Today we’re joined by Vanessa, a woman who’s here to talk about being overweight in a society obsessed with skinny women, the beauty industry, what’s in the food to make us fat, and if the food/weight loss industries are really being responsible by encouraging us to eat trans fat and then have to work extra hard to burn it off.
1. Thanks for coming Vanessa. You know I think some people are going to be pretty surprised to see this interview as most of the interviews so far have been political, but I thought “Who’s more invisible in today’s society than women who are big boned?”
Vanessa: Thanks for having me! Also, you don’t have to call me big boned, just like you don’t have to call me African American. You can call me black and beautiful lol. But you’re right that society sort of pushes us into the background, like the sassy girl on Glee or Gabourey Sidibe, who hasn’t had a leading role since Precious.
2. I feel like it’s a great thing to address, but I also have to admit I was super hesitant about approaching people to address it. The first two women I talked to about being interviewed about it rejected the idea immediately and haven’t really been so friendly since, even though I tried to tip top around it. So in the age of Twitter and Facebook and 24/7 self-promotion, I think overweight people might be the one group that aren’t looking for attention.
Vanessa: Well I could have told you that Brody! I agreed to do the interview where the others didn’t probably because curves and weight are a little more celebrated in the black community, but I still don’t want to use my full name. What it is, really, is that fat people are still the last group that it feels okay to mock. You can’t mock me because I’m black, well, you can, but you’re a racist dick. You can’t really mock someone if they’re gay or handicapped or if they’re a midget, well, you can’t call them a midget but a little person. So there’s all these rules about who can get mocked and who can’t, and the immediate target for all that pent up political correctness is fat people.
Even if you look at the exposure a lot of us are getting in TV or movies, it’s just as a punching bag or a joke.
3. What do you think when you go into a magazine aisle somewhere and the section is “Beauty” and underneath that all you see are rail thin women?
Vanessa: It’s terrible, and there also aren’t a lot of black women on those magazines so it’s a double disappointment for me. You look underneath the beauty section and there’s really only one ideal of beauty. The perception is that it’s getting better because Kim Kardashian’s big ass if on every magazine but it’s not really getting better. It lets them say they’re going for diversity of weight and race but she’s not really overweight and she’s as white as any of the other models!
Then you have a different, subcategory of beauty which is the “black” magazines like Ebony, but those magazines aren’t really for women. There’s as much stuff in there for men as women and the women in those magazines are usually dressed conservatively enough to be somebody’s grandmother, so it’s not a real celebration of beauty the way you might see Amanda Seyfried looking sexy in Elle. So the category of “black beauty” is insulting because it really shouldn’t be a separate category, and also it’s as much for men as women if you really look at the magazine. You can’t say the same about Cosmo or Allure.
4. It seems like the media has a really fucked up relationship with people’s weight. They put all this pressure on women to lose weight–showing pictures of them gaining weight with really insulting captions–then applaud them when they lose ten pounds, and then say “Remember girls, don’t develop an eating disorder.”
Vanessa: It’s a total mixed message. You can pick up a Tabloid or “legitimate” magazine like US and the headline will be “Guess who’s fat again?” with a picture of Oprah underneath and then a page later it will be “Nicole Ritchie, dying to be thin?” talking about her anorexia. So they do token stories about anorexia and not wanting young women to think you HAVE to be thin to be beautiful…and then they promptly turn around and make Christina Hendricks look like a whale because she gained five pounds. It’s hypocritical and bs really.
5. The saddest recent example I can think of is Jennifer Hudson. This is someone who looked really good before and then half her family gets wiped out by a psycho and to deal with the trauma she loses all this weight. Instead of the media saying “Is she healthy mentally? Is she getting the help she needs?” They say “look at her ‘hot’ new body!” and start clapping because she lost a huge amount of weight in not a healthy amount of time. And now she’s been praised so much for losing weight, she’ll just keep losing it until she probably loses too much to be healthy. What seems to me like overkill and someone dealing with tragedy without really dealing with it has become this big cause for celebration and Jennifer’s just there lapping it up like a trained seal, losing weight to get more praise.
Vanessa: It’s a sad example and to a lot of the guys I’ve talked to, they say she doesn’t really look right but you’re right that she’ll probably keep losing even more. I like what Raven Symone said about losing weight, which is that she looked fine before and really feels uncomfortable now that the media has applauded her for losing it. She drew needed attention to the media salivating over the “new” bodies of J Hud and Jordin Sparks and others and these were beautiful young women that looked great before.
I take it a little personally because “sistahs” used to be exempt from this kind of weight criticizing. White girls were always being asked to lose weight, lose weight, lose weight, but it seemed like curves were more celebrated in the black community. That seems to be changing.
6. What’s something very mean someone has said about your appearance? And do you think a media centered around fat jokes encouraged it?
Vanessa: The meanest thing someone has said…well that would be hard to think of. I tend to drown out the negative and just let that go so it’s hard to say really but there have been mean things. The most ridiculous thing was last month when someone said I had a hot girl’s name and they didn’t know too many fat Vanessas. That just made me laugh really.
As for if I think the media encourages it, absolutely. Even when you see more overweight women in media, it’s usually just as a punchline or as some sort of beast to poke at.
7. There’s been some attention paid to overweight women like Gabourey Sidibe and the actress from Bridesmaids and Mike & Molly recently as examples of how the media might be changing, but I’m not sure I see it that way. Gabourey is beautiful inside and out and deserves to be the lead in a romantic comedy but hasn’t been. And the actress from Bridesmaids was just used as this grotesque punchline to make fun of.
