I Went to See a Play on Saturday Night

I went to see a play on Saturday night. This is nothing new, of course, because I am YOUNG and FRESH and FREE and CREATIVE. I like to spend my time in the capital city sitting in cafes drinking soy milk and going to artistic events and immersing myself in CULTURE. The play was called No Taste Forever. It was written by Paul Rothwell and it was performed at BATS Theatre and I had major problems with it. I am now going to write about it.

After seeing the play I was unsure about whether I was even going to do this ‘writing about it’ thing. I've got problems with the script but I definitely do not want to minimise the hard work that those on stage have done and are doing. My whole heart, every fucking-last-ventricle, goes out to every single person involved in organising the full throttle, on-stage food fight that ends the play. I wasn't going to write about it but then after the show my beautiful, warm-as-the-very-best-oil-heater friend Jean and her boyfriend Jackson came over for a drink. Jean and Jackson were in No Taste Forever, and we drank cider and we talked about the show in the delightful company of Stevie and our wonderful friend Hannah. We had a really great discussion, with Jean and Jackson making some great counter arguments in defence of the production. When Jean was leaving she encouraged me to write about the play, and put into words some of the things we had been saying. So a thank you must go to Jean because as well as being as warm as a heater, she’s as supportive as a very expensive bra. I think I have to write about No Taste Forever because it was the depictions of fatness in the show that I mostly had a problem with. And like, that’s my thing. It feels cowardly to shy away from writing about. It would feel even more cowardly not to write about it because dear friends of mine were involved in the project and because the Wellington theatre community is small. So, I’m writing. Here goes nothing.

Imagine, for a second, the very worst possible depiction of fatness that you can.

I’m serious, I want you to imagine it.

Go.

I’m not kidding.

Make like John Lennon and imagine.

Are you imagining a fat man sitting at a table, eating KFC and crying? Because, in No Taste Forever, it happened!

Are you imagining the same fat man, whimpering in the foetal position, lying on the floor in a nest of junk food wrappers? Because it happened!

Are you imagining the fat man to have so little self control that he carries with him a bag of sweets, a bag that eventually explodes because it is so jam packed with candy? Because, you know what, that happened too!

Are you imagining the fat man being so socially inept that all he does at a birthday party AND at a food festival is eat, continuously and voraciously? Because it happened!

Are you imagining the fat man dribbling a huge gob of spit, just at the sight of a table laden with party food? Because, you can bet on your nanny, that it happened as well.

It happened, not even in some kind of fantastic and deliberate parody of how fat bodies are usually portrayed, but as a major part of the story line. I want to stress, at this point, that my problem wasn't at all with my friend Jonny Potts’ portrayal of the ‘morbidly obese’ Galen Widders. Jonny is a beautiful actor, and his liquid-gold voice was wasted in this role. He did a good job with an absolute shocker of a script. At first I thought that I wasn’t even particularly offended by Galen. Galen was merely just one little part of a show where the most obvious and the most stereotypical of food clichés were left unpacked and unexplored. In No Taste Forever vegans are so militant they wear camo pants; male bulimia is a joke and a food replacement pill is seen as a pragmatic problem solver, a cure not just for world hunger but for obesity as well. My girlfriend also pointed out how tired the female roles were in the show – a nagging mother, a dead child, a power hungry anorexic, a sexed up temptress, and two lesbians; one socially inept and the other a breaking-and-entering psychopath? Yawn.

It was a play that demonised food and that vituperated the audience about their eating habits. Surprisingly, mental health wasn’t touched on in this play about food issues. No real effort was made to explore how mental illnesses can manifest in over eating and under eating and comfort eating and obsessive eating. And like, eating issues are serious. I am a great believer in the importance of comedy as a tool for social change, but I really don’t think that the use of a fart soundtrack for an anorexic character quite cuts the mustard. My problem is not, necessarily, that No Taste Forever featured a fat man, crying over his bucket of fried chicken. This has probably happens, all the time, in many KFCs all over the world. Plenty of fat people hate their bodies and then don’t eat nutritiously and they have an unhealthy relationship with food, just like many thin people hate their bodies and don’t eat nutritiously and have an unhealthy relationship with food. As I’ve said before, many times, on this blog: weight can be no real indicator of health and the concept of ‘eating rubbish and not exercising’ needs to be separated from the concept of ‘being fat’. Lately I’ve also come to realise that health shouldn’t be a prerequisite for respect.

