Blow Your Stack Saturday: Welcome to Whitewashed Utopia

 

Image by wolfgang Lützgendorf from Pixabay

Today's prompt from 52 Weeks of Writing was "hey, Ornery, it's Blow Your Stack Saturday! Is there anything you want to bitch about?"

Okay, that was my interpretation of today's prompt, and yes, there is.

I recently fell down the syrupy Hallmark channel rabbit hole and have been watching Cedar Cove. Like so many romantic visions of television utopia, this one has a seedy underbelly. By seedy underbelly, I don't mean that Walter White has set up a meth lab or there is a prostitution ring. I mean that behind the perfect facade of perfect people in a perfect town there is some perfectly putrid prejudice that nobody wants you to notice.

Cedar Cove is the whitest place anywhere. I have not seen a single non-white person even in passing. Everyone is straight and attractive by Hollywood standards. Look all you want, you will see none of those unsightly disabled or fat people. Disabled people simply don't exist and fat people are a bugbear used to scare the Perfectly Pretty Able-Bodied White Straight populace into earning their eating-disordered binges through orthorexia.

Shows like Cedar Cove are the television equivalent of the ladies' magazines you see at the checkout stand in the grocery store. These initially appear to be innocuous fluff but they are actually fronts for insidious attitudes designed to keep impressionable women buying products to keep themselves looking impossibly young and girlishly thin. Do you want to eat a slice of that delicious cake on the cover? Better get ready to force yourself to vomit, take a few laxatives, and engage in a few hours of punishing exercise, you slovenly oinker!

The photoshopped cover models for such magazines have no lines on their faces, no stretch marks on their bodies, and not an ounce of fat. Any model deemed too dark-complexioned has their skin tone lightened. These magazines are chock full of "inspiring" stories of women who lost half their body weight on the latest fad diet. Never mind if you have to cut out entire nutrient groups on these diets and never mind that weight reduction dieting only works long term in approximately five percent of dieters. You don't want to be a bad fatty and not try yet again, do you?

I used to spend a fortune on these dreadful magazines hoping that I was going to finally find THE DIET that was going to work permanently so I didn't have to be ugly anymore. Approximately twelve years ago I realized that the messages these magazines promote are even uglier than I am. I raise my middle finger to the beauty, diet, and fashion industries. Fuck a whole lot of that shit. 

Spirit of the Universe, please help me accept myself as I am. Please help me to keep making improvements that will truly benefit me rather than trying to fit someone else's idea of what I'm supposed to be. Amen.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Fat and Ornery

Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors

Hangry isn't having it.

Free use image from Pixabay

Fabulous selfie of my actual middle finger by me.

You can't touch this.

It's not like I really care that much, it's just that I know that most people are cunts.

Resource Books:

52 Weeks of Writing

https://amzn.to/33sESxd

Self-Help Sucks

https://amzn.to/3sCWA9q

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

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Come As You Are Party: An Open Letter to Anderson Cooper

 

Letters I’ve Written I: Anderson Cooper

8 November 2020

12:34 PM

Dear Mr. Cooper,

When you said these words:

“That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world. And we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over."

I saw fit to light you up because that is some rank-ass bullshit.

tRump is an odious human being. His size is not what makes him an odious human being. That fault lies in his behavior.

You have since issued an apology for those remarks, because, as you said, “that is not the person that I really want to be.”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/anderson-cooper-expresses-regret-comparing-085928301.html

I genuinely hope that it is not, Sir, because there are plenty of those kinds of people, and they do untold harm to innocent individuals whose only “crime” is not measuring up to modern society’s arbitrary standards of attractiveness.

I am a large person with multiple health issues, including mobility issues. I move slowly. If I were to fall on my back in the hot sun, I might very well resemble “an obese turtle flailing around on her back in the hot sun, wondering if her time is over.”

Is it really okay for you to ridicule people like me?

I rather wonder if people were only incensed by tRump’s mocking of the disabled reporter because the man is slim. Were he heavy, how many of you would have said, “yeah, but tRump does have a point—look how fat he is!”

I feel that it is as if you and I come from different planets, Mr. Cooper.

You are wealthy, able-bodied, and most people looking at you would consider you handsome.

My earnings put me below poverty level. I have multiple disabilities, and I am considered ugly. Doubly so because I am heavy.

Fat is not the worst thing that a person can be, and that is what your initial statement implies.

Fat is not a hallmark of laziness, slovenliness, or any other negative thing. It is a neutral state. Why should people be treated abominably because they have a surplus of adipose tissue?

You will never know what it is to have people yelling at you that you are “eating yourself into an early grave,” even though your food intake is no more than that of your smaller counterparts.

