wickedqueen.net

Really EPIC asshaberdashery, though. Srsly. And it happened at WisCon, my first and favorite con, by way of a miserable self-hating gamer girl named Rachel Moss, who as it happens is also a graduate student at my own institution.

You may want to take a moment to catch up with the Angry Black Woman’s comprehensive explanation of what happened. (And skip to the bottom if you have no idea what WisCon is.)

I use the term “gamer girl” above with a healthy dose of irony–Moss does seem to indicate herself that her primary fannish interest is in game, and she is female, but in general I try to take care with my application of the label “girl.”* Here, I mostly want to highlight something that I see as a problem: many people who have reported on the Incident and/or discussed its ramifications have identified her as “young” or “very young,” often in an attempt to render her in some way pitiable–not excused; very few people are on board for that, but somehow slightly less responsible, or at least that’s how it reads to me.

Moss is 25 years old. She’s a year younger than me. She’s a graduate student at UW-Madison, just like me. Unlike me, she apparently struggles with an eating disorder** and has for many years. Like other posters on the subject I hasten to clarify that I think it is very sad that she has an eating disorder, and should never be grounds for attacking her–or, conversely, seen as an insult when I note that she has one; she has spoken about it publicly and it is, if I may say so, profoundly fucked up to act like saying “eating disorder” is equivalent to “her mother’s a whore.”

However, having an eating disorder and being an asshole are not the same problem. They do seem to be at least peripherally related; Moss hates other women, and what she hates in them seems to be all the things she most fears to see in herself: fat, “inadequate” or somehow unconvincing gender performance (as I’d interpret her transphobia), disability, etc. Claire Light puts it beautifully, and acknowledges some unpleasant similarities inside her own head that I would bet almost all women in this culture have experienced:

But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I’m also the enemy?

There’s still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I’ve come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it’s a tough one. It’s the same voice that tells me I’m fat, but it’s okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won’t admit it.

Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed–if she ever tried–to stomp it out. She’s let that voice take over, and it’s a monster’s voice. That’s what she’s turned into for the time being: a monster, who’s projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that’s what’s happening with women who hate on fat women?

I definitely know that voice. I have done the “fatter than me” count in a room more than once. But the thing is, I don’t agree with it. I know the voice is fucked up and wrong. Even if–especially if–I start feeling like I believe it. Recently, I was discussing weight and body image issues with one of my favorite WisCon goers, and I noted that the big problem I have in entering discussions like that is that people often assume that because I am a small woman with a fairly intense workout schedule, I am judging them for lacking my “discipline” or however you want to term it. I’m not. I do sometimes get a little nuts about a couple of pounds of personal weight gain, mainly because I put on about 40 in my first two years of grad school and I recall that it starts with two or three, and also I prefer it when my clothes fit. And I like being strong, and knowing that I can bike 50 miles, etc. But this is my personal standard. It takes a lot of work. When other people are not as fit as me, I don’t think they are lazy slobs; I figure they have other stuff to do, because, eschewing false modesty, most people are not as athletic as I am.*** Most people don’t spend the time on it that I do, most people don’t bike 100+ miles a week, most people don’t do weight training ~3 times a week. Why the hell would they? Keeping in top shape is kind of like chasing storms or keeping a log of all the trains that come through town: important to some individuals, mind-bogglingly boring and/or insane to most.

So I don’t have an eating disorder, but I can get a little hyperfocused sometimes. On myself, not other people. And other people do have eating disorders–a depressingly large number of them, in fact. So far, only ONE person has come to WisCon two years in a row with the express purpose, on her second visit, of taking photos without permission and posting them online to mock people for being fat, disabled, trans, not white… In her original post, from what I saw, Moss was mostly focused on misogyny and fatphobia, but she didn’t shy away from asserting her authority to racially categorize all participants and thereby delegitimize their identities, and the racism that followed from the SASS crowd is, to a sheltered white academic, truly staggering.

I think Claire is absolutely right, both in her assertion of the psychological motivation behind Moss’s acts and also in her implication that Moss is very different from most women, who hear the voice but who do not develop a full-blown case of demonic possession by the patriarchy. For fucksakes.

A number of people have reposted and analyzed Moss’s opening remarks about the con–the con that she, remember, paid registration fees to attend not once but twice, although as a Madison resident she probably didn’t pay for lodging:

[WisCon] is like any other sci-fi con, except that well over half of the attendees are female, about a third of the panels are political, there is no gaming, and absolutely everybody is a huge bitch.

