By now you may have seen the pointed on-air response that Jennifer Livingston, a news anchor for WKTB in La Crosse Wisconsin, gave to a viewer who suggested that someone as fat as she is should not really be on TV, lest young girls get the idea that it’s ok to be fat.
Here’s the video. Some thoughts on it below.
Let’s go back, for a moment, to what the guy said in his email. (You can find a transcript of the whole video here.)
Hi Jennifer,
It’s unusual that I see your morning show, but I did so for a very short time today. I was surprised indeed to witness that your physical condition hasn’t improved for many years. Surely you don’t consider yourself a suitable example for this community’s young people, girls in particular. Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.
While couched as helpful advice from a concerned citizen, the email basically suggests that Jennifer is, in essence, committing a crime against young girls by being fat in public. While Livingston, as a TV anchor, presumably “assaults” thousands of young girls by appearing on TV fat, the letter writer’s logic would presumably apply to every fat woman who posts pictures of herself online, appears in a play, or even just goes outside where others can see her.
Indeed, one woman I know has gotten similar, er, complaints, from people who’ve attacked her for “celebrating obesity” by posting pictures of herself on her blog looking something other than miserable and ashamed of her body.
In addition to the fact that Livingston’s weight is none of this guy’s fucking business, it should also be noted that the he’s simply incorrect in assuming that a person’s weight has much to do with the healthiness of their lifestyle. There are plenty of skinny people living less than healthy lives, including many in the public eye. (Has he ever heard of eating disorders? Or Keith Richard?) And fatness in itself is not a sign of an unhealthy lifestyle, nor does it generally add to health risks. Indeed, as author and fat blogger Kate Harding has noted:
Weight itself is not a health problem, except in the most extreme cases (i.e., being underweight or so fat you’re immobilized). In fact, fat people live longer than thin people and are more likely to survive cardiac events … obesity research is turning up surprising information all the time — much of which goes ignored by the media … Just because you’ve heard over and over and over that fat! kills! doesn’t mean it’s true. It just means that people in this culture really love saying it.
What you eat makes a difference to your health – not how much, or how many of the calories go directly to your waistline.
Meanwhile even those who actually want to lose a lot of weight don’t have many practical options besides gastric surgery, which carries its own health risks. Diets tend to be a mixture of quackery and false hope. They can be unhealthy and even dangerous – and the overwhelming majority of dieters eventually gain back what they lose. For most people, short of gastric surgery, the only way to lose a lot of weight and keep it off is to remain on a diet forever.
But the issue here isn’t really health. It’s body policing. As Livingston herself noted, fat people know that they’re fat. They don’t need it pointed out to them, even if the person pointing it out convinces themselves that they’re doing it for the fat person’s good. And frankly, most of those pointing it out don’t have good intentions. (It’s no coincidence that the favorite insult of the MRAs and other misogynists who hate this blog is to call me fat; I expect some will use this post an excuse for another round of fat-shaming.)
As Livingston noted in her reply to the letter-writer:
The truth is, I am overweight. You could call me fat and yes, even obese, on a doctor’s chart. But to the person who wrote me that letter, do you think I don’t know that? That your cruel words are pointing out something that I don’t see? You don’t know me. You are not a friend of mine. You are not a part of my family and you have admitted that you don’t watch this show so you know nothing about me but what you see on the outside and I am much more than a number on a scale.
And here is where I want all of us to learn something from this. If you didn’t already know, October is National Anti-Bullying Month, and this is a problem that is growing every day in our schools and on the internet. It is a major issue in the lives of young people today and as the mother of three young girls it scares me to death. Now I am a grown women and luckily for me I have a very thick skin, literally, as that email pointed out, and otherwise. And that man’s words mean nothing to me. But what really angers me is there are children who don’t know better. Who get emails, as critical as the one I received or in many cases even worse, each and every day. The internet has become a weapon. Our schools have become a battleground. And this behaviour is learned. It is passed down from people like the man who wrote me that email.
