Chloe Angyal | The Nation

The sign outside a cafe in West Village that sparked debate over fat-shaming. (Courtesy of Chloe Angyal.)

Earlier this week I blogged here about the thinspiration community—which encourages anorexic and bulimic behaviors and insists that eating disorders are not mental illnesses but admirable “lifestyle choices”—and its use of Twitter to share tips on how to be “better” at your eating disorder.

In that post I posited that, disturbing though it is, the thinspiration community is simply an exaggeration of the culture in which it exists. A grotesque exaggeration, to be sure, but hardly surprising one in a culture where women are expected to be thin at all costs, and in which more mainstream discussions of weight conflate thinness with health, beauty and self-worth. As an example of that larger culture, I pointed to a photo I had taken just that day, of a sign outside a cafe in Manhattan’s West Village. The cafe, whose staple menu item is oatmeal, posted the respective calorie counts of a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of oatmeal with berries, with the commentary: “Summer’s coming… Just sayin’.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what fat-shaming looks like. Summer’s coming, and with it, hot weather and skimpy clothes. Better look “good”—that is, skinny—when it arrives. Because fat people are disgusting, right?

I tweeted at the company and told them that I thought they should take the sign down, and they complied. They apologized, saying they were only trying to highlight the health benefits of oatmeal. I call shenanigans. If the sign had simply compared the calorie counts of the two breakfasts, that would have been fine. But there’s nothing healthy about reinforcing the hateful attitudes we hold in this culture toward people who are overweight.

After Oatmeals agreed to take the sign down, and after I thanked them, some other blogs picked up the story. The vitriol that was unleashed—in comments sections, in my Twitter feed, and in my e-mail inbox—was breathtaking.

Leaving aside the comments about my stupidity, my oversensitivity and my weight, the reaction to my argument that the sign was “fat-shamey” was, in itself, really fat-shaming. Fat people are hideous. Fat people are lazy. Fat people are fat by choice. Fat people don’t know they’re fat. Fat people are too dumb to make smart choices. Chloe is fat and should therefore shut up, because fat people’s voices don’t count. In that kind of discourse, it becomes crystal clear that in America, “fat” is not simply an adjective. It carries so much more—if you’ll forgive me—weight, than that.

Multiple people pointed to America’s "obesity epidemic" as justification for heaping scorn and cruelty on overweight people, as though a national food policy problem can be solved by insulting individual human beings. True, some people are genuinely concerned about the "obesity epidemic." But when I hear someone defend their hatred and discrimination with the words “obesity epidemic!” all I hear is, “I lack compassion for an increasingly populous group of my fellow citizens!” Oh, but for their own good, of course.

Others insisted that fat-shaming simply isn’t real, that it’s something that overly-PC liberals thought up so they can be offended by anything and everything. Fat-shaming isn’t real? Do you live in a world without US Weekly and People, without The Biggest Loser, without sitcoms in which fat people are depicted as stupid, lazy and greedy, their sexual desires painted as hilarious and grotesque? Do you live in a world in which critics comment only on the talent and not on the girth of actresses like Melissa McCarthy and Gabourey Sidibe? In which pundits treat politicians and public figures like Chris Christie, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton with respect? Because that is a world in which fat-shaming is not a real thing. It sounds fantastic! It also bears no resemblance to the world in which the rest of us live.

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If you sit up and pay attention, if you stop making excuses for the appalling way that we talk about and treat overweight people, you’ll notice vitriol all around you. And that vitriol, though it’s ostensibly directed at overweight people, isn’t meant just for them. It’s meant for all of us: even if you’re at a “normal” weight, it says, you better stay that way. This is the kind of hatred, the kind of judgment, the complete lack of human compassion that you can expect if you fail to do so. Some people have lived that experience in reverse, like Emily McCombs, who used to be obese and lost 100 pounds, dropping from a size 24 to a size 10. She observed that when she did so, she was “rewarded with membership in a club I never knew existed, where the benefits included better treatment, greater professional success and, above all, a new status as qualified participant in the social world including romantic relationships.” She had experienced some to-her-face cruelty when she was fat, but she had had no idea of the way that not-fat people had been speaking about her behind her back. “Of those who are nice to me now,” she wonders, “who would have been rude to me before? Which ones made the cruel jokes? Who can be trusted?”

That’s how you know that fat-shaming is real. It doesn’t matter how much you weigh, or how big you are (the two, though they’re correlated, are not interchangeable). Your body is being policed. Your body is being judged, and with it, your character and your intelligence. This is fat-shaming. Is it any wonder that millions of Americans are struggling with eating disorders and disordered eating?

Fat-shaming, like the myriad factors that contribute to obesity and to eating disorders in America, is systemic. When it comes to food (bearing in mind that, at the core, neither obesity nor an eating disorder is about food), it is imperative that consumers have all the information they need to make the best choices they can about what they eat. It’s crucial that we know more about where our food comes from: who picks it and under what conditions, what they’re paid for their hard work, what farming does to the land and the communities around it, what foods are subsidized by our government, what’s in our food and how it affects our bodies. There are so many things we need to know about what we eat, beyond the simple calorie count.

