More hate mail!

The F-Word is being attacked again. Yesterday I wrote a post about how the Daily Mail article on how a size 16 Miss England finalist is "dangerously overweight" and a "bad role model" was fucking ridiculous and also included some blatant lies (the "ideal" body mass index is 20, according to them, and this is after they've done loads of articles about how wonderfully "curvy" she is and what a great "role model" - *YAWN*). As a result of this, I've been called fat by someone who presumably has never seen me:

isn't it the norm for feminists to be againstbeauty contests period, why are you now pro-beauty contest just becausea fatty has been included in the line up? Youre also against BMI too.So i'm thinking maybe you're all angry just because you're over BMI 26and rather fat? just a hunch.

This comment isn't going on the site because we moderate comments to avoid flame wars like the one that this would inevitably lead to, but I thought it deserved airing. Of course I'm fat - the only reasonable explanation for me saying that it was unfair dragging someone who is marginally overweight through the mud as a poster girl for heart disease and type 2 diabetes is that I'm fat. If I wasn't fat, I'd be cheering on the Daily Mail and calling for Chloe to be forcibly removed from the competition and recycled as a bouncy castle.

Actually, The readers of the F-Word would totally have lynched me if I'd said anything that appeared either to endorse beauty contests or to comment subjectively on Chloe's appearance, so here's another point that I would have made if I'd felt able to do so: Miss England is a beauty contest, and however you feel about beauty contests, that's what contestants are being judged on, not whether they are "good role models". Few people would deny that Chloe is a beautiful girl even if you do happen to find her a little on the porky side, and thus she is eminently qualified to participate.

As I said in the original post, she is no more overweight than many of her fellow contestants are underweight, so that blows the whole "role model" issue out of the water anyway. Chloe has as much right to compete in this repulsive display of young women as commodities for public consumption competition as anybody else.

I do think she could have chosen a more supportive bikini top though...

Scared? You should be...

It might come as a surprise to you that I am a bit of a wimp. Although I will happily spar with someone twice my size in an open taekwondo tournament, or get on a horse and gallop across rocky terrain, there are some quite ordinary things of which I am terrified. I have a massive phobia of fish. I don't like heights. I can't stand boats. Violent scenes in movies turn me into a quivering wreck. I am petrified of talking to strangers even if it's just to say something as simple as, "Excuse me". The idea of me ever making a first move on a man is frankly laughable. It's embarrassing being such a total wuss, and I know I would enjoy life more if I could at least get over my shyness, but at least it's accepted. My friends accept and embrace my slightly neurotic disposition, they look after me when necessary and they simply accept that this desperate shyness and propensity for fear is part of who I am, even if I do know how to make a man lose bladder control with my bare hands.

I am currently in the middle of having to face one of my biggest fears: dentists. There is no earthly reason why I should fear the dentist, having never required any dental treatment before in my life, but I do. Horribly so. So discovering that I need to have all of my wisdom teeth removed didn't go down too well with me. Specifically, I was vomiting with fear, crying hysterically (normally I cry about as easily as The Terminator) and unable to eat for the first two days, which has now given way to a sort of numb acceptance brought on firstly by the fact that one of them has started to hurt quite a lot so I'd quite like it if it were no longer there, and secondly by the fact that I've been assured that if I have it done under sedation I won't remember the experience.

Throughout the last few days, everybody has been fantastically supportive. I have had countless cups of tea made for me. Nobody has been in the least bit unsympathetic or even surprised at my petrified reaction, even people who had no idea I had a problem with dentistry. But it's got me thinking: what if I were a man? Would people be quite as accomodating of a man suffering the same fears? I seriously doubt it. Fear is regarded as a normal state for a woman, but not for a man. When is it ever acceptable for a man to utter the words, "I'm scared"?

I just think this is terribly sad. It's hard enough what I'm going through at the moment. It would be much, much harder if I felt that my fear was unacceptable, or if everybody around me thought that I was just being pathetic. Perhaps they do think that I'm being pathetic, but either way, they recognise that my fear is real and distressing and that I need to be treated with kindness. If I were a man, I'd probably be being told to pull myself together. I'd be regarded as less of a man, an inadequate person.

Perhaps this is plain old-fashioned sexism against women - not expecting women to show courage because they are inferior to big, brave, strong men. And I can see that this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy - if girls are taught from childhood that it's acceptable and even desirable to be scared (I remember screaming along with all the other girls at primary school when an insect came into the vicinity, just to fit in) and if boys are taught to suppress their fears, it's not surprising if these attitudes become thoroughly ingrained. Amongst adults, women might well be genuinely more fearful creatures than men.

