – Ali Baba

4.       Track 9 – Gente de Zona – Homenaje Al Beny Castelllano

5.       Track 10 – Nickodemus & Quantic – Mi Swing Es Tropcal

6.       Track 15 – Perico Hernandez – Oye Como Va

7.       Track 16 – Perico Hernandez – La Quimbumba

8.       Donald Fagen – Florida Room

9.       Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?

10.   Natalie Cole – Good to be back

11.   Jamie Cullum – What a difference a day made 

By the time I get to the end of song no. 7, I’ve done 30 minutes. On nights when I’m super-tired, I go from that track straight to Jamie Cullum, for my cool down. When I get through the full playlist, it’s a 52-minute workout.

Tonight’s not a dance night, but tomorrow is.

“I’m just a girl whose intentions are good,…….”

Coloured Mother

(Written 12 May  - 16 June 2016)

South Africa achieved democracy in 1994. With the euphoria of the first post-apartheid elections came all kinds of expectations, on international and national levels, but – even more significantly – for each one of us involved, on a deeply personal level. For each of us, this forms part of our identity, part of our narrative. When the stories of our lives are told, whether spoken or written, apartheid, its demise, our expectations of life after its demise and the reality that prevailed (as seen from each one’s perspective), will constitute a significant set of chapters.

I was classified as “Coloured”, under the racist apartheid system, and raised in that context, with all the joys and limitations that came with it. When I eventually decided to get married, I ended up marrying someone who’d been classified and raised as “White”. Before 1992, that marriage would not have been allowed in South Africa.

One of the many things that people from South Africa have to deal with is the baggage of apartheid. All of us who lived in SA during that era, as well as our children, have to navigate our way through some very strange waters, even now, 22 years after ’94. The baggage includes many beliefs and fears, even superstitions, after all those years of indoctrination. For example, when a ‘mixed’ couple - e.g. White-Coloured - is expecting a baby, there’s huge speculation about what the baby will look like. If the baby’s looks are more White, there are sighs of relief from certain quarters, accompanied by comments that the baby turned out well. In colloquial-speak, they say “Die kind is goedgebaster”, with “Baster” referring to a hybrid (probably more like ‘mongrel’) of sorts. The phrase is an Afrikaans one, meaning “The child is a good hybrid.” A more recent term used to describe children like these is “Top Deck”, referring to a chocolate that has a layer of white chocolate and a layer of brown chocolate. While this term is regarded as humorous, it is are not as inoffensive as one might think.

As you can imagine, I have many stories to tell, after having had two children from this ‘mixed’ marriage. 22 years later, the narrative reveals an interesting sub-plot, as my children apply for admission to tertiary institutions. The topic of identity arose, recently, around the supper table, and I was intrigued by my children’s answers. They concurred with each other that, mainly because of the schools (formerly White) they attended, their exposure was largely to that of a White culture. For me, as one of the parents who had consciously selected mixed schools, where our children would be comfortable growing up in a diverse, multi-cultural environment, this came as a surprise. Then again, talking to my daughter on a daily basis about what everyday life is like at their high school, I can see that there’s a lot more to it than “With which culture do you identify most?”, because our children are definitely growing up with a lot more exposure to people from different backgrounds than anyone of my generation (in South Africa).

(This, of course, is my personal story about my children.  For the majority of South African children, the schools they attend were set aside for Non-White people, built with inferior facilities and, in many cases, appallingly deficient in many ways.  A sad reality of post-1994 South Africa is that apartheid based on ‘race’ has largely been replaced by apartheid based on economics: when we say the best schools are open to ‘everyone’, we actually mean ‘everyone who can afford the exorbitant fees’.)   

But back to the topic. People who don’t know our family assume that my children are White, and there’s a peculiar set of responses when they discover their rainbow background. My daughter has had to deal with all kinds of reactions to schoolmates’ realisations that her mother is not White. And so began the issue of the “Coloured Mother”. It’s become a joke for us, but for many people it’s a talking point: she is a curiosity because she has a Coloured Mother, and I’m a curiosity because I am the Coloured Mother. You see school kids surreptitiously peering at me, checking out the Coloured Mother. What’s even funnier for me is that it’s not only White kids and their parents who express surprise. J  Oh, the shackles that bind us……

The thing with any family is, when you’re living your life, doing things as a family, eating together, washing the dishes, hanging out in the lounge over a game of Scrabble, you’re just a family. You’re not looking at each other all the time thinking, “Wow, you look so White and I look so Coloured”, any less than a family with a disabled member  thinks about the disability everytime they look at the person. As clichéd as it might sound, a healthily-functioning family is a nucleus of love and acceptance, of nurturing, and of joy in each other’s uniqueness. It is only when that family is looked at by outsiders that the othering and the judgement begin – “Oh my God, look at that disabled boy!” Or, in our case, “Oh my God, have you seen her Coloured mother?!”

I really hope that in my lifetime – maybe in my grandchildren’s generation? – I’ll see a different South Africa, where diversity is celebrated for the beauty that it is, and not whispered about as though it’s a shameful secret. I long for a society where what we look like is not the huge determining factor it currently is.

What can I say? I always have been, and always will be, an idealist.