Since Livingston’s video went viral, the letter writer has come forward to double-down on his fat-shaming, saying in a statement that he hopes “she will finally take advantage of a rare and golden opportunity to influence the health and psychological well-being of Coulee Region by transforming herself for all of her viewers to see over the next year.”
I’m not quite sure why the letter writer thinks it’s Livingston’s job to “transform … herself” to meet his desired specifications. But I doubt there’s any point to arguing that with him unless he can first transform himself into something other than the real-world version of an internet “concern troll.”
After reading all this, I thought I’d take a look at MGTOWforums.com – where the regulars are not exactly shy about expressing their opinions about the appearance of women — to see if the regulars had responded with their customary compassion and respect. By which I mean self-righteousness and fat jokes. I was not disappointed.
Bubbagumpshrimp, while himself fat, decided it was perfectly fair to attack the weight of a fat women who – gasp! – puts herself on TV.
The writer stated the truth without resorting to being mean about it. He didn’t call her fat or anything mean. He just referred to her as what she obviously is…obese. This coming from someone that’s a good sized guy. You can’t go into a career that has you on camera, be her size, and be shocked when people call you on it. You VOLUNTARILY put yourself out there to be judged. If you don’t want to be picked apart on your weight, go be an IT person or something.
The problem in this country is that obese people are viewed as victims of a medical condition. The reality of it is that they are in a self-induced state. They have no one to blame but themselves. Putting someone like that out there to be a whiner when it’s obvious that she partakes in the all you can eat buffet line makes her exactly what the writer said…not a good role model for children.
Stewie displayed his rapier wit:
You shouldn’t be reporting on climate changes when you are so fat you are causing them.
Simple conflict of interest.
I don’t think she should be allowed to talk about earth quakes or talk shit about the gravitational pull of the moon either.
You know, because she’s FAT. (The climate and weather references are there because the MGTOWforum regulars seem to think she’s a weather person.)
DruidV, meanwhile, waxed indignant that a woman who doesn’t appeal to his boner is even allowed on TV:
This kind of shit is exactly why I killed my TV years ago.
Look, bitch, you’re FAT!
Listen, bitch, it’s perfectly a okay for anyone to tell you so publicly or otherwise. You don’t have the right to not be offended.
Let me say it again, bitch, YOU ARE FAT! and also very ugly, so I guess what you really are is FUGLY, bitch!
No, it’s NOT to be celebrated either, you nasty slob! It’s disgusting and pathetic. You should at least be ashamed of yourself, since laying off the buffet and hitting the gym is apparently out of the question, but then you are also female, which means you can’t even shut up about yourself long enough to see what a laughing stock you are. Three strikes and you are out, Bertha.
That said, couldn’t we pony up some $$$ to get this hideous broad (pun intended) replaced by a hot bikini blonde weather slut? It’s bad enough to have to watch our shitty weather play out, but do we really have to look at an indignant fat pig telling us how great and special she and her husband thinks she is at the same time?
Blah!
Blah indeed — because the letter writer’s missive to Livingston was really only a more politely worded, passive-aggressive version of this sort of hateful shit.
It’s no more shallow to not be attracted to fat people than it is to be a fat admirer. Which is no more shallow than preferring females to males or vice versa.
@Sannina:
Interesting. Thanks for the information. Sounds reasonable that maybe some people are simply “genetically sensitive” for lots of stuff we have now.
I also read that there’s a correlation between inequality and obesity. The US has a less even spread of resources than any other western country, and is also the fattest. The UK has a large degree of inequality by European standards, and also has the fattest population. On the other hand, the Nordic countries, despite a lack of fresh produce and a climate which rarely lends itself to outdoors activity, have a very low (for a wealthy western nation) degree of obesity.
I don’t know exactly what it means, but if staying thin is really just a result of willpower and making the right choices, it seems that giving people money will also increase their willpower. Which means rich people should probably be less proud of their accomplishments in that regard.
Anyway, Mr. Concern is a jerk. Even from an amoral, non-empathetic, purely pragmatic viewpoint that doesn’t take individual freedom and choice into account and is aimed purely at getting people thinner, there is no proof that shaming fat people will make the fat go away, and plenty of indications that it will worsen people’s health instead.
