Smart and controversial posts

[dolphin__girl]

Today seems to be the day for finding smart posts. Via a number of people comes Jamie LaRue, a librarian, responding thoughtfully and firmly to a parent demanding that "Uncle Bobby's Wedding", a book dealing with a child's fear that her uncle's gay marriage will change his relationship with her, be removed from his library.

The second is mizkit's post

Comments

[mrissa]

I am not a large person, and I never have been. But when I was sick several years ago, I couldn't swallow much at all for long enough that I became clinically underweight. It was worrying to me and to my doctor, not to mention being physically uncomfortable, and I made the mistake of mentioning it to other people.

And I got people telling me not to try to gain weight, that I would regret it, that gaining weight was always bad, that gaining weight was always easy, that I would learn to live with the physical discomfort of being too thin for my bone structure (being cold and tired all the time, emotionally more fragile, bruising more easily, etc.) and it would be worth it. Because I would be thin. Because the size 4 I was trying to get back to was not thin enoughSo yah. I've had nasty assumptions made about women of my size, and I've gotten comments that people didn't know were about me--stuff like, "You can see her ribs, that's so disgusting, she needs to eat a sandwich, damn." (Because no, my ribs don't glow through my shirt,

[dolphin__girl]

Thank you. This is exactly what I was trying to get across, but lacked the words to say properly.

[henchminion]

I'm with you on this one. Since I started reading Shapely Prose, I've been feeling more and more militant when people start talking about weight.

When you look at the medical papers on the subject, it turns out that being clinically obese is only as dangerous to your life expectancy as being male (and just as complicated to "fix"). Yet you don't see people sitting dudes down and saying "I'm worried that you're not taking care of yourself. All this masculinity is toxic for you, you know. Have you considered getting sexual reassignment surgery, or at least cutting out the football and not watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship? Maybe you should get a lap band around your testicles. You don't want to die early, do you?"

When you start to separate the actual health statistics from the cultural ideas about thinness and fat, the mainstream media discourse on the subject starts to sound weirder and weirder.