Cheerladers are bad. There’s no other way to say it. I don’t care if they’re of color or fat or have athletic skill. Being a cheerleader means you’re the sideshow, your role is to make the main event look good; you are not and never will be the star.
Witnessing the archetype blonde haired, blue eyed, super skinny cheerleader transform to allow more diversty in movies like High School Musical only makes me sad; it’s like when Mo’ Nique hosted a reality show on a fat girl beauty contest, or when there was an African-American model on the cover of Vogue and Anna Wintour wrote a self-congratulatory Letter From the Editor about it. Is it progress that women of color get to be anorexic too? Or that fat women are allowed to compete against each other so that a panel of judges can decide who is the prettiest?
The big problem with the cheerleader role is that it serves as a teen training ground for the model of the perfect heterosexual relationship; it’s like wife school. The hot girl cheers on her talented guy, standing by her quarterback, loyally, faithfully, whether he wins or loses; her admiration is constant and her love is true.
Who doesn’t have fantasy about her partner being totally focused on her, sticking around no matter what, celebrating when she does well, cheering her up every time she’s down? We all want that. But men, the guys in power, got to actually create that reality for themselves and reproduce it everywhere.
If you watched any of the superbowl, you likely saw dueling couples: former Playboy bunny Kendra Baskett with her Indianoplois Colt husband, Hank Baskett, versus Playboy model Kim Kardashian, girlfriend of Saint, Reggie Bush. Kim proudly flashed her nails for the cameras, painted with Reggie’s name and his number, 25. Rumor has it that if Bush won, he would propose, making Kardashian a real life trophy wife.
Maybe cheerleaders will be Ok with me when there are all male squads who rally on the pro-women teams at giant sporting events watched all over the world; when those guys are considered a catch, the hyper-sexual mates for the celebrated women athletes. I wonder if Kim can play soccer?
Garfield isn’t the only cartoon hero relentlessly mocked for his weight.
I was shocked at the continual stream of fat jokes while watching the animated hit, Kung Fu Panda. The story is about a panda, Po, who dreams of becoming a martial artist instead of a noodle seller like his father. What holds him back is his weight. The Furious Five, a pack of martial artists he idolizes– who are all male except for a token female voiced by Angelina Jolie– constantly make fun of Po’s weight. When these characters mock Po, surprisingly they retain their hero status; they are not portrayed as cruel bullies. Kids watching this movie see that it is OK and justified to put Po down for his body size. It’s espcially odd to witness teasing behavior shown as acceptable and funny, because making fun of others is a constant theme in kids movies; but it’s always potrayed as bad and wrong, acted out by the villians, not the good guys. Unless, I guess, the teasing is focused on fatness. Then it’s OK, just funny and true. Po’s teacher, Si Fun, constantly beats him up to convince him to quit his training, because he’s too fat to succeed. This prediction seems justified also.
In one scene, Po explains that the brutal training and beatings he suffers are mild compared to the pain
he experiences every day “just being me.” Then he looks down sadly at his big stomach, equating “me” with his body size, obviously feeling a lot of shame.
Po explains that when he’s upset, he eats. The turning point in his training comes when Si Fun realizes that Po can be motivated to perform amazing acrobatic feats by a jar of cookies on a high shelf. They begin to train with food as a reward. Po does pushups over hot coals while trying to slurp noodles from a bowl of soup. Po and Si Fun battle over a bowl of dumplings. It’s good, I guess, that Po doesn’t end up becoming thin in order to be a master. But the way this movie uses fat and food to advance its plot line and character development is truly odd and confusing if you’ve taught your kids– as I have– not to experience food as a reward and not to think fat people are bad, or to be made fun of, or that they are not as good as thin people. After about two hours of fat jokes, my kids came out of the movie with lots of questions about why being big is funny and bad why don’t I think so too?
Another popular animated movie, Wall-E (also named for its star male character) has a central plot line where the fat aliens are mocked. The aliens have evolved into an existence where machines do everything for them. They are fat, lazy, and nasty. Lucy asked me during the movie, “Why do they all look like that?” I guess I was supposed to say, “because they don’t get exercise. They’re lazy.” The message that fat people lie around all day and that if you don’t work out, you will look like a fat, pink alien is not something I want my daughter to learn. She’s six years old. I’d rather her do the monkey bars and play soccer because she loves it and it’s fun. I’d like my girls to learn to use their bodies out of joy and pleasure, not fear, for as long as possible– their whole lives?