Mostly, my problem is that in a play about food and food issues, the crying and the KFC were the only depiction of fatness, thus rendering fat as a problem that needs to be solved. My other problem was that No Taste Forever was performed by a thin to average sized cast, and the ‘morbidly obese’ character was played by a thin to average sized man in a fat suit. I wish Director David Lawrence had made more interesting choices when casting his show, to deliberately contrast the fat hatred inherently present Rothwell’s script. I wish he had cast more fat people. I wish he had cast a fat person. I wish he had cast a fat person in another role to contrast with Galen. I wish Ms. Chocolate had been played by a beautiful fat woman, as some kind of fabulous food goddess. When I was talking to Jonny about this he confirmed that there was even a line in the script about the ‘voluptous-ness’ of Ms. Chocolate. My hankering for Ms. Chocolate to be played by a rad fatty has nothing to do with Jessica Aaltonen’s lovely performance in the BATS production. It’s more that I think a fat Ms. Chocolate would have shown that fat isn’t the enemy, and that Galen’s problem was not his fatness, but instead his troubled relationship with food. And BEE TEE DUB, Galen's character was wearing a t-shirt which read 'More of Me to Love'. Pretty sure that Galen was crippling-ly lonely and self hating, so I can't really imagine him wearing that kind of t-shirt. Way to make light of his mental health issues and insult the fat acceptance movement all in one foul swoop! (I'll have it after the play is over though, if you like.)

Wait, did I just say fat suit up there?

Ah, fat suits. Is there a word combination that raises my hackles more than the word ‘fat’ when teamed with the companion of ‘suit’? I mean, as soon as I see ‘Extra Sauce’ + ‘$1.00’ or ‘Product’ +‘Discontinued’ or ‘National’ + ‘Party’ I start to get hot and bothered. But fat suits, man. They really rile me up.

I can’t think of fat suits without thinking about these ladies:

Or about this:

Or about this:

And now, I have this fat suit to add to my collection.

A collection that I’ve built up over the years of watching things and realising that dressing thin actors up so their bodies look more like mine is supposed to be a joke. I can see that sometimes fat suits might be useful, perhaps when a thin performer is so brilliant and well suited for the part that nobody else on the face of planet could ever play that particular role. Or when the director wants to create some kind of distance between the action and the audience, like casting a white person as Othello or using an all female cast. Mostly though, when I see a fat suit I just want to scream one and/or the other of these two things:

1. FATNESS ISN’T INHERENTLY FUNNY!

2. CAN’T YOU JUST CAST AN ACTUALLY FAT ACTOR, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE?

I think that what bothers me most about No Taste Forever is that possibly up until I walked into the theatre and saw Jonny crouching there in his fat suit, up until that very moment, I had thought of BATS as being my space. I realise that this is a little self indulgent and that squillions of theatre makers and theatre lovers and theatre haters have thought the same thing about the very same theatre, and hopefully squillions more will continue to do the same. I don’t even really consider myself to be a ‘proper’ theatre maker, especially because I’m terrible at devising. I’m more of a ‘one show a year actor’. But BATS just feels like mine. I’ve laughed in the audience and I’ve cried in the audience and I’ve also had to stuff my whole fist in my mouth in the audience, in case I sobbed so loudly it disturbed the performers. It’s the place that I’ve witnessed some of the best acting I’ve ever seen, with Sophie Hambleton’s Katy and Erin Bank’s Helen and Jonny Pott’s Friar all immediately coming to mind. It’s the theatre that I made a New Year’s resolution to act on the stage of, and then did that, the very same year. I’ve eaten countless Phoenician kebabs and Deluxe sushi rolls in the dressing rooms. I’ve touched up my lipstick a thousand times in that bathroom mirror. I’ve been useless at many a pack in and many a pack out, and so have ended up cleaning that dressing room toilet, every single time. The best-slash-definitely-worst of these cleaning experiences was when I cleaned menstrual blood off the toilet seat during MINGE, and I thought to myself LONG LIVE FEMINIST THEATRE. I’ve drunk the bar dry of cider. I’ve attempted to drink the bar dry of house sav, and probably made a fair dent in the stocks of Emersons Pilsner. I’ve been fingered in the toilets there and I’ve been to a Saatchi and Saatchi planning meeting and if I’m feeling sad or lonely I know I can just go to an opening night at BATS because it will remind me of how many wonderful friends that I really have.

