Hi friend,
Isn't the photo above fun? That's a client at their small business photo session with me, merrily rolling down a hill.
Business photo sessions sound kind of stuffy, but they can be a lot of fun when we bring your personality into it. I'll be telling you more about Kyra and their small business when the blog post about their session goes up, but in the meantime, you can learn more about my photo sessions for small businesses
here.
A followup:
In response to
this recent letter about body-mass index and the value we place on certain bodies, reader Andrea Tsavahidis-Lawrence says,
"You invite me to reflect and do better. I have certainly used the NFL player before or even Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Your post put words to the reason why it felt so icky to say/believe.
Something about the intention of the NFL/BMI connection statement feels very similar to conversations about dieting and weight cycling. This is usually in coversations around set point. How many times have you heard this? "Dieting will make people lose weight and when it fails, they often will gain even more weight." While this might point out the counterintuitive nature of dieting for it's purported purpose, it is still framing weight gain as a negative outcome. I have personally stopped using this language for that reason because it seems to come from the same place as the NFL/BMI fairy tale."
And now to this week's letter:
Once a friend of mine observed that in their daily life, they just felt like they didnāt see many fat people at all. And itās true: fat people are often missing from public life, especially very fat people. Why might that be?
BMI is bull, but letās use the masterās tool for a moment to examine the masterās house. I live in a body that is quite fat and my BMI is 42, so letās use a BMI of 40 as our starting point.
Depending on which source you reference, people with a BMI of 40 or more comprise 6-10% of the American population, so around 10% of the population is fat of the kind that youād notice walking around in public.
So where are they? Why isnāt at least 1 in 10 of the people you see out and about (in non-COVID times) very fat?
Well, that 10% of the population is also a group of people who face significant barriers accessing public life at all. Thin people have designed a world that excludes us.
š If I canāt buy professional clothing, you wonāt see me in your office.
š If I canāt fit in an airplane seat and people stare and glare at me when I buy two, you wonāt see me on your flight.
š If I canāt wear any of the clothing sold, you wonāt see me at the mall.
š If I canāt fit on the rides, you wonāt see me at the theme park.
š If Iāve been discriminated against in hiring, you wonāt see me in the elevator.
š If I canāt fit in the chairs, you wonāt see me in the waiting room.
š If I canāt fit in the desk/chair combos, you wonāt find me in the classroom.
š If I canāt fit in the booths, you wonāt see me at the restaurant.
š If I canāt fit in the seats, you wonāt find me at the theatre.
š If all the casting calls include āattractiveā as a proxy for āthin,ā you wonāt see me on stage.
š If I canāt have knee surgery, you wonāt see me at the gym.
š And if Iāve been denied knee surgery and gotten too many glares and stares for using a scooter at the grocery store, maybe I just stay home, get all my groceries delivered and stop offering myself up to the pain and abuse of even attempting to exist in a public sphere that was designed to push me out.
I want you to note that Iāve done something very deliberate here: Most of the statements above start with If I canāt. If I canāt. If I canāt. Now, Iād like you to go back and re-read those statements, replacing āIf I canātā with āIf people with thin privilege have arranged it so that I canāt.ā
How does that change the responsibility for those outcomes?
The motivations, of course,
vary, but every single one of those broken-heart bullets is the consequence of deliberate decisions made by people with a specific type of privilege (that of thinness).
This is what oppression looks like.