There are usually no major female characters in Garfield cartoons. The stories focus around Garfield, his owner Jon, and his frenemy, Odie the dog. Jon has a love interest now and then, as does Garfield, but I don’t think Garfield ever returns the affection.
Garfield gets one G because he sets a rare example by not caring much what other people think of him. His indifference to the opinions of others fascinated me when I was a kid and still does. It’s mostly Jon that worries about Garfield’s weight.
When Lucy and Alice watched the cartoon this morning, Jon put Garfield on several different scales, weighing him along with other animals to show Garfield’s weight was incorrect for his species. I’m not that upset about the constant focus on Garfield’s weight and the accompanying fat jokes on his cartoon. Maybe because Garfield’s male. Or because he’s been in this position for so long– the cat has got to be healthy, he’s been around for at least 35 years. Or maybe because he doesn’t care at all what other people think of him, so why should I?
I am glad that my kids– except for math and science class and annual doctors appointments– are pretty unfamiliar with the bathroom scales, featured all over this cartoon.
The subtitle of this collection is: And Other Stories of Strong Women. It’s a great book, with exciting narratives and beautiful illustrations. Every story is fabulous. I’ve done many searches on Amazon and in bookstores and somehow never saw this book, so I was thrilled when Lucy got it as a Christmas gift. It has a quite a bit of text per picture, so younger kids may get bored.
With ” and debuting this season, I count six reality shows about fat people including “The Biggest Loser,” “Biggest Loser: Couples,” “Ruby” and “Celebrity Fit Club.” As America’s weight obsession baloons into ever larger proportions, so do Americans.
Wilson and Alley’s new programs are strikingly similar, both featuring women who famously, very publicly lost weight (Carnie with a stomach stapling broadcast live on the internet, Alley as a spokesperson for Jenny Craig) then gained it back, now returning to our screens to lose it once more.
A long article in this week’s People Magazinedetails Carnie’s new show. This time she will be guided by Oprah phenom and protege, Dr. Oz. After dramatically weighing Carnie on camera, Oz reported to his audience that she is “morbidly obese.” But no worries: Oz and “his team” have prescribed a 90 day program that includes “daily excercise and food journaling.”
Carnie tells People, “I made these beautiful, lean ground meatballs,” but Dr. Mike Rozien, Dr. Oz’s “enforcer” told her: “Dump the meatballs.” People then asks her, “Do you like to excercise?” She says: “I loathe it. I just want a big tub of buttered popcorn, and I want to lie on the couch and watch a movie.” Carnie goes on to say, “I don’t eat what I bake. I’ve never had a slice of my own cheesecake. I’ve only had a bite.”
Carnie sounds to me like a woman who has never once in her life lay down on her couch with a bowl of buttered popcorn without feeling horrible and guilty and ashamed. I’d bet the same is true for her meatballs– lean or not. And can you imagine baking a cheesecake and only allowing yourself one bite?
Carnie doesn’t have too few rules about food, she has too many. I worry about her recovery, because I honestly believe that there are more concentrated crazies in the eating disorder/ recovery world than anywhere else on the planet. Think about it– who wants to grow up and become a nutritionist? Food obsessed people. And those are the ones supposedly advising the “sick.”
I know because I was a sick one, not overweight, but bulimic. In my journey to get better, I was told by almost every therapist-expert-nutritinionist from New York to California that I would never recover, but be “in recovery” for life. At best, I could “manage my disease.” Now I think I understand why they say this. Health, to many eating disorder experts and maybe to America, means being just the perfect amount of sick; we’re supposed to be obsessed with food and dieting and our appearance; we’re supposed to have the knowledge and skill to calculate fat grams, calories, time spent excercising and BMI equations like modern day Einsteins. Understanding basic nutrition can be useful, but obsession with it– “healthy” people writing down daily food intake, multitple TV programs on fat people, a first lady’s national campaign that includes the President publicly calling his young daughter chubby– becomes unhealthy, especially confusing and damaging when it’s portrayed as it’s opposite.
Even though I was told I would never get better, I am 100%, over ten years later. What got me healthy was escaping from all the “experts” I encountered over the years; and all of their rules, restrictions, regulations, and diets they all prescribed– all different and contradictory, by the way, just like today with Dean Ornish vs Atkins vs the ever-changing food pyramid vs counting fat grams or calories or whatever’s going to be the trend in 2010– eating local? Works for me, I live in California.