LiveJournal user hederahelix noted that contrary to her third assertion, Moss was sitting next to a gamer at one panel at least–since she sat next to hederahelix, and hederahelix is a gamer. I was on a panel about gender swapping in gaming during which there was a great deal of discussion about both MMOGs and table-top RPGs. At that panel, we also discussed the sexism and misogyny inherent in gamer culture on a number of levels: the automatic equation of healers with women, the reaction of a mostly male player base to the hiring of a female community manager at NCSoft, the way that male players often attempt to roleplay women (and absolutely refuse to hear “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” from actual women)…

I said that Moss is not particularly young, and I don’t think she is, at least not in any way that excuses or even explains anything. But she reminds me of an angrier and more poisonous version of 14-year-old me in the sense that she is obviously looking for an environment where she has no competition for male attention, and I think what she hates most about WisCon is that it both fails to provide much in the way of that commodity AND fails to acknowledge that commodity as inherently valuable.

When I was 14, I was the only female member of the RPG club at my high school. I was a sophomore, and for an entire year it was me and a bunch of role-playing guys. The next year, four or five other female students joined, and at the time I would have preferred it if they hadn’t. I was younger than everyone else, I was funny-looking, and I wanted the gamer guys to myself. And even then, I didn’t try to chase anyone away, I didn’t give up on it myself, I didn’t turn around and attack the other women in the environment. I thought a lot of crazy things at age 14, and I made a lot of bad decisions. But even then I realized that other women were not the automatic enemy. And I was not a complete asshole.****

On a more positive note: the thing that I love most about WisCon is the way that its attendees celebrate ourselves. It is, I suspect, this very quality at which Moss grits her teeth like the Grinch looking down on Whoville.

Many people have commented that the photos held up for mockery by Moss and others show people who appear to be having a wonderful time. Many of them are photos of my friends: hilarious, kind, wonderful, brave people. People who are not afraid to BE. WisCon is one of the few places where I never feel like I am Too Much: too smart, too weird, too flamboyant, too chattery…

Not that I make much effort to tone these qualities down in Real Life; I have pink hair for godsakes. But at WisCon, I feel like people GET it. Instead of mere wide eyes and the occasional burst of helpless laughter, my ensembles garner heartfelt appreciation. No one wonders WHY I am wearing a lovingly restored lime green go-go dress with hot pink fringe dangling big plastic flowers. They just marvel at the matching go-go boots. They appreciate my nerd/folk mix CDs (speaking of, I met my goal of distributing 100 of them this year).

So on the one hand, I’m not much moved by people pushing pity for Rachel Moss, who set out to deliberately humiliate and harm a number of people whose happiness I value highly, and who is DEFINITELY not sorry about anything other than possibly getting caught. But on the other… okay, yes. I do pity her. I pity anyone who can stand two years running in the middle of all that exuberance and Not Get It, like Kay with a chip of ice mirror in his heart. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then why come back? There’s got to be something there that she wants, and she hates everyone who has figured out how to let themselves have it.

I love WisCon. I am extremely bummed that I missed almost half the con laid up with the Wischolera (and how awesome is a group of people that collectively comes up with the term “Wischolera”?) but I am already looking forward to next year, when I’ll be living right by the conference hotel again. I just don’t have much time to spare for people whose lives are governed by fear.

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ETA: It occurs to me that many people may be totally confused about what WisCon IS. It’s a feminist science fiction/fantasy convention held in Madison, WI over Memorial Day Weekend every year. It attracts a lot of academic types, enough that there is an academic programming track; I presented a paper on gender-swapping in MMOGs there a couple of years ago, and it was really nice to be talking to an audience that didn’t need a 15-minute primer on “What is a virtual world” before I could get to the substantive content of my paper. A lot of very cool people attend from all over the country and even outside the US, and of course they (and the late night parties at which we get to hang out and drink ever night) are really the best part of the con. Some of us are, I suppose, “huge bitches”; others of us are really fairly small bitches with tall shoes to compensate.

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*Not quite as much as I do with the term “lady”; if you hear me use this word or its plural, you may assume that I am mocking some misguided person’s ideals of “modern chivalry.” This is pretty easy to cue into given how much I tend to extend the “a” when I say it.

****At age 14, I admit, no one is a complete NON-asshole either.

Awhile ago, someone on LiveJournal mentioned the National Weight Control Registry, which is a study associated with Brown University Medical School “developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss”–here defined as people who have maintained a 30 pound loss for one year or more.