But here is one thing we know for sure: fat-shaming is real, and it is not a solution to our problems. That way lies ruin. That way lies eating disorders and discrimination. Oatmeal might be a healthy and delicious breakfast, but there is nothing healthy—nothing admirable, nothing of social or cultural value—in shaming people for their bodies. Just sayin’.

For more on America’s misguided weight ideals, read Chloe Angyal’s post on thinspiration and eating disorders.

Chrissy Amphlett performs as Judy Garland in the musical “The Boy From Oz” in 2006. (Reuters/Will Burgess.)

Decades before Britney Spears danced through the hallways of a high school in a little plaid skirt, Chrissy Amphlett was making a scene on stage in a school uniform and fishnet stockings. Long before Rihanna sang about the appeals of S&M, Amphlett was crooning about the fine line between pleasure and pain, asking us to please not ask her how she’s been getting off. And years before rappers like Missy Elliott and Nicki Minaj were rhyming about taking their sexual pleasure into their own hands, Amphlett was serenading the object of her affection with “when I think about you, I touch myself.”

Amphlett, the lead singer of Divinyls, one of Australia’s best-loved rock bands, died in New York City yesterday after a long battle with cancer and multiple sclerosis. She was 53.

Growing up in Australia in the 1990s, I heard a lot of Divinyls music, most of it in the car. My parents had raised us—my sister and me—on classical music and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and didn’t expose us to much pop music (though my mother did teach me the names of the fifty United States with the aid of “California Girls”). When I was 6 or 7, though, they hired a new nanny, one who had very different tastes in music. She listened to rock, and so whenever she and my sister and I were in the car, the radio was tuned to Sydney’s rock station. New names entered my vocabulary: Bon Jovi, Cold Chisel, Screaming Jets, Midnight Oil, AC/DC, INXS. I wasn’t terribly good at distinguishing these bands—they all sounded the same to my young and uninitiated ears, and I took to simply asking, “Is this Cold Chisel?” every time a song came on, much to my sister’s irritation. But I never had any trouble identifying Divinyls, partly because Amphlett’s was one of the few women’s voices you could hear on rock radio in the mid-nineties.

Two decades after Divinyls made it big (in 1991, “I Touch Myself” went to No. 1 in Australia, No. 4 in the US, and No. 10 in the UK), there are more women’s voices to be found in mainstream rock, though not as many as I’d like. And in part because singers like Rihanna and Spears, as well as Janet Jackson and Pink, have recently penned and performed songs about masturbation, it’s easy to forget how shocking those lyrics were when the song was released. But in 1991, it was still remarkable for a woman to talk openly about masturbation, let alone sing about it loudly and proudly with the full backing of a band to boot. By the early 1990s, the second wave of feminism had well and truly crested, and the backlash against it was in full swing. It was one thing to be a woman in a man’s game, but for that woman to stand on stage and enumerate her various sexual fantasies, well, that was still revolutionary.

Later in her life, Amphlett expressed the wish that “I Touch Myself” serve as a reminder to women that they should get annual breast exams, so that they might catch breast cancer early. And so it should, but of course, those exams don’t involve touching yourself. As we contemplate Amphlett’s legacy, we should also remember the power of women’s pleasure—and consider the sobering fact that it is still shocking to hear a woman talk, or sing, about masturbation.

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Last week, I wrote here at The Nation about how important it is for survivors of sexual violence to tell their stories, and what civilians can learn from the US military about how not to listen to those stories.

One of the cures for that epidemic is the destigmatization of pleasure. A culture in which girls and women are taught to understand and honor their own sexual desires, and in which boys and men are taught to respect those desires as much as they respect their own, is a culture that does not permit sexual violence. In such a culture, it is a prerequisite for initiating and continuing with a sexual interaction that everyone involved will feel good. Everyone will have the vocabulary and the permission to talk about feeling good. They will consent, enthusiastically. In that culture, Steubenville is inconceivable. In that culture, bodily autonomy comes first and pleasure comes—and yes, that was entirely intentional—a very close second.

We don’t live in that culture. We live in a culture that let Steubenville happen, and that will undoubtedly let countless similar acts happen before we finally decide we’ve had enough. Destigmatizing women’s sexual pleasure isn’t a panacea, but it is one solution. Pleasure is powerful, and, as Amphlett’s own song suggests, there’s a fine line between pleasure and pain: We cannot talk about bad sexual interactions and sex crimes without also talking about what good sex looks (and feels) like. We have a sexual violence problem in America, and we have an orgasm gap. The two are related, and we won’t solve that problem or bridge that gap until we care, as a culture, about pleasure and about pain.

