#body privilege

For my gender portfolio #5, I want to talk about my struggle in Japan related to clothes. In Japan, many clothing stores, especially women's clothing stores, only sell one size of clothes, which they call "free-size." "Free size" is not what a lot of people think in English. It means they only have that size, and it does not mean that size is meant to fit most people with various body shapes. I HATE "free size" clothes in Japan because whenever I find clothes I like, it does not fit me if they're "free size." They are almost always too small for me so it is quite difficult for me to find clothes that I like and that fit me. I am pretty sure I am not the only one who struggles with that system because even though a lot of Japanese women are skinny, not all the women and body shapes vary from person to person.

I believe this stupid system is a big issue because it contributes to the concept of body privilege and promotes people's judgmental thinking towards other people's body shapes. When I went to a clothing store and told a clerk that I wanted to try some clothes on, she said, "These are free-size clothes." It sounded like she was telling me that you are not slim enough for those clothes to fit me. Even though she might have just wanted to tell me the size variation of the clothes, I got uncomfortable when she told me that. I cannot count how many times I had to give up buying clothes because of the "free-size" system.

This promotes a toxic way of thinking in people's heads that they have to be slim to be normal and promotes people's judgment towards other people. In addition, it contributes to the concept of body privilege. Body privilege is an invisible package of unearned assets that thin individuals can take for granted as they navigate public space in their daily lives.

Everyone's body shape is different, and the size variation of clothes should not limit people's freedom to buy and wear what they want.

There was a radio commercial around the holidays that really pissed me off.  I don't even remember what dealership or brand it was for, but it actually talked about not worrying if the payment for a new car was a little out of budget, because then you'd have less money to spend on food and you would lose weight, so that (and yes they actually said this) "You could put your new body in your new car"  -Seriously?  "Buying our overpriced cars is more important than being able to afford to eat properly" - THAT's your selling point?  ...and that's with out even getting into the using the idea of getting a 'thin' body to sell cars.  Not even a weight loss program, or exercise equipment or clothing - cars.  Nah - our society isn't obsessed with looking a certain way, it doesn't place a higher value on achieving a specified look than it does on having necessities like, oh food. (/sarcasm)

There's also an article floating around written by a woman who lost something like 100lbs - that talks about how complete strangers treat her so much differently at the lower weight then they did at the higher weight.  She writes at length about how people open doors for her, smile and make eye contact and well, act like normal courteous people are supposed to, but that they didn't before she lost the weight.  She mentions that this isn't fair, that the marginalization of an entire population for any reason isn't right - but then she goes on to say how much she likes the attention - how she enjoys using it to her advantage now.   - there's lots of chat about how great it is to read an article that acknowledges this different attitude, and I'm starting to think that I'm the only one who found the article disgusting and not at all uplifting.  The article is written with a not so subtle undercurrent of "It's not fair the way fat people are treated, and the solution is to do this amazing juice fast/vegan eating thing that I did and then you too can be one of the privileged"  - The solution to an injustice of any sort is not to make the population who's been plagued by it go away, but to correct the attitude that fosters the injustice.  Even beyond that, it seems to me that someone who's experienced it, and who is now in a position to be part of the 'ruling class' could do a tremendous amount to be heard regarding the problem, rather then wasting decent writing to reinforce the disparity in attitude and treatment.

I feel one of my "actual science" rants coming on.....

Everyone and their freaking insurance agent is talking about the BMI measurement as though it's some brilliant calculation that can illustrate clearly how healthy an individual is.  One of the things that makes me bug-nuts about this current popular chatter is that most people have little to no actual understanding of what BMI is, but it's discussed like it's some holy number.  So, I'm going to talk about this.

BMI stands for Body Mass Index, and it was invented in the 1800’s by a Belgian intelectual named Adolphe Quetelet who was doing social research on what the “average man” looked like.  His intent with this number was to get a snapshot average of body types across large numbers of people in a population.  It is not designed to look at differences, or even at individuals.  Then in 1972 a professor and researcher named Ancel Keys published a paper called “Indices of Relative Weight and Obesity.” In it, he examined height-weight formulas and he made the determination that Quetelet’s was the best. Keys also gave Quetelet’s formula the name “body mass index” and actually warned in his paper against using BMI for individuals diagnoses, since the equation ignores a lot of other variables.

These days, most folks go to one of the online BMI Calculators and plug their height and weight into it, and voila, magic number.  But there is actually a mathematical formula behind that magic.  The formula was originally developed in metric units and is: (Weight in Kilograms / (Height in Meters x Height in Meters)) and more recently has been converted into English units: ((Weight in Pounds / ( Height in inches x Height in inches)) x 703).  As you can see, the formula doesn't take into account anything like your body frame, the amount of muscle on your body, the density of your bones, how you carry your weight, whether you exercise etc... Heck, it doesn't even take gender into account, and male and female bodies are designed to include vastly different amounts of fat.  All the things that Keys warned about it not taking into account.