So there I was, sitting in the back row, amongst an audience tittering at a plethora of fat jokes. Jokes mainly centered on how lazy and ugly and unmotivated and weak and socially inept and uncoordinated fat people are. Not on Channel Two or in the YouTube comments section, but performed on the stage at BATS. A place where I thought that I was safe; where I thoought my body was safe. It sucked. I was bitterly disappointed, especially at how this play was affirming to the audience that it was acceptable to laugh like this at fat people. Before I went into the show I counted the number of fat people lining up for tickets, just in case I was terribly offended by the show or so bothered by the fat suit that I wanted to write about it and I needed some kind of point-making statistic. Always Be Prepared and so on. There were at least eight other fat people in the audience with me. During those fat jokes in No Taste Forever I wasn’t just thinking about my body, I was thinking about their bodies as well. I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to feel positive about my body and in the last eight months or so I have been actively concentrating on trying to nourish my sense of self worth. I consider myself part of the fat acceptance movement, for fucks sake, and during that show I felt uncomfortable in my skin. I don’t know whether those audience members have read about reclaiming the word fat or heard about Health At Every Size. I hope they have. I hope they know, that as my friend Jessica said, every body is a good body, no matter what it looks like.

I was offended, during No Taste Forever, yes, but I think it’s about something bigger than that. It’s about how the constant slew of media representations make people feel about their bodies, and the cycle of self loathing that eventuates. I will never understand, as long as I live, why some people think that shaming fat people helps anybody. Fat people end up hating their own bodies, and why would anybody want to love and nurture and strengthen something they hate? It’s not just about me being offended, it’s about how, en masse, these kinds of representations are actually just fucking damaging.

Because it’s never about just that play or that one movie or that one advertisement. It’s systemic. It’s about how every villain in every book ever is described as having a ‘puffy face’ and it’s about how tired the weight-as-a-metaphor-for-greed thing really is. It’s about being ten years old and Camryn Manheim clutching her Emmy and proclaiming “This is for all the fat girls” and feeling like she was talking directly to me. It’s about how Tiggie Tompson loses the weight at the end of The Tiggie Tompson Show. It’s about trying to think of positive representations of fat bodies on screen and asking whether Sooki off Gilmore Girls can really count, because she’s a chef, and you know, can we really keep counting Roseanne Barr, because it’s 2011 now and if the millennium isn’t even considered new anymore then how can TV shows from the 90’s still be relevant? It’s about the headless fatties in infomercials. It’s about how there will never be a fat Juliet.

I wasn’t able to pick up a programme when I was at BATS, as they were fresh out, but in John Smythe’s review of the show, he writes that in the programme Rothwell has claimed that “the play is really about hunger – hunger for control, hunger for company.” Interesting. I’ll tell you what, Paul. Fat people are hungry. We’re hungry for representation. Fat actors are hungry for parts to play. We’re hungry to be depicted in any way that doesn’t depict us as slovenly or unattractive or as the butt of the joke. We’re hungry to turn on the television or go to theatre or pop down to the movies and not be told that we ought to hate our bodies. And we’re not just peckish, Paul. We’re fucking starving.