When I was submerged in the eating disorder/ recovery world, I was told off the wall stuff– just like what Oz may be telling Carnie– that I was “addicted” to certain foods (or “allergic”) like sugar and flour; these were white powders that had an effect on me just like cocaine. I paid people $175 an hour to tell me this– that just like a coke addict, if I took one bite of any food that had white powder (bread, muffins, cereal– we’re talking wheat here) like any addict, I would lose all control, eat and eat and eat and never stop. This, by the way, is what every bulimic fears: if she starts eating, she will consume the whole planet. This is a central misconception she must abandon in order to get better; that there is, in fact, always a natural boundary, an end, a stopping.
This is how I recovered– already briefly written about in this blog but summarized here. I stopped writing down what I ate. I stopped trying to convince myself sugar and flour were like cocaine. (by the way, right when I got healthy, I did testing for food allergies, something not one nutritionist or therapist ever recommended to me– guess what? not allergic!)
I stopped thinking being thin was good and being fat was bad. I read an amazing book caled When Women Stop Hating their Bodies and went to a program called Beyond Hunger in Marin. This is what they taught me there: if you eat a loaf of bread, go out and buy more loaves. Same with a bag of chips. Fill your house with anything you’ve ever wanted in abundance and eat whetever you want and replenish it. As I did that and for the first time in my adult life, allowed myself to eat what I wanted, whenever I wanted, without feeling bad or guilty, I got back in touch with real hunger and real fullness; my eating disorder vanished.
It’s true that I was never “overweight” but I believe obese people, so often, along with bulimics and anoexics, regulate food more than most other people, are more conscious and more knowledgable about health and fat grams and calories than the rest. Most don’t need a national campaign to educate them further.
Oz tells Carnie she “needs to break her addiction to food….she fears passing on her addiction to her daughters. That will motivate her more than a magazine.” Carnie agrees, “I have to be a teacher to my daughters. Lola started to notice commercials on TV with people who are trying to lose weight and she looks at me. She’s thinking about this stuff and its getting to her.”
I wish Carnie would learn to listen to her body and teach her daughters to do the same instead of listening to all the noise on commercials and reality shows, including, sadly, her own. People with eating disorders don’t need more instruction and facts, they need less. Food is not a drug or a moral barometer. Food is food is food. Can we have a reality show about that?
Driving home from school today, Lucy kept shouting out the window, “Those meddling kids!” She’s a huge Scooby-Doo fan, and I like the show too. Yes, I wish Scooby or Scrappy were a girl, but there are two main female characters and they do all solve mysetries together as a team. Daphne is the “pretty one,” a glossy red head who always worries about messing her hair and wants to shop; Velma is “the smart one” who usually figures out the crucial clue; she has short hair and wears glasses.
So in the car, Lucy said, “Let’s play Scooby-Doo, I want to be Daphne.”
I said, “I want to be Velma. Velma is soooo smart!”
So Alice said, “I want to be Velma.”
Lucy said, “No, I want to be Velma!”
I said, “No, I’m Velma. I said so first.”
So we all fought over it and then decided we would all call each other Velma, even baby Rose could be Velma.
(This is, by the way, the exact same thing I do in the morning to get them to eat raisin bran instead of coco puffs, I say: “I want the raisin bran. I LOVE raisin bran! Yum!” Then I get myself a bowl. Of course, I’d rather not incite fighting, but there’s plenty to go around so its all good, I think.)
This week’s People Magazine has a “sneak peak” at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Johnny Depp, as usual, pictured front and center as the Mad Hatter. To his left, a Dodo, to his right, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. At least there’s one female, but where is Alice in this promo for her movie???
Please check out the comments I got under my last blog entry about Alice, also mentioning Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox and the lack of females. The commetator thought these movies were not sexist, because there was a Mrs. Fox and in that movie, a kid also had a love interest who was a girl. Can you imagine a movie called Fantastic Ms. Fox where all three villians were female as was Ms. Fox’s whole possy? It would be some crazy feminist movie.
Today Lucy called me chubby. I told her what I always tell her, “There’s nothing wrong with being chubby. People come in all sizes. Some people are small, some are big, some have dark hair, some have yellow hair. People are different.”
She said,”You’re the only person in the whole world that thinks that.”