You will never know what it is to have people tell you that you “just need to exercise more” as if you could just turn your mobility, pain, and weakness off.

You will never know what it is to realize that the only reason any time a man is propositioning you is because he thinks you’re desperate enough to have sex with anybody who asks, or because he’s doing so on a dare.

You will never know what it is to have people not want to hire you because they assume that fat people are “always taking time off” because of their poor health. I am unable to work at a regular job anymore, but I rarely called in sick during the last twelve years of my working life. I did call in sick a lot previously, but it was not because I was fat. It was because I had untreated PTSD and nowhere to turn for help.

While everyone was patting you on the back for your “obese turtle” comment, I was seething.

You see, I may be a mean old bitch who doesn’t give a rip what a rich pretty boy news anchor or his fans think of me now, but I still struggle with the eating disorder that onset when I was twelve years old because I was terrified of getting fat. I did everything I could not to get fat. I exercised obsessively. I missed a lot of moments with my son when he was little because I was at the gym for up to five hours a day trying to get ridiculously thin.

That gym put up “motivational” pictures of celebrities talking about how they were up to a “gargantuan 132 pounds” before they obsessively dieted and exercised themselves down to “a slim 102,” or something equally unsustainable.

I weighed a good deal more than 132 pounds. If that was gargantuan, what the hell was I?

I tried to hate myself thin for 33 years, Mr. Cooper. It didn’t work. You see, my endocrine system conspired against me, starting with my thyroid, which fried itself when I was in my early teens.

I worked for many years in very physical jobs taking care of people or serving food and drinks while not taking care of myself.

My working life mostly ended in March 2017. I was working as a home health nurse caring for medically fragile pediatric patients. I was very, very sick with a bad respiratory infection, but the coordinator from the agency that I worked for insisted that I go to work because I had contracted the infection from the patient that I was working with so it was reasoned that I could not re-infect that patient.

My diabetes was getting worse. I had not yet started using insulin. My coordinator was always telling me that they were going to get rid of the other nurse on the case, who had lupus, and replace her with me, because she was always calling in. I didn’t want them to do that.

During the night, I fell into a very deep sleep. I do not remember doing so. I would occasionally doze lightly for brief periods of times during a night shift, but I was easily roused. That was not the case on this occasion. The last time I looked at the clock on my laptop, it was 4:00.

I woke from complete oblivion to see the patient’s father sitting on the edge of the patient’s bed glaring at me. It was 4:20 A.M. I gathered my things and left. I was fired, which I expected would happen. The patient’s mother lied and told the agency that I had been ordered to leave. That is not what happened. The patient’s father told me that I could finish the shift. I said that I did not think that would be a good idea and I terminated the shift of my own accord.

At this point, I think that I may have lupus because of my weakness and fatigue and the redness across my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. It is like pulling teeth to get tested.

I tried to work in a long-term care situation after my last case ended with a second homecare agency where I had been working. I only lasted one night. I felt like I was going to pass out and I was confused by tasks that I had handled easily during my clinicals, such as med passes and treatments. The nursing staff was running from the time they arrived and never had time for breaks. Because of my diabetes, I needed to be able to take breaks to check my blood sugar and eat. This was not possible.

Mr. Cooper, it is not people like Donald tRump who get hurt when people like you make cracks like the “obese turtle” remark. It is people like me.

Seeing everyone laughing because someone like you implied that fat is the worst thing that a person can be, and fat people are deserving of derision and scorn is very painful.

My life is already difficult enough.

I try to take daily walks through the little town where I live using my upright walker so I can walk for longer distances than I would be able to if I were compensating for my spine problems. It is one of the poorest towns in the state of Colorado. I would not want to live anywhere else. I do not want to return to the Denver area. I want this to be where I live for the rest of my life. Which, by the way, may be longer than you expect, given my horrible, horrible fatness.

My very fat great grandmother, who had obvious endocrine problems, lived to be 79. It was not any “disease of obesity” that killed her. It was acute myelogenous leukemia, a disease that kills people of all sizes. In fact, she lasted a good deal longer than a thin person would have. She went from 300 pounds to 95 pounds in the space of a year. Then she died.

But hey, at least she cut a svelte figure in her casket, am I right? She was no longer an obese turtle in the sun deserving of the scorn and ridicule of elite news anchors and their cronies.

Mr. Cooper, I hope that you mean it when you say that you don’t want to be the guy who made the “obese turtle” remark. I was extremely disappointed when that guy surfaced, because, prior to that moment, I did not think that you were him.

I’m willing to forgive, but I never forget. I have my eye on you.

Acknowledgments

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Fat Friday: A Big Fat Fuck You to Anderson Cooper

I did not want to write about this shit today. 