Despite having regained a bit of weight in the past two months due to first being Full of Blood Clots and then, a week after they finally let me go back to the gym, catching the Death Flu, I am still within five pounds of my original goal weight, which I reached on December 13, 2005–coincidentally closely following Clot #1; I only missed about a week of gym time for that one. Anyway, my study consent forms arrived with my held mail today, so I got to initial a bunch of stuff and provide evidence that I did actually lose all that weight.

They offer two options: you can get your doctor’s office or whoever to provide documentation, or you can submit before-and-after photos. If there’s one thing I have ready to hand, it’s photos of myself–admittedly quite a few more “after” shots than “before,” as Matthieu has commented on in the past, but definitely enough “before” shots to prove that I used to be fat.

Although not, actually, the worst and most horrible of “before” shots, which for some reason my father had on his website for MONTHS after it was no longer accurate, until he finally listened to my desperate pleas and took it down. I don’t know what happened to that one. I looked like Jabba the Hut. It would have been PERFECT for the purpose of demonstrating how fat I used to be, so I am actually kind of sorry.

Anyway, here are the photos that are actually getting sent:

Before:

(October 7, 2004)

(June 2005)

(Christmas 2004)

AFTER:

(December 2005)

(July 25, 2007)

(July 23, 2006)

The Christmas 2004 one is probably the worst of the lot, mainly because that was when I weighed the most (178 pounds when I, inexplicably, decided that it would be a good idea to weigh myself like two days after Christmas). It’s actually pretty encouraging to be looking at those old-old photos, since I’m actually only about five pounds over my preferred weight at the moment, and while that’s worse than it might initially sound because I’m also down quite a bit of muscle from being benched for so long, on the other hand, I do not look like Jabba the Hut. My face is still pretty much the way it looks in my “after” pictures, for one thing, rather than all chipmunky.

My gym is closed until January 2–I did get in some cardio and probably some strength-training shoveling snow this afternoon; I could only do so much since no one has been in residence for over a week and people have been walking on the sidewalk, packing it down, and eventually I got very, very tired of hammering away with the edge of the shovel to remove 1/8″ of snow from the walk. I put down salt. Come January 2, I will be doing 5-6 days of weight training a week until I am back to my former glory:

My biceps have really suffered. But I will get them back into shape.

…but my father is in the hospital in Missouri with what, at last pass by various specialists, looks like it might be a heart defect. They’re supposed to be running tests today.

He feels a lot better than when he went into the ER on Saturday night, but they want to keep him for at least several more days, probably, to run tests. The hematologist who was brought in yesterday does not think his problem is Factor V Leiden (my clotting disorder), although there is evidence of (long) past clot-related damage. They did an EKG that came back clean, but apparently the possible defect is of the sort that wouldn’t show up on an EKG anyway.

This is interesting, because I actually complained about chest pains to my GP last year and got an EKG of my own. She was basically humoring me; she kept telling me that I probably just couldn’t tell the difference between chest pains and muscle aches from weight-lifting, which I found insulting, but the EKG came back clean, so despite the fact that I’ve had these pains intermittently at least since college I figured it couldn’t be that bad.* I guess if Dad has a Super Sekrit heart defect I’ll need to get rechecked.

My mother was not too happy when I mentioned this.

“You had CHEST PAINS and you never MENTIONED them to me?”
“Gee, I wonder why… The EKG was fine! They said I was fine! I feel fine!”

Mom called to update me just as I was leaving the grocery store; I arrived home to discover a letter from the UW Benefits Office, forwarded from Boston, informing me that they were canceling my health insurance effective TODAY because the premiums had not been paid. This should definitely not have happened, since the standard practice is to take the entire summer’s premiums out of the May check for grad students who have a fall appointment, which I do, but apparently–the benefits office returned my frantic voicemail at 6:35 this morning–nobody authorized this for me. No one really knows why.** They’re supposed to call me back either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

I strongly hope that there are no further difficulties in resolving this, since I may need to get a freaking cardiologist when I get back to Madison. Not to mention a new GP–even if I don’t have a heart defect, this is also the woman who told me that I should never, under any circumstances, consume more than one alcoholic beverage in a 24-hour period and then strongly implied that I was an alcoholic. It was like she’d never seen a graduate student before.

The good news: my honorary nieceling Abby, who is almost 5 and who fell down a flight of stairs this weekend and suffered a fractured skull and subdural bleeding, has just been discharged from the children’s medical center in St. Louis. They have a follow-up appointment next month and a list of symptoms for which to keep an eye out, but this morning’s CAT scan showed that the injury has started healing (it was a long slow bleed, which is why they kept them for three days). Abby is very relieved that they will not be shaving her head for surgery and apparently is enjoying telling people that she broke her first bone: her skull.