But male fear is an enormous taboo, almost uniquely so. I can't think of any emotion that is unacceptable to the same extent in women. I would say it's probably acceptable for a man to be scared if he has a terminal illness, or is about to do a 5000ft bungee jump, but other than that, fear and masculinity are thoroughly mutually exclusive. Women who show bravery are applauded. Men who show bravery are just being men. Women who show fear are comforted. Men who show fear are ridiculed. It might be that people expect less of women because they regard them as inferior, but it's men who really suffer because the illusion is not that women are easily scared but that men are not easily scared. Fear is a natural, human emotion not confined to women and children. It really is time we accepted that both men and women feel fear, and that both men and women can be brave and confront that fear when necessary. Personally, I'm fully expecting to come round from my grisly dental operation with an "I was brave at the dentists today" sticker plastered to my chest.

Here's someone who thoroughly enjoys going to the dentist:

Fight like a girl

Lately I've been thinking about how great it is to be a sporty woman. I think getting seriously involved with a sport is one of the most empowering things a woman can do.

Three and a half years ago now I took up taekwondo, a Korean martial art based on karate. I'd always wanted to do martial arts, but my parents had vetoed it when I was a child on the grounds of my propensity for getting into fights at school (probably a wise decision I have to admit). At 21, I finally got round to donning some "angry white pyjamas" to learn how to kick ass. I'd acquired enough disposable income to join a gym, but it cost about the same to join a taekwondo club instead, and the rest is history. I'm now just about to take my black belt grading. I'm a much more confident person in general than I was at 21 for a variety of reasons, but taekwondo has probably been the biggest influence in terms of having more confidence in my body.

As women we are bombarded with pressure from the media, from our peers, sometimes from men, to see our bodies as wayward things that must be kept in check, that mustn't be fed too much, that exist largely if not solely for aesthetic purposes, and that life will not be worth living if we gain a few pounds. A woman's body exists to be beautiful, not athletic, and beautiful according to pretty strict guidelines at that. How we feel about our bodies, and often consequently our self-esteem, is dictated by a cruel lottery of genetics. And if we have drawn a poor or even a not-quite-perfect set of numbers in the genetics lottery, we are to spend our lives striving to improve our bodies, not allowing ourselves to be truly happy or relaxed until we achieve perfection. It is of course much more important that we are attractive than healthy or fit.

I know that people go to the gym to "keep fit", but for a lot of women, "keeping fit" is synonymous with "keeping thin", and not just because slimness is for most people a by-product of fitness. Virtually every woman I know who has a gym membership sweats it out on a treadmill specifically in order to get or stay thin, and good luck to them for not achieving that just by starving themselves, but it concerns me that women by and large are more concerned with how their body looks than with what it can do.

If you do a sport rather than just going to the gym, you are doing physical activity for a purpose other than just to look good. Being sporty gives you the same physical benefits of going to the gym, but with none of the weight obsession, wall-to-wall mirrors, lycra, posing, sleazy guys and other assorted annoyances that gyms are associated with. You will get fit, and yes, you will get thin if being thin is the state that your body is destined to adopt when it is at the peak of fitness, but you will do so by focusing on having fun and getting good at something instead of on how your body looks. Much more enjoyable and massively more empowering.

When you are training or competing in an actual sport, nobody gives a flying fuck how your body looks. When I'm beating the crap out of a focus pad, demonstrating a pattern for some beginners, kicking a 6ft man in the head, or just sitting around comparing bruises after class, it is the only time I feel that nobody, absolutely nobody, cares about how my body looks.

At my taekwondo club, it is not at all unusual to find men discussing their diets. It's a given that everybody will be watching what they eat to a certain extent, making sure that they have a healthy diet giving them the required energy and nutrients to perform at their best. Being sporty makes it acceptable for men to take an interest in healthy eating. And it makes it acceptable for women to eat proper, substantial food that gives them the energy they need.

A while ago, I can't remember when, I was getting into the shower when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and suddenly realised that I had no cellulite. Before taking up taekwondo I'd had some - not a huge amount, but quite a lot for a 20-year-old. I hadn't been massively distressed about it, but I hadn't liked it either. I'd occasionally succumbed to that masochistic practice of standing in one's underwear in front of a full-length mirror and thinking, Yuk. And now, after a couple of years of regular exercise, it had gone. But it wasn't the fact that it had disappeared that I saw as significant - it was the fact that I hadn't even noticed its disappearance. At some point, I'd stopped caring.