Vanessa: Right, even if you watch the show Mike & Molly, and I try not to, but most of the jokes are about how fat the two lead characters are. It’s like “Hey, fat people are people too…now let’s laugh at them.” Then in Bridesmaids, you’re right, they made her pretty disgusting. Usually when they have a fat actress, it’s just so they can fart or burp. Gabourey is luminous but they haven’t really shown that in any kind of romantic light, and on America’s Next Top Model they always make a big deal when they have a “Plus Size Model,” which really just looks like a regular sized woman, but she hardly ever wins. They make a big deal about having one out of thirteen women be on the show that can finish a plate of ribs and then they send her home a few weeks into it. So, no, I’m not really impressed.
8. Much like I love roles for all minorities that don’t HAVE to be about them being a minority (take most of Zoe Saldana’s roles for example), I also love roles for overweight people that don’t revolve around them being that. Margo Martindale as Justified’s villain last season was excellent, she looked a little bit like a lot of women in my family but commanded the screen in the type of nuanced role you just don’t see a lot for overweight actresses. And it’s even more unfair to see that for overweight people because being overweight isn’t a minority in America.
Vanessa: No it isn’t. I feel like if any other group in America was this big, they’d probably have one kick ass lobbying firm demanding to see more of its kind on TV or in movies. A lot of times studios might say they don’t want to put a lot of overweight people in stuff because it will look like they’re glorifying it but that’s total BS. The lifestyle of being overweight could never be glorified and if it’s a health thing, then why show characters on TV drinking alcohol? Most characters on TV drink alcohol which isn’t healthy, but so few are fat because it’s not healthy? It’s just because alcohol is considered more of a sexy bad choice and fat is considered unattractive.
9. That’s a great point. In 1995, only one state had an obese population of more than 20 percent, but today only one state has an obese population of less than 20 percent. So things have really flipped.
Vanessa: They have and it’s only growing. Obese Americans are the largest minority in this country but are avoided like the plague in TV and movies out of revulsion. It’s not right and it might be time to change the way we think about fat.
10. Something we could definitely change the way we think of is food. To me it’s completely hypocritical for a society to be built on the idea that “Thin is beautiful” but then have lard in almost all of its food. Trans fat, high fructose corn syrup, hormone injected meat, and other anomalies are things you can’t find in nature but they’re in most of our food.
Vanessa: That’s all true. It’s not just a coincidence that what you said about the obesity rate flipping happens during the rise of high fructose corn syrup and trans fat and chickens that look like pigs because they’re on steroids. Myself and a lot of other girls are hitting puberty at a much faster age than before because of all the hormones in the meat and they serve chicken nuggets at the school! So, it’s crazy. That documentary Supersize Me really opened my eyes to a lot of fast food.
11. And it’s not just fast food. This past week Michelle Obama praised Wal-Mart for serving areas that don’t have other access to grocery stores, but Wal-Mart is as bad as fast food. Their produce is injected with shit to keep a banana green for a month and their meat isn’t even packaged on sight. Not to mention that if you look at the items on the shelves, even cereal has high fructose corn syrup or trans fat. They’re pushing drugs but in the form of salt, sugar, and coca cola instead of cocaine on the street corner. And she fails to mention that the REASON Wal-Mart is serving communities that don’t have a grocery store is because it put those grocers out of business when it moved in.
Vanessa: Hey don’t be hatin’ on Michelle now Brody lol! No, I think she’s got an admirable goal trying to get people to eat healthy and it shows just how partisan this country is that she’s being attacked for saying you shouldn’t feed your kids happy meals 24/7. But I agree with you that Wal-Mart is junk.
12. Then you have Whole Foods which Bill Maher calls Whole Paycheck because it’s so expensive. It seems like if you want to eat healthy or avoid cancer, you’re going to have to be rich and if that’s true, you’ve probably got great health insurance anyway.
Vanessa: So true. Vegetables cost more than hamburger patties. You can buy a happy meal for what it costs to buy a pound of grapes at a store that’s not adding poison to it to make it last longer. A bag of chips is three dollars but getting the stuff to make a salad with is twice that. Even at fast food restaurants, it’s 5 bucks for a chicken salad but a dollar for a “hamburger” that’s 10 percent cow and 90 percent filler. So it’s truly crazy that it costs so much to eat healthy in America.
13. Do you feel like it’s irresponsible for our country to put so much emphasis on weight loss (literally half the reality shows on TV are fat people trying to get less fat and that includes all the infomercials) but also advertise junk food so heavily? Every time I watch TV it’s Dr. Pepper, Reeses, McDonald’s, etc. commercials. When’s the last time you saw a lettuce commercial? All infomercials are either cooking tools or weight loss tools.
Vanessa: I think there’s a lot of money to be made off weight loss, you have dieting pills and exercise equipment and the whole works. So there’s more money to be made off a fat person, first you get their money when they overeat and gain weight, and then you get their money on the way down when they’re trying Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, gym memberships, Kim Kardashian’s weight loss pills, and everything else to lose weight. So there’s more money off that than someone who eats apples in moderation and has a proper diet. Just like there’s more money to be made off a sick person in America than a healthy one.
14. The nexus between the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance is an evil one. It’s all about making people sick with the food they eat, and then “treating” them which is a lot more expensive than if everyone just ate lettuce and never got cancer.
Vanessa: Right lol. I can’t really add anything.
15. And finally, do you think all these fitness crazed monsters we see on TV–where every guy has six pack abs which is so damn unnatural it’s crazy–and just the whole “tight body” craze will once again put America into the Haves and the Have Nots? Part of our country is the smartest in the world and others are stupid, part of our country is the richest in the world and the majority is poor, and will it now be most of our country is obese but we’ll have the highest percentage of tools with six pack abs?
Vanessa: It’s already happened. There are more obese Americans than any other country but also more fitness models here than any other country. I know you’re fond of saying it’s as bad for guys to get in shape these days as women but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that! lol