Despite having been confined to a hospital bed, Abby never really showed many symptoms (it’s a good thing my friend Laura, her mother, took her to the ER, obviously), and she was definitely getting pretty bored. Laura said that last night she pressed the call button to summon a nurse and then demanded that her Care Bear’s blood pressure be checked. In case you were wondering, a Care Bear’s systolic BP should be under 50. Bedtime Bear is a healthy 35.

I hope they actually figure out what’s wrong with Dad today.

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*You’d think I’d have known better by then. Constant vigilance, that’s how you have to deal with the medical profession.

**Although let’s just say that this is not the first benefits SNAFU that I have experienced through my department in the past couple of years.

You know, all those years of secondary school gym class, I thought I hated physical activity, but it turns out I just hated fascism.*

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

–Richard Brautigan, The Memoirs of Jesse James

(My other reflection on biking lately is that the older I get, the more like my father I seem to become. Biking, cooking,** and I’ve started contemplating camping, which was definitely not my thing as a child, at least not after age 8 or so.)

My hair is also getting really faded. I’m loathe to cover the highlights, which still look good (if faded), but probably I’ll dye it all back to Atomic Pink after I get back from visiting my cousin in LA. This does mean that Cyn and I will not be total twinsies if we get together for lunch, but that may well save the universe from implosion,*** so perhaps I should consider it a necessary sacrifice.

And speaking of the universe imploding, today’s Thursday PARC Forum is about dark matter. Maybe I should go.

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*I’ve remarked this to several people now, which is why I can’t remember who thought it should be on a t-shirt. I think it might be a little long.

***I’ve always been a big fan of parallel universes, such as Star Trek Dark Mirror and the Futurama Cowboy Universe. Maybe there’s one where everyone’s got pink hair EXCEPT Cyn and me. I’ll tell you one thing: I bet Evil Bizarro Cabell has really conservative hair. Lime green would be the photo-negative, but I’ve done that, too.

So it took me 90 minutes to bike into work today, but I think I can shave off some time tomorrow by not going 6.2 miles out of my way.*

First I forgot my cell phone. That cost me about a mile, but the real problem was when I forgot that Arastradero doesn’t start until after you cross El Camino, and failed to turn left on Charleston. Because I had written down directions for myself off the Gmaps Pedometer route I plotted over a map of bike lanes in the area, I was TOTALLY SURE that I was not supposed to turn left on Charleston, despite the niggling doubt in my mind as I sped through intersection after intersection with no sign of Arastradero. This is the peril of documents,** even ones that we ought to know are not exactly 100% reliable given that we created them yesterday and are notoriously bad at navigation in general. They just seem so authoritative. Oops.

So I didn’t lift any weights when I got in as I’d originally planned; just showered and changed and came upstairs to my office. At least I know how to get from home to work now, and am in good enough shape that I can handle a 6.2 mile detour.

As you may have gathered, I am safely in California–mostly moved in, even, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of my friends Greg and Stevie, who let me ship my many, many belongings to their apartment, helped me get my luggage and packages from my motel to my summer lodgings, and even took me in to the bike shop to get my bike reassembled this weekend. The house where I’m renting a room is pretty nice, and has pretty much everything I could ask for in the kitchen; I’ve already been baking up a storm. I’m hoping to finish organizing all my crap this week, so that my room doesn’t look so much like a dozen boxes of clothing, jewelry, and office supplies exploded in there. And I’m also planning to actually update again; I know everyone will be so pleased.

AMAZING CALIFORNIA DISCOVERY: There is a box karaoke place in Cupertino*** that has Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain”**** in their catalog. This is like the holy fucking grail of karaoke for me; now I just need to find “Season of the Witch” and “When U Were Mine.”

And Stevie even took the best karaoke photo ever, as a bonus.

BEDSPREAD UPDATE: So Stevie took me to Target to pick up all the random stuff I still needed despite having shipped a dozen boxes of my crap to California, and I got a new bedspread to replace the one that, you may recall, I jettisoned in Boston because I hated it. At first I wasn’t seeing anything that really appealed to me in Target Housewares, but then I realized it was probably because I was looking in the adult bedding section. In the children’s section I found a comforter in PINK CAMOUFLAGE. Naturally I pounced on it. Now no one can sneak up on me when I’m sleeping! It is, after all, when I am at my most vulnerable.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COMMENTERS: If at any time you ever posted a comment here and it never showed up, it’s because it got lost in comment spam. I had like 10,000 of the freaking things and just mass deleted them all, so I’m sorry if I accidentally trashed any legitimate comments along with the rest. I’ve just enabled a special spam-busting plugin that will hopefully solve this problem, though.