(Edited to add - Jonny Potts, who played the 'morbidly obese' Galen in the show will be writing a guest post in response to this piece. I am really excited about this, so make sure you check back in a couple of days.)

[Image credit - No Taste Forever photo taken by Vanessa Fowler Kendall and found on the The Bachanals Facebook page. Images of Monica/Gwyneth and Mike Meyers found here at The Daily Beast. Image of Eddie Murphy found via Google Images.]

A Fat and Punchy Post

I thought that the next blog post I write should be relatively short, so that perhaps I could start occasionally tapping out something short and maybe even funny while I am procrastinating at work. My urge to actually write this short and witty post eventuated into action, or as much action as it really takes to open a new tab on my Internet browser, when my work blocked my usual procrastination hive of, Jezebel. To some add some colour to this description of the puritanical regime of the modern office environment let me tell you that my work also just blocked a bra website:

Access to this URL is currently restricted because of its classification.

URL: http://www.curvykate.com/

Content classification: Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit

Thank heavens for that. I might have accidentally stumbled upon a pair of togs; the obscenity of which I surely would never have recovered from. Lace and Lycra, the smoking guns of office Internet censorship. I hate to think about what would happen to this Internet blocking system if it were actually a person and they were accidentally to go to a beach or a lingerie shop, and to suddenly be accosted with a smorgasboard of strips of breast covering fabric. And so because my work finds feminist blogging and boulder holders so offensive, I am here to write a post about being offended. A post that I hope to be several onomatopoeic words, all describing things that are short and yet effective, like 'zippy' and 'zappy' and possibly 'punchy', although I am not really sure if that meets the onomatopoeic criteria.

.

And so in the spirit of keeping things punchy, in every possible sense of the word, I thought that maybe I would post something else from my "All Of The Negative Things That My Facebook Friends Have Said About Fat People and Bodies In The Last Couple of Months (Unless They Said It In The Period Of Time Where I Went To Ohakune Or To Christchurch Or When I Went To See Lady Gaga In Auckland AKA The Best Weekend Of My Life) File". And so, here is snippet from my stash:

And I think this post is interesting, because it taps into the whole thing of 'fat' automatically being a derogatory word, rather than just a describing word, like I talked about a bit in my second blog post and also written about by the Messiah of Fat Acceptance, Kate Harding. Just because the fat guy behind the IT desk appears to be an asshole, it seems that Anonymous Facebook Commenter thinks it is sweet to make snide remarks about his body. And even though it may seem that way, AFC is not just describing the appearance of the IT guy. Words mean things. Saying "Go see Brown Hair Guy another day" or "Go see Red T-Shirt Guy another day" would not mean the same thing. AFC describing the IT Guy as Fat Guy means she already has a joke, because I'm not sure if you've realised but our culture seems to find fat hatred hysterically funny. And this stuff seems to be okay. I am sort of loathe to compare fat othering to racism, because it is the easiest thing to do and I think there is already some kind of Godwin's Law type deal that whenever any kind of privilege is discussed on the Internet it will inevitably boil down to being compared to racism, which usually ends up weakening the essence of the argument in the first place. But in the interests of keeping this post zippy, zappy and punchy I am going to play the race card:

Would it be okay for AFC to say "That has happened to me soooo many times. It's something to do with logging in campus, or whatever. Bleh. Go see Black Guy another day"?

And in response to my card playing, I think the answer might be no. And I don't really want to compare the legacy of slavery and racial oppression to a fat joke on the Internet, but the words do make for an interesting comparison. And often, sizeism is more than a fat joke. Kate Harding has written an article here about anti-fat hate crimes. And I know that race is a construct. And I know that a lot of people get their knickers in a twist when sizeism is compared to racism, because obviously every fat person in the world has chosen to be fat and if they just put in a little bit more effort into not being so lazy they wouldn't be such a drain on the health system. (Which is a fucking stupid argument by the way, if you exist you are inherently a drain on the system. We all pay tax and that is what society is, we are all just leeching off each other and if you expect to shit in a pipe and have it flushed away or to be able to catch a bus ever you can't complain about somebody HYPOTHETICALLY needing more medical care than you.) And I know that nobody in any kind of official position can decide whether sizeism is hate speech yet, and Jezebel wrote a kind of interesting article about it the other day. (An article which, by the by, I had to read ON MY OWN TIME, when I wasn't even getting paid, thanks a lot to my corporate office censorship lifestyle.) But the answer to the race card is no, it wouldn't be okay to be so blatantly racist, but it is totally okay to be hell for leather sizeist. Why couldn't AFC just have told the Facebook-User-Who-Has-Problems-With-Uni-Computers to go and see Smug Asshole Guy another day? Shouldn't being a total and complete dickwad be a bigger insult than being reminded of your own body shape?