The first time I heard Divinyls on the radio, I asked my nanny what the song “I Touch Myself” was about. She got very uncomfortable and said she didn’t know how to explain it properly. Then she changed the station. Years later, I am still waiting for an honest conversation about women’s pleasure and pain—a cultural one, this time. We won’t solve America’s sexual violence problem without it. If we can have it, though, the implications will be nothing short of revolutionary. “I Touch Myself” can be our anthem.

Chloe Angyal last wrote about one girl’s rejection of sex education that only promotes ignorance.

The documentary The Invisible War profiles survivors like Ariana Klay, who was raped in the Marines. (Courtesy of The Invisible War).

"So, what's it like to be sitting in a room with so many people who have been sexually assaulted?" My friend was asking because yesterday, I spoke at the Service Women's Action Network conference, the Truth and Justice Summit on Military Sexual Trauma. I scoffed grimly and texted him back: "Look around the room you're in now, and ask yourself the same question."

It wasn't an unreasonable question he'd asked. There is something bone chilling about sitting in a hotel ballroom at full capacity and knowing that almost every person in that room is a survivor of sexual violence. It's nauseating to remember that most of that violence was inflicted while they were serving their country, and that it was inflicted not by the enemy, but by one of their own. A conservative estimate of the proportion of women in the Armed Forces who have been sexually assaulted is 20 percent. For men, the sheer number of assaults is higher than it is for women. We are talking hundreds of thousands of men and women, in all branches of the military. This week, several hundred of them gathered in Washington, D.C. to talk about their experiences, to discuss policy, and to visit Capitol Hill for a day of lobbying. There were moments in that ballroom, when survivors were talking about how they had suffered, first at the hands of their assailants and then from the military’s efforts to sweep what had happened under the rug, or from the VA’s failure to provide them with care, when you could hear a pin drop. There were moments when the pain, the betrayal and the anger, were almost palpable.    

Of course, it’s rare, unless you do sexual violence prevention work, to find yourself in such a room. But statistically speaking, in America, if you’re in a room that contains six women, or a room that contains thirty men, one of them is a survivor of sexual assault. The difference between the ballroom I was in yesterday and almost any other room in this country is that in the ballroom, we actually acknowledged the statistics. We were thinking about them. And most importantly of all, we were talking about the problem.    

The workshop I was there to teach was about the various ways survivors can tell their stories of assault in public, be it in print, online, through photography, or in other media. Some of that storytelling work has already begun: the documentary The Invisible War, about servicewomen and men who have been assaulted and attempted to seek justice through the deeply flawed military justice system, is a spectacular piece of storytelling. But there are literally thousands more stories to be told, and to tell them can be an act of personal catharsis as well as a powerful political strategy.

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To speak openly about sexual assault in the military is to run myriad risks. Many survivors have been punished for telling the truth about what happened to them: attacked further, threatened with discharge, actually discharged, cast out of their professional community and then of their wider communities, their stories questioned repeatedly and the blame for what was done to them laid at their feet. No wonder that 20 percent figure is considered a conservative one: many survivors never say a word to anyone. The risks are simply too great.    

In the civilian world, it’s rare to find oneself in a room that contains so many survivors of sexual violence. But they’re all around us nonetheless, and they should take the courage of the servicemen and women as a model. We, as their would-be interlocutors, should take the institutional cruelty of the military as a model how not to behave when they do come forward.    

At the moment, we are failing in that mission. True, law enforcement procedures and legal practice have changed since the days when yesterday’s keynote speaker Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill was a prosecutor. In the 1970s, when McCaskill was the only woman assistant district attorney, sexual assault cases were ignored and laughed at. Yesterday, McCaskill recalled one case that her office almost passed on because the victim in question had an IUD. That she used birth control made her claim of rape incredible, in the eyes of those ADAs. Thankfully, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk notwithstanding, Americans don’t think that way any more. But we don’t listen the way we should, and we don’t treat sexual violence with anything approaching the seriousness it deserves. Our failure to listen when survivors of sexual violence tell their stories is fatal: in the last month alone, two such survivors have committed suicide because of how the people around them responded when they spoke out about what happened to them. And those are just the two we know about.    

“The movement,” as my fellow presenter and Nation contributor Mychal Denzel Smith said yesterday, “needs a narrative.” Sexual violence happens in every community in America. It’s not just the military. It’s not just the football team, or the frat. It’s the chess team and the gymnastics squad and the mathletes. It’s parties all over America. It’s houses of worship all over America. It’s homes all over America. All those stories need to be told, until they can no longer be dismissed as one-offs, as the actions of a few bad apples. Every story we hear makes us more likely to hear and honour the next one. That is how movements work.    

The onus, though, cannot be solely on the storytellers. It is also on the rest of us, the other five women in the room or the other twenty-nine men. It is true that there is enormous political power in telling your story. But only if someone is listening.

First suspension, later stop-and-frisk: The lifelong cycle of discriminatory treatment starts in our schools, Chloe Angyal writes.