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*Yes, that pretty much doubled the length of the ride.

****No one ever knows this song. Belinda Carlisle is probably best known for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and possibly “Circle in the Sand”; at least these are the two songs you can expect to find at every karaoke joint. They NEVER have “Summer Rain,” except in Cupertino. Lyrics here.

(As you can see from the link, this is a few days old–I bookmarked it to blog, but I was pretty busy all week with the IAP video game design workshop which, incidentally, my team won with our pitch for a Beatles game for the Wii.)

N.Y. lawmaker want weight standard for models

This is the first CNN story on the subject that I’ve seen (and there have been several now) that actually provides a point of reference for the Madrid ban’s BMI requirement of at least 18 by noting that the WHO considers a BMI under 18.5 to be “underweight.”

It’s interesting that this issue seems to be getting continued policy proposals and press–no doubt the anorexia death of a Brazilian model in November helped keep interest levels up. I am fairly pessimistic, however, about the prospect of any real change at all, and even if some of these proposals were actually codified into some form of law, I don’t think that’s the solution anyway.

The big problem is that, for some reason, to be “fashionable” requires the body of an alien. I have just as much trouble finding clothes that fit me well as a size 1-5 (there’s a lot of between-label variation in the smaller sizes for women) as I did when I was a size 12-14. Bring up the issue of clothes never being designed for one’s body type and you can have a lively conversation with almost any woman, regardless of what her body type might be.

So it’s not just that clearly some models are unhealthy; I’m willing to concede that some people just have bodies that tend towards the model ideal. My sister is 5′7″ and coltish. I myself have virtually no hips, not that I think this a good thing. But when the entire clothing industry focuses on a tiny percentage of female bodies that look NOTHING LIKE the majority of the female bodies out there, you have to wonder: What the fuck are they thinking?

Isn’t the idea here to get us to buy their fucking clothes? Which never fit us? So we just look for the ones that fit the least badly? Admittedly, we do need to wear SOMETHING, so as long as the whole fashion industry holds the line, it works.

So yeah, I’d like to see models who are clearly starving taken off the runways, but that’s a pretty small step. What I really want is to see some variation in bodies, because having a single figure, usually an extreme outlier in height and slenderness, be the “in” figure for the season seems kind of ridiculous in a world where we don’t have the technology to grow replacement bodies at will.

That’s right, fashion industry. Get me some serious sci fi body replacement and I’ll stop bitching. But until then, I’d like one damn pair of pants that fits.

‘Freshman 15′ really 5 or 7, but the gains don’t stop

Freshman 15 drops some pounds

Interestingly, the USA Today article names the schools that CNN says are “unidentified,” but you know, whatever.

It’s not totally clear to me how separate the studies of the two different student populations were, but it looks like the difference between a public institution in the Midwest and a private institution on the East Coast is not insignificant:

• Freshman-year gain at Purdue: 7.8 pounds for men and women, mostly in the first semester.

• December/January winter-break gain: men, 1.4 pounds; women stayed the same.

• Gain by end of sophomore year: men, 9.5 pounds; women, 9.2.

• Freshman-year gain at Brown: men, 5.6 pounds; women, 3.6, again mostly the first semester.

The Brown data doesn’t include a measurement from sophomore year, so it’s hard to say how big the ultimate difference between men and women there might be. It does seem like a four pound difference in women’s freshman year weight gain between Brown and Purdue is worth considering in more detail.

Of course, people in the Midwest are probably heavier than people on the coasts, and also I suspect people who attend public universities are heavier than people who go to private ones to begin with, and the difference is then probably exacerbated–the articles mention the high calorie/high fat nature of cafeteria food. Private universities probably offer more options, whereas I don’t think we even had a regular vegetarian entree in the cafeteria when I was attending my public Missouri undergraduate institution, and the ones we did get tended to be about 65% cheese.

I think the difference between male and female weight gain at Brown, assuming that it doesn’t disappear after the sophomore year, is pretty interesting. It’s not that surprising that in both cases men gain more, and that they keep gaining in the second semester; women are much more likely to freak out about weight gain and take steps to at least stall it. But why do women at a public school in the Midwest gain almost as much as men, while the difference at a private East Coast school is so pronounced?