@Sgt Grumbles
I agree it can be read that way but I think they used shallow to mean ‘would drop you like a sack of spuds if your body changed even a miniscule amount from what they had deemed to be hot, because they were never bothered about you as a person’. There’s a difference between liking someone and thinking they have a slamming body, and liking someone because they have a slamming body.
OH WORD, reflecting the strict beauty standards of the oppressive-as-shit society in which you are raised is exactly the same as bucking those standards. I bet you think it’s totally fine to not be attracted to people of colour, too!
(To clarify: Yes, it’s fine if you aren’t attracted to fat people, but you best do some serious soul-searching to make sure you haven’t internalized damaging beauty standards. You owe yourself and your partners that much. It’s reductive to pretend that accepting social beauty standards at face value is defensible.)
Also, Grumblz, one of the ways that being fat weeds out the shallow ones is when they don’t want to talk to you at all because you’re not hot enough.
What bugs me is the assumption that all your problems are because of your weight. I was on the gastric surgery track but I’ve stopped that to focus on the psychological reasons for why I eat they way I do (classic comfort eater). When I had finally plucked up the courage to tell my dad (who was really pushing me to go for surgery- he seems to think it’s my only hope), he basically lectured me about how he wanted results in the next 12 months & that my parents weren’t going to loil after me if anything drastic happened. Just before I had to leave for work so I was nearly hysterical by the time I got there, my boss told me to speak to the employee counselling service. Despite being told it was what my dad had said that upset me, the counsellor kept going on about Overeaters Anonymous. I’m sure contacting them may help in the long run but it didn’t really make me feel any better at the time.
@Thenatfantastic; “There’s a difference between liking someone and thinking they have a slamming body, and liking someone because they have a slamming body”
So, so true. I think the Husband Elect has a fabulous body, but I fell for him because he could quote both Terry Pratchett and Stephen Fry and laughed at my jokes. When his hair falls out, and he gets what my sister would call “an authoritative stomach” I will still love him as much because of the author-quoting and sense of humour as I ever did.
@AB: Where are you from? Because you can get relatively fresh fruit and veg throughout the year in my town in northern Sweden, even if it is imported. But I do agree that it’s possible that relative equality and wealth gives you an increased sense of control over your own life, which I (very unscientifically) suspect makes it easier/more likely for someone to make relatively healthy choices.
Also, walking in deep snow, and shovelling your driveway multiple times in a day gives you quite a lot of exercise 😛
@drst, thank you for that link. I’ve always wondered about that, why people supposedly need so much water yet don’t feel thirsty. Isn’t that the point of thirst, to alert us to dehydration? The only time I would have wanted that much water was during pregnancy, when I drank Gatorade by the quart. I’ll have to remember that if the topic comes up again at a family reunion.
I’m like ShadetheDruid and enjoy caffeinated drinks like coffee and pop, and I’m not big on plain water unless I’m exercising. It also doesn’t make sense that if caffeinated drinks cause dehydration, why are they thirst quenching? Then again, beer seems thirst quenching but it really does cause dehydration.
For the OP, I think the anchorwoman is an excellent role model for children, in the way she handled the jerk and his faux concern. I’d like my kids to learn from her that it’s not worth worrying about what jerks think, especially on something superficial like being fat or thin.
Another point to make is that eating ‘well’ doesn’t mean you’re healthy – I said above that I eat very well, with lots of fresh vegetables and everything cooked from scratch, but I never ever exercise, because I find it too dull. I also work from home and don’t have time to go to the shops or anything, we get our weekly shop delivered. The only exercise I’ve done this week is cleaning and sex, and my house is by no means spotless. I’m a size 8-10 (US 4-6) but if you put a pedometer on me it would probably break through boredom, I can’t even run for the bus.
So even if people were to magically get enough money to buy better foods and more time to cook them, it doesn’t create time in the day to do cardiovascular exercise or anything like that, especially if they work sedentary office jobs (which are also arguably a cause of the rising levels of obesity in the past 50 years).
