Deborah Lipp

Via Shakespeare’s Sister, I find that the Boston Herald thinks it’s okay to refer to an overweight person’s “blubber.”

It is not my normal habit to be a Fat Activist, simply because it’s not a way I choose to define myself. I’m overweight, I’m not interested in your diet for me thanks, let’s move on. It’s not nearly as interesting to me as, say, civil liberties, or Wicca, or bringing home the troops, or James Bond. Once you get the ‘love yourself’ paradigm, just keep lovin’.

But this makes me mad, because this endangers people (primarily women, what a surprise). The information about overweight people getting improper medication doses is important. It’s something every overweight person should know so she can discuss it with her doctor before getting an intramuscular injection.

How many women won’t read this article, or learn from it, because the language used was so wounding? How many will read “blubber” and stop reading, because they are rightly offended or because their self-hatred has been reawakened?

As Thesaurus Rex pointed out in his comment to the Shake’s Sis entry,

“If the article were about Asian women, it wouldn’t make jokes about their li’l yellow booties or quote “Me So Horny” by 2 Live Crew. If it was about black women, it wouldn’t talk about their skin color or quote “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Oh, but fat people, well, they’re fair game. “

And he’s right. Let’s just leap in and find the fun in this article, rather than inform people that the reason they’re still sick may be because they haven’t gotten proper medication dosages. After all, the only sick people affected are fat, and maybe they’ll lose weight, so it’s all good.

Update: Someone asked if “blubber” isn’t just a word meaning “fat.” No. It’s a word meaning whale fat, from which derives a secondary and insulting meaning of excessive fat. In other words, you’re as big as a whale so I refer to you as one.

New Update, 12/2: I just realized that when I was in the hospital I woke up in the middle of the night in agony, and they had to raise my Demerol to a surprisingly high level. Demerol, of course, is given by IM. So let’s have a blubber joke while I’m in screaming agony because I didn’t get enough meds. Fun, huh?

Over on Shakespeare’s Sister we were having this conversation about girls clothing, and Sis said the point I was making could be a whole other post, so here’s a post.

The original topic was about how Certain Forces In Our Culture™ try to confine girls by accusing them of slutitude whenever they wear anything revealing. But Geez Louise, is it really better to force them into slutitude?

If you haven’t been in a girls’ clothing department recently, I encourage you to be shocked and appalled. The [male] clothing manufacturers are genuinely getting mileage dressing girls as sluts, marketing sluttiness as a commodity. Not just sluttiness, also frilliness, ridiculously-girliness, and the like.

There is no simplicity to be had in most girls’ departments, no jeans without curlicues and flowers and sequins, no t-shirts without some sort of I Am A Slut slogan plastered across it.

One time I was in some store (I think Sears) looking for clothes for my son. And there was this cool line of girl’s clothes with a label like “Just Me,” marketed specifically to an unfrilly girl. How I know this is that the staff had shelved it in the boys’ department. They saw NO pink flowers and assumed it was for boys.

Kids R Us, Sears, Kohl’s, it doesn’t matter; even toddler’s sizes look like stripper wear.

Another time recently, I was buying my son new tap shoes, and I was asking the dancewear store manager about appropriate boy’s dance clothing. She started to say there were unisex clothes on the girl’s rack, and then changed her mind; the shorts now are too short, the shirts ride too high, the asses have sayings across them.

Let’s get real, here. We’re not overcoming the patriarchy by dressing our daughters as sluts. We’re submitting to the latest twist in the patriarchy. We’re buying them the clothes and the Britney Spears albums, so that they think they’re little rock stars oh how cute, but we don’t teach them that some people will think they’re not little rock stars, they’re little sluts, and they won’t understand why the same culture that sold them these clothes is now treating them in a particular and unpleasant way. It’s like Joan Cusack in Working Girl not being able to figure out that her look confines her.

Is it better for boys? Hell no! We struggle to find dancewear because my son doesn’t want to dress like a football or basketball player; he’s a dancer and he doesn’t dig sports. There’s little non-Nike to be had in boy’s wear. Being a male dancer is such a no-no that he’s trapped, sartorially speaking. It’s either girls’ slut clothes or boys’ jock clothes; there’s really nothing to buy for male dancers. Doesn’t that just say everything about how clothing sets us up to be the gender stereotype the culture demands we be?

Clothing stores are much more polarized than they were twenty years ago. As the old fogeys say, when I was a kid, it was different. Of course, I was a kid in the seventies, and “hippie” was a unisex look. I was successfully able to deny my sexuality well past the age when I was actually having sex. And that was comfortable for me.

Nowadays, there’s simply no such thing as unisex clothing. Girls have to stand in the slut corner, boys have to stand in the jock corner, and woe be unto you if you don’t want to be a stereotype.

I don’t know for a fact if the slut corner is worse or better for girls than the virgin corner. It’s a fucking corner; I’d like kids to have a whole room, or better yet, the great outdoors.