One possible theory: women’s access to birth control in the Midwest may be much more restricted, meaning that many more women get on birth control only after starting university. This would contribute to weight gain. It’s not why I gained weight my freshman year, since I didn’t go on the Pill until I was a sophomore,* but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

There’s probably also some class/gender interaction going on here, wherein it is more important to upper class women’s professional success to present a specific kind of physical image. Upper class men just need to be tall.

The studies mention reduced physical activity in college, and I probably gained weight my freshman year largely because I stopped fencing; it wasn’t available at Truman. My case was a bit unusual, since my high school certainly didn’t offer fencing; I was actually doing it with the club at SEMO. In most cases, students probably have less access to school sports teams in college than they did in high school–actually, this might be a particular problem for women, although I don’t know.

The articles put a lot of the blame on too much access to bad food, which is fair in some respects, although I think they don’t put ENOUGH of the blame on the cafeterias that make eating healthy so difficult–if a lackluster salad bar is the only offering that doesn’t have 15 grams of fat in it, how long are students supposed to choke down limp spinach for their health? On the other hand, it is true that when I was in high school, my parents would have frowned upon me leaving the house at 2 am every other night to go to Taco Bell with my boyfriend.

The articles really emphasize the lack of supervision–college students don’t have anyone to tell them not to eat fries with every meal, and they go crazy! So the real question is, does this happen whenever people move out of their parents’ house? What about the people who move out and get a job without going to college? Do they gain weight, too?

They make less than people with college degrees, and being lower income is associated with being overweight. It would be interesting to see, however, since we’re blaming leaving the nest for weight gain in college students, if people who are lower income have the same kind of weight change patterns as the researchers found in these college students. I would guess not.

Of course, that brings up the issue of what kids get fed in primary and secondary public schools…

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*It is probably why I gained more weight my sophomore year.

As Marc has already reported, a Madrid fashion show has banned participation by models whose BMIs are below 18. The “normal weight” range is considered to be 18.5-24.9; a person with a BMI below 18.5 is classified as “underweight.”

(You can calculate BMI here.)

The BMI measure, as many people already know, has problems, but they are mostly associated with identifying healthy individuals as overweight because they have above average muscle mass. To put this in perspective, my BMI is 21.8 (if I claim to be 5′3″, which is stretching it a bit, but I also have 17.3% body fat, so I am probably one of those people whose BMI is higher than it really ought to be anyway). In order to have a BMI below 18, I would have to weigh 101 pounds, which I think might place me in the NEGATIVE BOSOM category. It wouldn’t be pretty, that’s for damn sure.

Of course, the fashion industry is deeply concerned about this attack on “gazelle-like” models and their own personal freedoms:

Organizers say they want to project an image of beauty and health, rather than a waif-like, or heroin chic look.

But Cathy Gould, of New York’s Elite modeling agency, said the fashion industry was being used as a scapegoat for illnesses like anorexia and bulimia.

“I think its outrageous, I understand they want to set this tone of healthy beautiful women, but what about discrimination against the model and what about the freedom of the designer,” said Gould, Elite’s North America director, adding that the move could harm careers of naturally “gazelle-like” models.

First of all, bitch, PLEASE. “Gazelle-like”? Me at 101 pounds wouldn’t be “gazelle-like,” unless we’re talking some kind of walking dead horror movie zombie gazelle skeleton haunting the post-apocalypse.

And “the freedom of the designer”? The freedom to do what, exactly? Design clothes that only fit 1.0% of the human female population? Either get a real job or design me some fucking pants that FIT, asshat.

The above quote, incidentally, I pulled from the CNN article, which as I noticed when it ran, does not provide the actual BMI cut-off for the show, reporting only that 30% of the models initially booked for the show fell below it. I’m a little surprised that the number isn’t higher, but models probably do lift a few weights. Given that the cut-off is so low,* I find CNN’s failure to report it pretty weasel-some, but not, unfortunately, surprising. This country is insane about weight.

For instance: I was talking to a friend of mine last night. We’ll call her S. S.’s younger sister has lost a huge amount of weight in the past year–she went from a size 22 to a size 11. The only problem is, the younger sister has implemented absolutely no lifestyle changes that would account for the loss: she never exercises and eats junk, and lots of it. This is nothing new, but it’s exactly what she was doing before the weight started mysteriously coming off. She’s not even in a situation where she’s walking more than she was previously.