I wanted to write about my characters finding a grim grimoire and all the ghoulish fun that comes with that sort of thing. Instead, I am writing about a shitty, juvenile jab that privileged millionaire asshole anchor Anderson Cooper made about trump resembling "an obese turtle flailing on its back."

If you can't see why this is a really fucking shitty thing to say, sit back, shut up, and let your old Aunt Cie explain this shit to you.

Anderson Cooper just used heavy people--a marginalized group--to insult an odious politician. His insult implies that trump's size is the worst thing about trump. Not trump's policies, not trump's narcissistic behavior, not trump's misogyny, racism, or belittling of disabled people. His fucking size. 

Well, that's a pretty god damn stupid thing to say, but there are plenty of goddamn fools patting Cooper on the back as if the fucker just discovered a goddamn cure for cancer.

I saw some gob-smackingly stupid shit from people trying to excuse Cooper's juvenile jab. Take this bit, for instance.

Colt here excuses using the word "obese" because it's a medical term and trump is, at least according to Colt, "obese."

As I said, "obese" is a medical slur. Its use others large patients and minimizes their concerns. When I worked as a nurse, if a patient was heavy, "obese" was one of the first things that got written on their chart. Doctors looked at this shitty diagnosis and felt that this patient did not need to be taken seriously. Clearly, they had made a "lifestyle choice" to "eat themselves into this condition." All they needed to do is lose weight and everything will be fine. Also, this patient can be treated in a subhuman fashion and psychologically abused with impunity.

You can ask Ellen Maud Bennett how that advice worked out for her.

Oh, wait, no you can't. Because she's dead. Since doctors didn't take her complaints about feeling poorly seriously the multiple times that she made them and instead told her that she would feel better if she lost weight, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer too late to save her life.

Ovarian cancer is very treatable if caught in the early stages.

These doctors are complicit in Ellen's death.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/30/canada-ellen-maud-bennett-obituary-fat-shaming

A large body type is rarely the simple result of "calories in, calories out." DNA is the biggest factor in determining a person's body type, but many medical conditions as well as medications play a role as well. Even if being heavy were always the result of a person massively overeating, using such people as the butt of jokes is still a shit thing to do. 

Do you suppose that someone who is a chronic binge eater is happy, and do you really suppose that belittling them will shame them into changing their ways? Do you truly think that your bullying will lead to your target becoming slim and happy and an acceptable member of society, adding to the roster of people that you want to fuck? After all, anyone whom you do not deem fuckable is clearly that way just to piss you off since the world totally revolves around you.

Just admit it. The idea that fat people should be treated with basic decency, including not using them as an illustration of The Worst Thing A Person Can Be, upsets you because you WANT someone that you can scapegoat and be vile to with impunity. Your spirit is so mean and your life such a drag that you must have someone you can shit on in order to prop yourself up.

Now, let's address this foolishness.

"He absolutely deserves to be called the worst things on the planet.

Being obese is not one of the worst things on the planet. If you think that it is, you're part of the problem."

Yeah, but Alexi, Anderson Cooper just implied that it was. That was his big hilarious gotcha. Der Trumpenfuhrer is an obese turtle flailing around on it's back! Hurr hurr hurr! Me so funny! Try again, Alexi.

In closing, Anderson Cooper can go fuck himself, and if you think what he said is the sickest sick burn ever and that he totally deserves a Pulitzer prize for that majorly awesome gotcha, you need to take a hard look at yourself.

Ornery Owl is displeased

Free use image from Pixabay

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Fat Friday: Thoughts from an Irritating Overweight Woman

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

As my fan club of -666 readers knows, I review books for a living, such as it is.

I was presented with a book to possibly review, and was, initially, excited. It was a collection of short stories about a group of female friends.

The short story is an undervalued art and female friendships are an undervalued treasure. I was interested in reading this until I saw one of the characters described by another reviewer as "an irritating overweight woman."

The comment about the "irritating overweight woman" gave me pause. Why is her weight such a determining factor in her characterization? Many authors tend to write large people in a negative light. As a person who fights with my abusive partner ED (Eating Disorder) constantly, I don't really need to read works that vilify people who look like me. It's a shame because a good short story collection about female friendship sounded like just the ticket.

I decided to give the book a hard pass.

Authors (like society as a whole) love to scapegoat, stereotype, and vilify large people. I have enough problems wrestling with ED on a daily basis. I don't really need to read fiction putting down people who look like me yet again. ED does that quite often enough.

Fat and Ornery

Image copyright Open Clipart Vectors

Sly and Snarky

Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com

Fat Friday #16 + Real Cie Reviews: Breakwater

Genre: Fantasy Romance

Rating: Four out of Five Stars

Disclosure:
I received a free promotional copy of this book for review purposes.
If the book is purchased through the featured link, I earn a small commission.
This review appears on Amazon, Goodreads, and my review and writing blog, Horror Harridans Writing Sisterhood.