@Katelisa Geeky partners FTW. I knew BoyFantastic was for me when he said he’d done something ‘for no raisin’.
bionicmommy, if your mom lived in Florida, I’d say she should totally hook up with mine. Based on their reading and viewing habits, they could be best friends 🙂
Somewhat relevant: I have a young cousin (16) who has lost about 70 lbs on a diet. My family is not made up of kind, compassionate, intelligent people, so everyone is going on and on and on about how good she looks.
My dilemma is this.
She wanted to lose weight, so I am glad that she is eating healthy foods and exercising and has lost weight.
But I know the odds of her keeping the weight off are slim. She does not. There’s really no way to tell her about this without coming off as not supportive.
If (most likely when) she gains the weight back, social fallout is gong to suck for her.
It’s really annoying 🙁
@Katelisa:
It’s not that you can’t get fresh produce, it just tends to be imported and expensive. And sometimes, it tastes awful. My father once asked a local greengrocer about why melons didn’t have as much taste as they used to, and the greengrocer answered “You can’t get real melons any more. The ones we sell are grafted onto squash plants to make them grow faster at the cost of making them more watery”.
I was amazed on my trip to the USA how cheap salads were compared to home, and how well they tasted. I mean, there are some things that are arbitrarily more expensive in Denmark because the companies know people will pay for it (like soft drinks and ice cream), but it seemed like there was also a huge difference in fruit and vegetables, with the American being fresher and cheaper. And of course, Denmark is nothing compared to Norway in that regard. Norwegian exchange students here are as amazed by the Danish prices as I was at the American ones.
It sucks for me personally because I have a very sweet tooth. I don’t like too much sourness, and I avoid most things bitter (coffee, alcohol, tea without plenty of honey, black tea in general, a lot of bitter vegetables, though not broccoli for some reason). Danish apples and strawberries are supposedly very good, but it’s hard to get anything real sweet with as little sunlight as we have here. I love melons (and as a bonus, they don’t contain a lot of calories despite being sweet), but the greengrocer is right, the ones we get tastes a lot more watery than they should. And again, it’s all expensive. When I was at my poorest, it was easy to get enough calories, but salad was a luxury.
And yes, shovelling snow is great exercise, and I reckon other Nordic countries get a lot more of that than Denmark does. Still, there are long chilly periods in spring and autumn without snow but with enough wind, cold, and rain to keep a lot of people inside (though it might be made up for by rarely being too warm). Not to mention the lack of light in the darker half of the year, which makes a lot of people drowsy and probably helps drive the depression rates through the roof. But still, we have a lot less obesity than the UK, despite somewhat similar weather conditions. So it seems to be a social phenomenon more than anything.
LOL, she’s in a small town here in Missouri, but if she were in FL, they would get along great. My mother in law is the same age and she also likes those health shows and magazines.
There are a lot of places where it’s hard for people to get exercise or eat fresh, healthy foods. People can’t get fruits and vegetables in food deserts without driving long distances. A lot of towns and cities don’t have sidewalks and trails to make it easy to get around without a car or public transportation, and the processed food at grocery stores is cheaper and keeps longer than fruits and vegetables. That’s part of why the south and midwest have higher obesity rates than other parts of the US.
map of obesity rates
@whataboutthemoonz i feel like i have “success” (for a given value of success) when i say things like “you’re very strong” or “you’re always beautiful to me” or “you have such willpower” instead of saying “you look good/different” because those things hold over even after the weight returns which, as you note, it is likely to do. 🙁 best of luck to you both.
No, my tastes were not formed in a vacuum, but I’m not a blind follower of society’s standardized image of beauty. Whatever that is. I prefer curvy to skinny. Pale over tan. But with the sex symbol status of Christina Hendricks, I’m not sure I can say pale and curvy is still out of style. That’s pretty recent, however, and plenty of people still think tanning is the way to go.
Or maybe you’d like a stronger example. Well, a woman shaving her head, or other similarly countercultural fashions, is surely a deal-breaker for your average American male, but not for me.