These days, if I find myself in front of a full-length mirror, instead of appraising how my body looks, I throw a few kicks and admire my ninja skillz (fellow martial artists, don't try and tell me you've never done this). If I'd spent the last four years at the gym instead of in the dojang I would be just as fit, but I wouldn't be able to do a pretty mean 540 degree turning kick, I wouldn't have a shelf full of trophies and medals, and I'd still be examining my thighs for cellulite. If I was ever in danger of getting involved with the mad body beautiful culture that plagues young women, taekwondo saved me from it. I am no longer a slave to my body - my body is a slave to me.

Sorry to pontificate but I really think if there's one piece of advice I can offer to every woman it's to find a sport you enjoy and do it. What physical activities did you enjoy as a child? What have you always wanted to try? It's not often that women are encouraged to take up an actual sport as opposed to simply squeezing themselves into pink lycra and going to spinning classes in order to keep their lardy bits in check, and I think that this is a great shame. There is a lot of untapped female sporting talent out there, and a lot of women who are missing out on getting fit in a massively enjoyable manner. There are some who would say that running around like a mad thing and getting sweaty and dishevelled is unfeminine, but to hell with them. Taking up a sport allows you to reclaim your body and to use it to its true potential.

Only thin candidates need apply

The lovely Lynne Miles of The F-Word has been blogging recently about the true cost of being fat. Our Lynne is an occasional member of Weight Watchers, and receives emails from them. She was horrified when the following popped into her inbox:

"The worst thing was when I went for a job interview, knowing full well I had all the skills needed. But I never got the job."

Susan believed she was turned down for the job on the basis that she was overweight. Proof of this came six months later when she applied for the same job again - this time much slimmer - and got the job.

"It was embarrassing," she says. "I had the same skills, did the tests in the same way and got the same results. The only difference was I was 3st lighter."

Although the idea of losing weight if one is unhealthily overweight isn't a bad idea, this story is being used as a motivational tool to help fatties lose weight, rather than as a demonstration of how employers discriminate against people who don't look the part. It's pretty fucked up that anybody could read the above and not be outraged.

Lynne thinks that this sort of discrimination affects women more than it affects men and I sort-of agree. I do think that men are almost certainly discriminated against for being fat. However, I suspect that the level of obesity men have to achieve before receiving the same level of discrimination is probably significantly higher.

If an interviewer saw a candidate of either gender who was morbidly obese, I can absolutely understand them being put off by that. Somebody who is so hugely fat they don't walk so much as waddle and get out of breath climbing a flight of stairs is unlikely to be a healthy employee. It's pretty much impossible to be that fat without having either physiological or psychological problems and whilst it's unfair, it's understandable that employers might not be keen for that reason.

Beyond that, it's just mindless discrimination. And as Lynne points out, as physical appearance is considered more important for women than for men, women are bound to be more affected by it. Employing someone who's a size 6 instead of someone who's a size 26 is kind of understandable. Employing someone who's a size 6 over someone who's a size 16 is outrageous. No man who was heavily built and/or slightly overweight would suffer such discrimination unless he was going for a job as a Speedo model, but women live with it constantly. If you don't believe me, take a walk around the City and see if you can spot a female suit who's above a size 12. How "too fat" is defined for women is considerably more exclusive than how it is defined for men, and thus a far greater number of women suffer discrimination. Not that I would think it were any more acceptable if it happened to men too, but if it happened to men too people would probably make a fuss about it.

I actually got chatting about this with someone a while back who told me that he had once employed an enormously fat woman precisely because of her size. She had many great qualities but what really clinched the job for her was that he felt that any woman who could achieve the impressive CV that she had and to go through life in such an image-obsessed society as a functional, confident human being whilst being that fat, had proved herself to be a very strong and determined individual.

I agree. Although the human capacity to endure is far greater than anybody ever imagines until they're actually going through something, I can't envisage going through life as a very fat woman without ending up with rock bottom self esteem. However much you believe that being physically attractive isn't that important and that other people's opinions don't matter, how one is perceived by others is important and does affect one's self image. Even Lynne, who is a bit fat but in no way unattractive, tells me that she receives random abuse from people in the street on average about once a week. I don't even understand why anyone would do that. Why yell abuse at someone who's done nothing wrong other than to be a few pounds heavier than you think they should be? People suck.