(And to the Facebook-User-Who-Has-Problems-With-Uni-Computers, I am impressed that you didn't take the easy fat joke bait, but maybe if you ever want someone to actually put your dick in their mouth, you should possibly stop using it as put down. Maybe My.Victoria actually truly wants to eat all the dicks? Bodies, they're anatomy, not an insult. And this post, it might be punchy, but I guess it's not so short after all.)

Thinking about acting like an idiot on the internet. And sizeism. And a picture of Beth Ditto's sweet behind.

When I had the idea of starting a blog about being offended I talked to my girlfriend about it, and I sort of hoped that maybe one day I could be the go-to person that current affairs programs would interview about being offended. I would sit on the Good Morning couch wearing earrings and a sassy top, and I would give the new Mary Lambie a knowing and vaguely patronising look and say "Yup, that is definitely offensive". This lofty goal sort of grew and grew in my brain, until everyone was afraid of me because of the huge and all pervasive power that I had to deem things as offensive. When I was talking to my girlfriend about this she said that wanting to be feared possibly wasn't the best or the most reliable life ambition, and I probably sort of agreed and waggled my head around a bit and changed the subject to talk about the most positive and non-confrontational thing that I could think of at that moment in time. Like how great my flatmate Dan's new lemon zester is and how it creates really long strips of lemon rind without getting any of the pith. Or something.

But part of the writing-the-blog-about-being-offended thing was that I wanted to NAME and SHAME. I wanted the racist and the sexist and the privileged to SHAKE IN THEIR VERY BOOTS when they read about their offensive acts, and immediately realise the error of their ways and humbly thank me for tactfully drawing their attention to it. And I would give them the Mary Lambie expression and I would accept their apology but probably still think a little bit less of them. But in the very first post, I chickened out of the naming. And not really the shaming, but without the naming it was somewhat diluted. I went instead for the irritatingly passive aggressive and weakly confrontational first letter of people's names.

But, as I am clearly fixated with naming and shaming, for the last couple of months I have been avidly collecting anything that comes up on my Facebook newsfeed that I think is negative about female appearances. I sort of started doing it for a women's theatre project I am doing, and I liked to lie around thinking about my Facebook friends sitting in the mildly uncomfortable seats at BATS, and think about them squirming, not because of the invasive arm rests but because their WORDS OF SHAME were emblazoned on the wall. And then I sort of realised that me standing on stage reading these out might make for reasonably average theatre, and that maybe my collection of statements would be put to better use where they belong, and where they came from. (Which, in case you didn't realise, is on the multi-faceted and often mindless but sometimes revolutionary Internet).

Because I have been thinking a little bit about how Facebook turns people into idiots. About how people halfway through their honours degree feel the need to join groups like I Love the Sound of Rain as I'm Going to Sleep and why people who have an important job doing something with pylons and engineering "like" the page Clapping to the Opening Theme of Friends. My girlfriend thinks that these pages have something to do with liking feeling included in a group, and liking to feel like part of an in joke. I think that she is probably onto something. But as for the rain sounds and the Friends clapping, actually everybody in the entire world likes that shit. You do not need to join a group about these things, because you would be joining a group with EVERYBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD THAT HAS A ROOF AND A TELEVISION. And god, why must so many of these groups be so comfortingly banal? The other day a Facebook friend of mine "liked" The Sense Of Dread When A Feather Comes Out of Your Puffa Jacket =( and I could have written an entire blog about how BORING this is, but then I realised that I had recently "liked" Where Do All My Bobby Pins Go? and I came to the painful and inevitable realisation that I am just as boring as everyone else. So I have been consoling myself with the fact that Facebook makes everyone act like an imbecile, and that it wasn't actually my fault that I thought for a second that my friends might care about my hair clips.