My contribution to the whole fit versus fat debate: My mother and brother have always been the heavy ones. My dad was trim and muscular, and with the exception of a the “vegetarian ten” I carried on my hips while I was trying to go veg, I’ve always been slim-to-skinny. My mother has always seemed deeply ashamed of her weight, though I don’t know for sure; I’ve never seriously talked about it with her, and I’m 32 years old. My brother has spent his life insecure in his own skin. He loses weight, gains it back, loses twice as much as before, gains it back plus twelves pounds, and then loses half as much again. During his heavy phases he got treated to some lovely doses of fat-shaming by my dad (who was otherwise a kind, generous person – I still can’t figure out why he bullied my brother in that way).
So what kind of health does everyone have? My mother and brother are the pictures of health, even though my mom does no exercise (brother does lots, but is still struggling with the pounds). I eat well by conventional standards and exercise every day. Accordingly, I have been rewarded with joint problems, two rounds of gestational diabetes (higher risk of Type II onset later), and a heart murmur. My dad died from cancer.
I’m glad there are scientists out there researching this stuff, because I sure can’t figure out the magic health pill.
One other consequence of our cultural obsession with weight is that it tends to reduce body image to how you feel about your weight. In high school health classes that talked about body image and “love your body week” at college, it was always and only about weight and eating disorders.
Now, those are extremely important issues and they should be addressed! But there are also other types of body dysmorphia and other reasons that people can have poor body image. For instance, I have gross rashes, but none of those programs ever talked about loving yourself and how you look even if your skin is not very good.
I’m kind of living proof of the famine hypothesis. Your body doesn’t know the difference between a famine and decades of dieting/self-imposed starvation at the hands of an eating disorder.
My mom had anorexia with purging. She was a gymnastics person in high school and spent a lot of time trying to be as thin as possible. When she met my father, she was still exhibiting disordered eating behaviors, and I suspect she was still engaging in these behaviors when she was pregnant with me (she got really huge while pregnant with me, and this triggered a lot of her anorexic feelings). Of course, by the time she had my sister and brother, she was eating normally, and only *I* have the “weight” problem. I have PCOS and thyroid issues, and have always been chunkier than my siblings even though I didn’t start gaining a lot of weight until I started dieting/exercise bulimia behaviors (I used to exercise upwards of 8 hours a day until I basically killed my immune system and almost died of pneumonia) in high school.
Have any of you heard of the Dutch Famine study?
http://www.dutchfamine.nl/index_files/study.htm
Apparently there was a lot of research done on the genetic and physical differences between babies born during the Dutch famine and those who were born before and after (even to the same parents). Apparently, gestational conditions during pregnancy can really influence your predisposition to certain diseases as well as obesity.
And so, it’s quite possible that women who diet during pregnancy (especially those who do it in the name of being “healthy” and minimizing weight gain during pregnancy) may actually be predisposing their children to obesity and co-morbid diseases at the insistance of their doctors. Obese women are even at a higher risk for this because most OBs will try and keep them from gaining ANY weight or even try and get them to LOSE weight during pregnancy. My OB told me that I was not “allowed” to gain more than 10 pounds in my pregnancy because I am obese. I just looked at her and told her that I’d gain what I was going to gain and I refuse to starve myself during pregnancy. Lucky for me I don’t get a lot of shit from my doctor because my hormone problems reverse during pregnancy, which is why I tend to lose weight during pregnancy without changing any of my habits, but for many women, they’re pressured to basically go on starvation diets in the name of “health” for their babies (have you ever had a doctor give you the “you are killing your baby” speech in the name of your baby’s “health”? It’s fucking awful.)
So yeah. I keep wondering to myself what I would have been like if my mom had eaten properly during pregnancy. I wonder if I would be as thin and conventionally attractive as my siblings are. While intuitive eating and living in a very exercise-accessible area has improved my health a lot, I will probably always be a bit over 200 pounds for the rest of my life. I hover around 10 pounds higher or lower than 218- it seems to be my set point. I don’t really mind all that much as long as I can do what I need to do- my main goal is weight equilibrium and stability. I’ve been able to wear the same wardrobe for almost 7 years now, and I consider that a win for me.