Perhaps one of the reasons that "fattism" isn't treated with the outrage it so richly deserves is that the women who suffer from it are too ashamed to speak out. We are taught that fat women are barely deserving of existence. Of course there are notable exceptions in the form of high profile fatties such as Jo Brand and Dawn French, but as a whole, fat women are not exactly flavour of the month. I've said it before and I'll say it again: physical appearance is considered by far the most important trait for a woman, and so if a woman doesn't conform to a certain standard, her worth as a human being is massively diminished. It takes an incredibly self-assured fatty to make a fuss about discrimination, rather than simply to shuffle away and tuck into a low fat yoghurt. Susie Orbach springs to mind.

Most women don't appreciate the extent to which attractiveness-based discrimination happens because most women go through life at pretty much the same level of attractiveness all the time. Susan knows what it's like to be both fat and thin, she knows how much more accepted she is with her slimmer physique, and yet she is using her experience not to speak out about how appalling the treatment of fat people is but to speak out about how you too can be a size 10 to please all of those unmitigated arsewipes who won't employ you if you're carrying a few extra pounds. If you manage to lose weight and keep it off, good for you. But you shouldn't have to do so in order to be valued as a human being. You shouldn't have to do so in order to get a job. Fattism should not be accepted.

Part of the problem is that people think that losing weight is easy and that anybody who's a bit porky just needs to lay off the pies a bit and get some exercise. Usually the people you hear saying that are the sort of people who stay slim no matter how many pies they eat. If it really were that simple, do you think anybody would be overweight? Nobody chooses to be overweight. Hell, if it were easy to control one's size, few women would be above a size 8. It's illegal to discriminate against people on the grounds of race for example, but not on the grounds of fat. If it were possible for black people to bleach their skin white, would people consider it acceptable to shout racial slurs at them in the street because "they could change if they wanted to" or to discriminate against them in the workplace because they "obviously lack self-respect"?

In my not-so-humble opinion, it's time people accepted a few things:

Some people find it easier to stay slim than others

Being slightly overweight isn't likely to affect one's health significantly

Being fat doesn't make a person sub-human

Women don't exist just to look pretty

Being fuckable isn't an important criterion for a job interview candidate

You can't discriminate against discrimination. It all sucks, whether it's to do with a person's gender, sexuality, the colour of their skin or their waist measurement

Vintage advertising

Charming!

Carbs are the new fat

Virtually any women's magazine you will ever read will have a feature or two on diets. Something that's really interesting is how the content of these features and the advice given has changed over time.

Ten years ago, fat was the antichrist. Women were advised to eat a diet rich in complex carbohydrates, lean protein, fruit and vegetables, but no fat! Don't eat fat - fat will make you fat. Fat must be banished from your diet. Fat is bad and evil and wrong. Men are allowed to eat fat, but any woman who eats fat will be punished by her hips expanding to grotesque proportions so that the whole world can see that she's eaten FAT.

Ooooh, I'm scared.

These days, carbs are the new fat. Now we're supposed to be eating lots of fruit and vegetables, lots of protein, and fat is allowed but no carbs at all. Pasta is evil. Bread is the antichrist. Potatoes? You've got to be kidding! They'll make you FAT.

I blame Dr Fatkins, sorry, Atkins. Ever since his bonkers diet came back into fashion and loads of Hollywood celebrities attributed their lean figures to it, the media has taken up the no-carbs mantle, trying to persuade us that eating even a small portion of the best wholegrain organic bread will turn you into the 400lb Angry Mom on Ricki Lake.

These magazines always manage to get quotes from "respected nutritionists" backing up what they have to say. Funny that the whole of nutritional science seemed to turn on its head as soon as Jennifer Aniston went on the Atkins. What's also interesting is that dieting is always linked with health. A "healthy" meal is one that won't make you fat. Even articles that have no specific weight-loss angle bang on about it. I read something in Cosmopolitan a couple of years ago that made me absolutely seethe. It was an article in which three women tried out different "healthy" diets without the explicit goal of weight loss at all. One of the women was very sporty and had previously eaten a carbohydrate-rich diet. The nutritionist put her on a low carb diet, chiding her that, "If Lucy didn't eat a carb-based snack after going to the gym, she wouldn't undo all her hard work." Right. So the only reason Lucy goes to the gym is to lose weight.

At least this U-turn from low-fat to low-carb a few years ago demonstrated just how fickle the media is when it comes to this sort of thing. What we're supposed to eat goes in and out of fashion almost with the same frequency as what we're supposed to wear. Low carb is in fashion just as skinny jeans are in fashion. Being on an 80s style, low fat, high carb diet is as unthinkable as being seen in shoulder pads with a frizzy perm.

