In the musical puppet show Avenue Q, there's a hilarious number called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," wherein each member of the show's ethnically diverse mix of puppets admits to unconscious stereotyping. In its gentle, up-tempo way, it's one of the most effective rebukes of political correctness I've ever heard:Everyone's a little bit racist, sometimes
Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes!
Look around and you will find,
That no one's really color-blind,
Guess it's really something we should face!
Everyone makes judgements based on race.
It loses something without puppets' delivery, and the bouncy, Sesame-Street style score, but you get the idea.
I was reminded of this little number during a conversation I had last night with a friend I'll call Kathleen -- that's not her actual name -- the relevent points about whom are that she's a woman and that she's heavy. She told me she had watched the Joy Nash "Fat Rant" video, which I blogged about last week, and that she'd had a very ambivalent reaction to it. Instead of wanting to stand up and cheer, a reaction that the video provoked in many other similarly plus-size women (according to Big Fat Deal), Kathleen echoed some of Nash's most vociforous detractors: that Nash shouldn't feel good about herself; that she was kidding herself; that she was clearly unhealthy, should lose weight, and --implicitly -- that she should shut up. Discussing it with another heavy friend, whose response to the Nash clip had been "I wish I had her confidence," Kathleen had said, "I wish I believed her."
Kathleen parallelled her experience to a response she'd had to recent trends she'd noticed in dance. Lately, she said, the standards for female dancers' bodies have easing, and so one sees heavier women performing in prestigious venues where you wouldn't have seen them a few years ago. And again, instead of finding comfort, or empowerment in that development -- which is the response I would expect her to have, being a relatively enlightened, and let's not forget, plus-sized person herself -- she admitted that she didn't like seeing the heavier dancers. She even expressed something like disgust at seeing them.
It was a starling reaction, and a brave admission.
I recalled to her the print ad campaign that Dove soap launched last year, in which women of varying ages with average physiques posed proudly in bikinis: in groups, alone, in pairs, often hugging or draped around one another. I admitted that I hadn't found the pictures particularly beautiful; that my response had been, "Well, good for Dove, but I'm not really interested in looking at those women." They looked like they were playing minimalist dress-up games, and clinging together for some combination of concealment and dear life. And in spite of their plaster grins, I wondered whether those women really wanted to be hanging it all out there on Sunset Boulevard, either. My frequent encounters with these billboards, which were ubiquitous in LA at the time, felt like a poorly-conceived, never-ending blind date which neither of us wanted to be on."Look at us!" the Dove suits proclaimed through their self-satisfied images, "We don't use skinny, unhealthy models whose images promote anorexia and low self-esteem in young girls, and hey, aren't we making you appreciate the beauty in averageness?" Their cause was noble, but their methods were facile and smug and mildly embarassing after awhile I just wanted those pictures to go away.
I have no answers here, just an addendum to the Avenue Q characters' assertion, that not only is everyone a little bit racist, but that everyone -- even an educated, articulate, plus-sized woman and a guy who makes a good part of his living trying to help women lose weight -- is a little bit weightist as well.