And so I thought that I might want to write more posts about Facebook, and the way that it gives me this sort of bizarre insight into the most stupid thoughts of acquaintances on my friends list, and how these often offend me. I thought this could be a good place to start unloading some of the things that these acquaintances have said and that I find offensive. People from places like media studies tutorials and high school and average parties in Newtown and people that my friends have slept with and I have never gotten around to deleting. And I think that I really, really want to name people, because hello Voldemort, names have a lot of power. But I think for now I am too scared of confrontation and insipid initials feel like an easier way to unpack Facebook idiocy for a little bit.

When I started a blog I think that I also really really really heaps badly wanted to write something about fat activism, but I think that anything I try to write will be so influenced by the exhaustingly amazing words of size activists like Natalie Perkins and Lesley Kinzel and Ragen Chastain and Charlotte Cooper and Kate Harding. Because I am constantly disgusted by the things that people will breezily say about fat people, because if these things were said about black people they would be completely unacceptable and borderline psychopathic. And I am angry that BMI is supposedly an indicator for health when actually all it indicates is that everyone should go and get a blood test and BMI actually just hides that heaps of thin people eat crap and don't move their bodies; and I do resent that apparently every fat person is a drain on the health system but that nobody begrudges cyclists or highly stressed lawyers or bungee jumpers of their free health care.

So I think I want to use this blog to sometimes look at sizeism on Facebook. Because when I look through all of these horribly offensive nuggets that I have gathered, it is not just people from Newtown parties who are writing this shit. It is my friends. It is people who are friends with me and heaps of other fat people, and who are educated and left wing and funny and well dressed. It is people who say stuff like this:

And I guess that this might seem kind of inoffensive. But actually, I am offended. I am offended because calling someone fat isn't just a description of their body shape. The social meaning of the word means they are a smelly, awful, unlovable pleb who eats nine Big Macs every day and probably never has sex and also definitely has diabetes and will die of a heart attack in the next seven months. Kate Harding wrote an essay about this and you should read it because she is smarter than me. But I think that this little Facebook post here by Anonymous Facebook User [AFU], and liked by three other Anonymous Facebook Users, shows how ingrained jokes about fat people are in society. And how easy they are to make. As easy as making a cake with a cake mixer, or as easy as keeping your tights up when you know that you just have to wear a pair of black undies over the top. They're so easy because you use the word fat and you immediately have a punch line. And like I said last time, this is Facebook. It is public. I wasn't aware that fat people weren't allowed to have iPads, and also that they weren't allowed to think they are "cool". God forbid a fat person uses a piece of technology in public, in case someone thinks they are trying to be impressive. Don't you realise that you can't be impressive if you are a fat person? Even if you have an extremely well paying job that means you can buy an iPad, you better not use it in public in case ANFU thinks you are trying to impress her.

Ultimately nobody is winning by making these kind of jokes. Unhealthy fat people get the message that their body is something to be ashamed of, and they don't want to spend any time nourishing it or moving it around. I don't know anyone who has ever wanted to look after something they hate. Beauty standards continue to be perpetuated, fat people continue to be othered and thin people continue to fear being fat. How is it a good thing that 50% of women aged between 18 and 25 would rather be hit with a truck than be fat? Living in fear of YOUR OWN BODY is not a good way to live, and nobody needs to live like that ever since they figured out that spontaneous human combustion is a myth.

So, Facebook. Fat shaming. I can't sum it up as neatly as I would like to. But I'm going to keep trying. Facebook makes this kind of kitchen sink anthropology pretty easy. Almost as easy as making a fat joke.