The first time I heard her call someone fat, it was her father, about six months ago. So I said my line, “There’s nothing wrong with being fat.” And my husband looked at me and said, “You think I’m fat?”
No one would call either of us fat or chubby unless she was a kid who thought she was saying a bad word. Unfortunately, Michelle Obama’s obesity campaign is exacerbating America’s weight obsession . It’s a continuation of the unrelenting focus on female body sizes and what they should look like.
For example, there’s no step towards health or progress of awareness that tabloids have become as obsessed with anorexic stars as they are with fat ones. It’s another headline to sell magazines, a popular thing to yell out for attention whether you’re a magazine, a first grader, or a first lady.
It drives me crazy when people whisper, “She’s a size double zero!” Why don’t they headline that the actual clothing sizes have gotten drastically smaller. There was no double zero ten years ago. There wasn’t even a zero. You rarely saw a size 2 in a store. I know this because I am a petite person. I am the same size now that I was then but now it’s a different number.
I wish Michelle Obama would focus the nation on empowering women, and healthy weights would follow. But I guess that’s too radical and first ladies need causes that are non-threatening, preferably child centered. At least now she’s got Laura Bush as her role model.
This story used to make me so sad, I could barely stand it. Whenever I heard Peter, Paul, and Mary sing it, I’d have to turn it down, get out of the room, or cover my ears, and I’m referring to my time as a parent. Jackie Paper comes no more? Puff’s “head is bent in sorrow, geen scales fell like rain…Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave.” Does he just die? Alone like that? After all that frolicking in the mist, that’s how it all ends? Horrible. I can’t take it.
But now everything is OK. After all these years, a beautifully illustrated version came out in 2007, where a girl saves the day, saves Puff, saves us all. The lyrics are ilustrated just as you can imagine, until the text repeats the chorus for the final time. Then a girl is shown climbing down a hill, spotting puff, who smiles gleefully at her. On the next page, she strokes him under hs chin while he presses his nose toward her forehead, her father looking on in the background, also smiling.
Thank God Peter Yarrow had a daughter and was inspired to come out with this book. In his author’s notes, he writes that he recorded a special CD with Bethany (which comes with this book.) Lenny Lipton writes in his author’s notes that when he was in Hawaii, a friend asked him how he came to set the book in Hanalei, and he said he’d never heard of Hanalei. (I never realized the island sounded Hawaiian until I read this.) He goes on to write, “There are many what-ifs along the way with Puff. I left a poem in Peter Yarrow’s typewriter, and he added some new lyrics and turned it into a song.”
This book makes me think Yarrow, Lipton, and Yarrow’s daughter were as troubled by Puff’s sad story as me and probably millions of parents and kids. My mom got this book for my daughters, and now when we hear the song, Granny tells how Puff was so sad, but then Alice came! My three year old lights up every time she hears that. It’s amazing this song has transformed from tragic and all male into a happy, girlpower story just with a couple illustrations (see, guys, that’s all a little imagination takes.) The interpretation that this song was about marijuana/ addiction has never consoled me. This beautiful book does.
Check out this written for SFgate by Woodhull Institute alumn Lisa Hix. The article, about a new book called The Supergirls, claims that SF author Mike Madrid is finally giving superheroines their due. Yay, it’s about time!
I love this quote from Madrid, author of The Supergirls, just because it is so right on: “When I was growing up in the ’60s, a lot of guys didn’t like the women in comics, because they thought they were useless and annoying. The women were there to escalate the danger. They were supposed to be members of the team, but often times they created extra work because the men had to rescue them.”
How many of us have sat in movie theatres screaming at the women not to do all the stupid things the films’ writers, directors, and producers make these actresses do? It’s mind programming on such a massive scale, getting audiences all over the world accustomed to seeing women act passive, frightened, and dumb.
I haven’t seen this new book, but am excited to check it out. When I got Wonder Woman for my daughter, she asked me “Why is she always in her underwear?” So I’m hoping at least some of these supergirls have clothes on and no implants along with doing brave things; I’ve been so disappointed in female superheroines of the past, with their tiny skirts and missle breasts, looking like sex fantasies of teen boys instead of girlpower. I’m a little nervous that the author of The Supergirls is a guy, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt because he sounds so smart. Ratings on this book coming as soon as I get it.
that if Bush won, he would propose, making Kardashian a real life trophy wife.