Now, when I lost about 45 pounds in five months by working out six times a week** and carefully monitoring my calorie intake, there were people in my social circle who suggested to others that I had developed an eating disorder. I was constantly fielding queries about whether or not I was eating enough. So you’d think losing 11 sizes in a year for no discernable reason at all would definitely raise some red flags, right?

Aside from their grandmother, S. is the only member of their immediate family who thinks that this is cause for concern. Her younger sister refuses to see a doctor; S. is afraid this is because the younger sister got a boyfriend after losing a lot of the weight, and associates him with the weight loss, which is probably true, but can’t account for the rest of the family’s willful blindness–although of course the root issue is the same: people are so convinced that Being Skinny is the right and MORAL state of being that they naturally associate it with happiness and success in romance and all other areas of life, and a 19-year-old girl’s parents don’t see any problem with her losing HALF A PERSON in a year doing NOTHING. Hey, weight loss! Hooray!

So excuse me if I’m not too worried about public sentiment turning against the gazelle girls any time soon.

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*Especially when you consider what the “overweight” and “obese” lines are–before I went on Online Weight Watchers, I was over the 30.0 cut-off for obesity.

**And I’d been working out for the seven months prior, which is probably why the weight came off so fast–I’d built up substantial muscle mass lifting weights, and muscle burns more calories.

Right before I took the social psych prelim last month, I read a really interesting article in the June issue of Social Psychology Quarterly by Ellen Granberg about weight loss maintenance, incorporating Identity Control Theory, possible selves, and the narrative of self.* I don’t remember if I actually got to cite it on the prelim, but it was one of the few things that I actually enjoyed reading in my frantic whirlwind of studying.

Of course weight loss maintenance is something that holds particular significance for me, but I also thought that she synthesized the theories really well–basically, the idea is that losing weight is a process of identity change for most people who embark on the project, but that cultural narratives about what weight loss means do a lot to undermine the maintenance of the new, lower weight. Because we’re taught that losing weight will completely remake our lives, it’s very difficult to feel like we’ve “succeeded” when we do manage to lose weight and subsequently do not become perfect princess rock stars.

Possible selves are pretty self-explanatory; they can serve as motivators when we imagine ourselves actually inhabiting them, either positively (if I lose weight I will be a happy skinny person) or negatively (if I don’t lose weight I will be a miserable slug-like creature). Identity Control Theory argues that people seek out self-verifying feedback, and if they don’t get it, they may adjust either their behavior or their self-concept, with the latter usually being a last resort if the former doesn’t work. Granberg suggests that self-concept change may be a more frequently used strategy, however, in situations where one is adopting a new identity.

She argues that the people who are most successful at keeping weight off are those who either start out with domain-specific expectations about their skinnier possible self (”My cholesterol will go down”; “I will be able to ride my bike faster and longer”), or who are at least able to change/narrow their skinnier-self-concept if they start out thinking that they will experience a total extreme make-over of self by losing weight. People who can’t give up that construction of the skinnier self are more likely to become discouraged by the continued lack of confirmatory feedback and may end up reverting to old bad habits and regaining weight–because keeping weight off is a project, too, and one that doesn’t produce dramatic results like losing it did. If you feel like you’re working hard to maintain a self that’s really a disappointment–because you lost weight but you’re still not a perfect princess rock star–it’s not surprising that you might gradually become less dedicated to the work necessary to maintain weight loss.

This is definitely something that I find myself thinking about sometimes, although when I started working on losing weight, I think I was fairly realistic about what I wanted to attain; I just didn’t want to feel actively bad about my body anymore. But it’s hard to totally escape that mainstream cultural narrative of the fat ugly duckling becoming the thin beautiful swan, the plot of every other teen movie ever, even when you’re aware of it. It’s hard not to catch yourself thinking, when things get really shitty, I thought everything was supposed to be better now.

Like most psychological processes, I guess it’s just a matter of degree. No one is issue-free, and it probably doesn’t help that nobody’s body seems to fit the clothing designer ideal. My problem used to be my chest being too big for things; now it’s my shoulders, which are apparently freakishly broad in relation to the rest of me, and my butt, which isn’t there. But overall I feel pretty good about my body, and I still feel invested in maintaining the ground I’ve gained in the past year and a half.

Besides, while I know that weight loss will not fix everything that has ever gone wrong in my life, I’m pretty sure that these shoes will:

Um. Amazon is having a blow-out shoe sale.** Spend $80 or more and get free shipping (even for stuff that normally isn’t eligible, I think) and $20 off (that only works once, in case you were wondering).