@ an inconvenient truth- Did rushv’s first paragraph strike you as waaaay too specific to be entirely sarcastic? Oh, woe is rush- all the pretty girls just cuddled him and wouldn’t touch his penis, so now he is a disease ridden shell of a human being. Truly I weep for him.
I like how Grumbles is apparently under the impression that what gives him a boner is at all relevant to his assertion that it is not at all problematic to reflect and reproduce oppressive beauty standards in your personal life.
(I also like how he thinks curvy white women were ever not considered beautiful by mainstream culture.)
@whataboutthemoonz – I’m currently living with a relative who is obsessed with her weight and it is triggering all sorts of jerkbrain thinking for me. I’m hiding food from her, eating stuff when I’m not in the house or when she’s out so she won’t know I had it, which then makes me eat more of it because it’s very hard to practice intuitive eating when you feel compelled to sneak shit. I hate it. And given that 97% of people gain weight back after a diet, I keep wanting to scream at her WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING WITH THIS? She’s ridiculously healthy compared to me, she exercises all the time and aside from not eating much from scratch she’s got a pretty balanced diet. All the medical info says exercise is the biggest factor, that a sedentary lifestyle is significantly more damaging than food. But I’ve tried a couple times to bring these subjects up, like HAES, and it falls on deaf ears.
It’s deeply frustrating. And I have at least a year to go before I can move out.
@Grumbles – I don’t give a shit what you like. That being fat keeps shallow assholes who are only interested in a conventionally attractive body type rather than meeting a human being still stands (certainly compared to being “acceptably” thin, where you can have no idea if the guy hitting on you is seeing your awesome personality or your body for a while).
Eh, I didn’t care for the fact that Grumbles felt that this thead needed input from his penis, but now that we’re on the subject of sexual preferences I don’t care for the idea that people need to examine said preferences and feel bad if they’re too mainstream. Maybe this is one of those things that you just can’t take gender out of, but my experience as a woman is of having the idea that I’m not really entitled to have physical preferences and I’m being a mean bitch if I’m not interested in certain men because of the way they look drummed into me since I was a kid, and honestly, that ties in very strongly with all kinds of sexist ideas about how men’s needs are more important than women’s, women are supposed to be “above” mere physical attraction, etc. From a woman’s point of view that idea is both oppressive and not very sex positive at all. It’s one of the strongest ways in which women’s sexual agency is thwarted by culture.
Granted that Grumbles is a dude, but still, I’m not convinced that “examine your preferences” is ever really a good path to go down. If someone’s very mainstream preferences are leading to their treating people who they don’t find attractive badly then sure, that’s bad, but the problem there isn’t so much the mainstream preferences as it is the lack of understanding that your preferred gender doesn’t exist just to make you feel happy in the pants.
All of this reminds me way too much of earlier editions of the feminist sex wars, like the period when lesbians who were into butch/femme dynamics were told to examine their preferences with the assumption being that examining them would lead to abandoning them, or the arguments about BSDM in which again people into BSDM were told that they must examine their liking for it and that if they did so they’d stop wanting to do it. Given the history the whole “examine your preferences” thing raises my hackles quite a bit.
If someone is only attracted to conventionally pretty, thin white women, that’s not a problem for anybody but them. It becomes a problem when that person then treats people badly for not fitting his idea. Or for whining because there are ‘fewer’ people of his ideal than there should be and those people don’t want him. Getting personally offended because someone else doesn’t arouse you is the problem. And then those same people will also get personally offended when *they* don’t arouse someone else. Oh, and it’s also a problem to assume all people are ‘secretly’ attracted to the same things you are, and if they claim otherwise they are obviously just settling, or have emotional issues.
I don’t think anyone’s obligated to feel bad because their preferences are too mainstream. I do think people owe it to themselves to at least think hard about how much their preferences rely on damaging and oppressive narratives about race, gender, presentation, weight, disability, and so on.
Granted, the idea has a problematic heritage, but so does assuming people get a pass for thinking only white people are pretty, and given the choice I’m gonna err on the side of caution.