All nutritionists always seem to have agreed on is the following:

Too much saturated fat is bad

Refined carbohydrates are bad

Vegetables are good (fruit is a bit controversial because is has - gasp! - CARBS in it)

If you want to lose weight, you need to get lots of exercise

Alli oops

From tapeworm eggs to heart failure, diet pills have always been a fairly controversial subject. But now a new over-the-counter drug has become available in the US, which works in part by punishing users for eating too much fat by making them lose control of their bowels. No, really.

Why is this a feminist issue? Well, because prescription-only diet pills are quite rightly only available to people who are medically overweight. Over-the-counter diet products are aimed at those attempting to lose weight from either a normal or only slightly overweight frame - i.e. women. It's only women who are under pressure to lose weight from an already-healthy physique, and so any over-the-counter or black-market weight loss aid is bound to be aimed mostly at women and to have more female consumers.

Perhaps it's just the fact that I've never actually been fat talking, but I find it incredible to think that any normal-sized person would be so desperate to lose weight. If the only thing standing between you and a chip butty is the prospect of soiling your trousers, then perhaps it's time to break your diet.

Mmmm...cake....

My mother is a size 14-16 and has spent her entire life on a diet. There hasn't been a day since she was about sixteen that she hasn't been dieting, or thinking about dieting, or despairing of her figure in some way. My mother is built like a brick shithouse and the one time she did get down to a size 10 on the Cambridge Diet (don't do it, kids!) she looked skeletal. She's a bit fat, in a normal, post-middle-aged-spread kind of way. She is certainly not the hideous, whale-like creature that she thinks she is.

When I was little, she was convinced that I'd be fat too, that I'd take after her. She told me this in order to prepare me for life as a fat bird, because I would always struggle with my weight, because I would always be unattractive for it and the earlier I learned to live with it the better. She fed me skimmed milk and Diet Coke and cottage cheese and rice cakes. She insisted on buying me a size 14 blazer for secondary school because I was bound to balloon to gigantic proportions sooner or later (if I tell you that my skirt bore an "Age 9" label, that should give you some idea of just how effing stupid I looked on my first day of school). Essentially, I was brought up to believe that my destiny was to become a disgusting, unlovable creature who had to live on Slim Fast milkshakes in order to avoid ballooning from a size 16 to a size 26.

I'm twenty-four now. Apart from the odd few weeks of dieting to get into a weight category for martial arts tournaments, I haven't restricted my food intake in any way since the age of seventeen. And I am a size 8. I feel cheated - all those years of my childhood I felt distressed at the thought of being unattractive when I grew up, all those years of my adolescence I stressed about gaining a bit of weight on my hips which nobody bothered to tell me was perfectly normal, it was all for nothing.

If only somebody had told me. If only some magical creature with the ability to see into the future had tapped me on the shoulder when I was six years old in the supermarket with my mother tutting over the fat content of Mr Kipling's latest offering and whispered in my ear that I should eat cake if I want it, that I would always be blessed with a natural inclination towards healthy food and exercise, that I would be so naturally slim I probably couldn't gain weight if I tried, and that a few extra pounds never hurt anybody anyway.

What if I had taken after my mother though? What if I was a natural fat bird? Would I be devouring diet books, going to Weight Watchers and wearing black one-piece swimsuits with a sarong? Would I make my future daughters memorise calorie counts? I bloody hope not.

The thing is, if you're slim, you've no idea how difficult it is to be fat. (And by fat, I mean fat by society's standards, not necessarily medically overweight). It's easy to look at fat friends and think they look fabulous, but not so easy to be one, to be surrounded by billboards that tell you what you should look like, to be surrounded by other women who more closely resemble that ideal, to be surrounded by men who hit on your slim friends because they constitute better "arm candy" although nobody ever tells you that you're just as attractive as them really, for the F word to be the first insult that's thrown at you not because it's such a terrible thing but because it's the most hurtful thing you can say to a woman. I can imagine what it's like, and I can also imagine that nothing I can imagine could possibly come close to reality. We are so cruel to fat women. A fat man is merely unhealthy. He needs to lay off the chip butties and get some exercise. But the word "fat" is emotionally loaded for women. It smacks of laziness, slovenliness, unworthiness, unattractiveness, stupidity, emotional instability, meanness, greed, lack of self-control...

No wonder my mother wanted to protect me from all that.