WeightWatchers and other weight loss programs frequently suggest buying shoes as a reward for losing weight because, in addition to presenting an obviously superior alternative to, say, celebratory eating, your shoe size is much more resistant to change than your pants size. This is true, but I still lost about a half shoe-size last year, too. And yet, thanks to my incredibly well-muscled calves, buying any boots that go up much higher than those remains an ordeal. It’s always something.

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*Full citation: Granberg, Ellen. “‘Is That All There Is?’ Possible Selves, Self-Change, and Weight Loss.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69.2 (June 2006): 109-126.

**That link goes to the women’s section, because there doesn’t seem to be a link for the top level, and I suspect that most people who will be interested in this sale will be primarily interested in women’s shoes. But men’s and children’s are on sale, too.

So this weekend, while visiting friends in Kirksville, I woke up way earlier than I had any right to on Saturday, and everyone else was still asleep because we’d spent the night before partying until practically dawn at the Prism drag show.

So naturally, I logged onto City of Heroes. That’s basically why I took my laptop to Kirksville (I also used it to verify that yes, the south McDonald’s has wireless internet in addition to their damaged DDR machine). My primary server (Pinnacle) was having issues, so I decided to create a tanker character on Justice–most of my toons are blasters and defenders, and I wanted to see what it was like to play a tanker.

So I create a tanker. She’s kind of scantily clad, although that’s justified in the backstory–I chose “magic” as her origin and then wrote up that she was the former “personal plaything” (obscenity is disabled in chat on CoH by default; I was afraid “sex toy” in my profile might cause problems) of a currently MIA sorceress, so that it’s her status as a magical construct that grants her invulnerability and super strength:

So there she is. You get the idea. It is important to note that this character is IN NO WAY remarkable for her skankiness on CoH. All you see everywhere on CoH is people running around in costumes like that, half the time.

Anyway, I end up going to bed later than other people, too, so I log on with her again. I’m running around, enjoying my skanky bad self, pummeling the shit out of muggers to level up. And a male character shows up, and starts bumping into my avatar–repeatedly, bumping into me, not saying anything, just crashing into me over and over. I say, “Can I help you?” Snippy, but allowing for the possibility that someone isn’t too good with the controls. I walk out of the immediate area.

I’m killing more muggers. And the guy is back–he’s circling me and dodging in and out of my field of view, not attacking my targets, just getting right up in my grill. I finish off my targets and say, “Get lost.” I leave the area again.

I’m killing more muggers. The guy is back, and this time he’s brought a friend, also a male toon. They’re both doing it now, dodging around, bumping into me, circling me, etc. I finish off my muggers.

I send the first guy a private tell: “I don’t know what you want, but I have no problem reporting you for harassment.”

Bam! Both of them are SO gone. The guy sends me a tell back, the first either of them has spoken: “just joking around”

I send him a reply: “Obviously I’m not laughing. Good night.”

I should note here that these two male toons were somewhere between level 15 and level 25; you can tell because they had adjectives before their names, but only one (you get a second at level 25). My toon was level 2 or 3 at the time. So it’s not JUST a matter of two male toons harassing a female toon (in an environment where it is important to note that there is a LOT of gender-swapping). It’s also two at least somewhat experienced players hassling someone who MIGHT not be an experienced player, although in CoH, most people seem to have quite a few alts and there are lots of people with a level 50 who also have some new toons.

And the way I handled the situation–an effective way, following the failure of the general command to go away and stop bothering me–was not to say anything about the morality of their behavior per se, except to define it in the term “harrassment,” which more importantly defined their behavior as not just bad but actionable. Demonstrating competence with the game and its regulations was how I got them to stop hassling my low-level female toon. Don’t get me wrong, the whole situation seemed, to me, obviously gendered–but it’s hard to untangle that from the issues of game experience that also were in play.

I’m still kind of mad about it. And I wonder how other players would have handled it, and if in general being male or female would influence what a person did, and if having that happen when you WERE actually an inexperienced player would make you less likely to want to keep playing. I am pretty much entirely certain that the male toons who were bothering me did in fact belong to male players. I wonder if this kind of blatantly sexual harrassment is treated differently by game authorities than name-calling etc., and how common it is (not uncommon, I’m guessing).

And I really wonder how anyone can claim that gender doesn’t matter in MMOGs, as some do. Because even in a game where there seems to be a very low certainty about any female toon actually belonging to a female player, stuff like this happens.

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Coming soon: Travis discovers that the chat obscenity filter scrambles “gay.”