Breakwater is the second book in Errin Stevens’ Mer Chronicles series. Errin’s impressive storytelling skills make this book a fantastic, can’t-put-it-down read. Errin excels at world-building and character creation, and I really enjoyed getting to know more about the Sirens’ society. Breakwater deeper into the relationship between sirens and humans as well as into the Sirens’ archaic and sometimes draconian politics.

Breakwater offers plenty of mystery, intrigue, and surprises. I enjoyed learning more about some of the secondary characters. I had an affinity for Simon. As a “black sheep” in a Catholic family with strict ideas about right, wrong, and an individual’s “correct” role in life, I related to Simon’s distress at feeling that he was letting his family and community down as well as his resentment at being told what to do.

A startling revelation by Seneca throws the Blake family’s stable lives into upheaval, and a new, power-hungry antagonist is revealed, complete with nefarious ideals and a delightfully wicked demeanor. Duncan is a villain that readers will love to hate.

For those who enjoy intensity in their romance, Breakwater delivers. For my own part, I prefer the political intrigue aspect and find the romance to venture too far in the overly possessive direction. Although I like the sirens and found myself particularly resonating with Simon and his internal conflict, I find the male sirens’ interactions with human women controlling and coercive, more like a vampire compelling his victim than a would-be lover courting the object of his affections. Rather than cheering for the woman in the pair to get her man, I find myself thinking: “eek, no, run away!”

I really like Errin’s female characters, who are self-assured, driven, competent women. They are well-rounded, well-written, and realistic. Unfortunately, too much of their energy is spent dreaming of catching a man and lamenting not having a man to complete them.

Overall, the female characters are companionable and supportive of one another rather than being backstabbing and bitchy, a trope which is entertaining if one is watching reruns of Dynasty but tiresome otherwise. The women truly care about one another and embody what sisterhood means.

Breakwater is an exciting and inspiring story, and I truly wish I could give it five stars.

The main thing that stops me from doing so is the scene between the women at Sylvia’s café, where they discuss being “fat” (translate: pregnant), not wanting to “look like a beluga,” and other such unfortunate diatribe regarding any physique which is not slender and toned.

As a person who became bulimic at twelve due to fear of becoming fat, who developed a myriad of endocrine disorders which sealed the deal that I would become fat regardless of how much I restricted my food intake and engaged in orthorexia, and who spent the next 33 years trying to hate myself thin, I am well aware that this type of conversation takes place between millions of women every day. Women bond over size-shaming self-deprecation rather than encouraging one another regarding traits and skills unrelated to their physical appearance. The conversation is realistic, and it is horrible.

As a genuine, actual, bona fide fat person who fights to be at peace with my body multiple times a day every day, I can tell you that reading or hearing such a conversation is hurtful. What these conversations sound like to me is: “being fat is the very worst thing a person can possibly be. Being fat is ugly, disgusting, undesirable. Being YOU is the very worst thing a person could possibly be. I would do anything not to be like you.”

Writers, your larger readers, like all your readers, are looking for a moment of escape, not to be reminded that people see us as The Very Worst Thing A Person Can Possibly Be. We realize that we are unlikely to be portrayed as heroic and/or desirable in most stories but would appreciate not being represented as Things That Shouldn’t Be. Eating disorders are rampant. Let’s not waste our wonderful female characters reinforcing diet culture. Let’s let them be the amazing badasses they are, regardless of their size.

My other wish is that everyone would ditch the phrase “off their meds” immediately. Most people who live with mental health issues are not dangerous and do not stand out in any way. People with mental health issues tend to suffer in silence because of the unfortunate stigma surrounding mental illness. Nobody should be made to feel ashamed of whatever “meds” they take, whether their meds are for strictly physical or psychiatric conditions.

With those bones being picked, I rate Breakwater an overall compelling and well-written read and look forward to the next book in the series.

~Cie~

Fat Friday #10: A Big Fat Fuck You to Fatphobic Stephen Moffat

Dear Stephen Moffat,

Your retconning fuckery and pulling plot twists out of your ass at the last second are bad enough, but your stupid, immature fatphobia is the worst. How was it necessary for Bill to say that she suddenly realized that the young woman she'd been giving extra chips to in the food line because she liked her was fat, so now she couldn't possibly find her attractive anymore.

When lameass fat jokes are all you've got, it means that:

A)You're a douchebag 

and

B) You're unoriginal as all fuck.

In closing, see the finger, you halfassed hack.

Love,

Cie the Fat Ugly Old Bitch From Your Nightmares