So why the heck is it being used so often as a measurement for health these days?  Insurance companies. Seriously.  In the early 1900’s, motivated by their bottom line, life insurance companies started doing studies of BMI in an effort to show that overweight people were more likely to have health problems and die earlier, this way they had official looking numbers to show their policy holders, to justify raising premiums and denying claims.  OK, but that doesn't really explain why so many doctors use it. While that began with the influence by insurance companies to provide this magic number on patients, according to the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention", it’s primarily used in the medical field because its easier and less expensive than better alternatives.  SERIOUSLY.  Easier and less expensive. (you can see those words on their very own website here: http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/adult_bmi/index.html#Why)

Our physical well being as a society, our individual self images in many cases (and therefor our mental health) is being significantly harmed by the misplaced dependance on BMI as a measurement for health.  It's being used as a reason to deny health coverage, or to price it so that individuals have no choice but to choose inferior health coverage, it's result is being used as a determining factor in diagnosis, and quite frankly it's lazy, ineffective healthcare.

It doesn't only harm those of us who's BMI would place us in the "overweight" or even "underweight" category.  We've become so dependent on classifying people's health based on their BMI number that when someone who's BMI is in the normal range presents with symptoms like body pain, tests are often never even considered for illnesses that have been classified as obesity diseases.  Like my neighbor: young, active, normal range BMI. Who over a year's worth of doctors visits got a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia and then one night ended up in the ER having her chest cracked to drain massive amounts of fluid from around her heart. - they never even considered running any of those sorts of tests because her BMI didn't indicate it to be necessary. Which is the explaination her doctors actually gave to her furious and freaked out husband.

Body Privilege, which is defined as "the privilege of having a body which meets the current social definition of beauty", is a concept that I think really needs talking about. I'm seeing people on both sides of this issue that lack understanding of what this means to individuals on the other side, and that's counter productive to everyone.

At first glance at the concept of body privilege, one might think "so what?". That body over there there meets the current socially accepted standards for beauty - lucky them, and this one over here doesn't, end of story.  But the repercussions of this difference is further reaching than that.  There is significant evidence (both anecdotal and scientific) that reveals a society that is geared in a physical way to accommodate individuals that meet that standard, and exclude individuals that don't.  This is the place where it becomes an issue that outreaches the "so look the other way if you don't like it" argument.  When I talk about excluding folks, I'm not just talking about individuals who are extremely outside this "standard" - I'm talking about every day folks like myself, (for reference I wear a women's size 20 dress) who have trouble navigating isles in stores, or going through turnstiles at the subway, or sitting in a chair with arms in a public place, or very thin individuals who can't tighten a safety belt enough to make it worthwhile, or folks with long legs who can't sit in the passenger seat of a car because their knees press painfully against the dash.  -all things that people have to do on a daily basis in order to simply live their lives.  If those things are never an issue for you, if you never have to dedicate one ounce of thought to whether those types of things will happen to you - then you're, technically speaking, one of the "body privileged".  All of which means that falling outside of that body privilege category can have impact of a physical and psychological nature on all aspects of every day life. OK - now that we've identified on a more visceral level what the term means, let's talk about this lack of understanding that I'm seeing.

Currently there is a huge push in the fat acceptance movement to identify all those types of things that the body privileged alone enjoy.  I totally get why that's going on, without identifying things that are unjust we can't create change.  However I think that there is something that happens sometimes in a process like this, in a process where there is a huge emotional connection to the differences.  A them and us mentality develops.  I listen to fat acceptance activists paint individuals who fall into the current socially accepted definition of beauty with a big wide "privileged" brush some times.  They make the mistake of assuming that just because that group of "them" don't have to worry about whether their ass will fit in the seat, that they can't possibly suffer from the psychological affects of hating their own bodies, that they can't possibly understand about the stress that comes with believing that your own body doesn't meet some standard for beauty, or that they aren't even entitled to feel those things.  What they fail to notice is that those kinds of feelings aren't always strictly logical, and they don't always have to do with some absolute number on a scale.  However, I also see the flip side of that - individuals who do physically fall into that body privilege category, sweepingly rejecting the idea of body privilege being an idea of any merit or impact because they don't have any personal experiences that highlight it's existence, and sometimes those that do 'get' it, feel that they aren't entitled to speak out about it because they fall into that privilege category, and so what "right do they have".