ghosts and horror

[susanstinson]

I'm reading exquisite ghost stories: The Two Sams, by Glen Hirschberg. Very scary, technically brilliant and morally gripping. I'm going to review them for Strange Horizons.com

I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.

Comments

[firecat]

Good point. I think all this shrieking about the "war on obesity" is partly designed to distract from the real wars going on.

I've also heard and agree with the notion that the US obsession with fat distracts us from the fact that the US consumes such a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The pursuit of thinness is a superficial and self-centered substitute for real ethics.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Yes. I've written about that, and for a while I was thinking about doing a book about the relationship between economic greed and US overconsumption and the way fat people get used as scapegoats for all of that.

When I went looking for the ads this morning, I found all sorts of related stories, including a ban being passed on lawsuits against fast food restaurants and lots of rhetoric about people taking personal responsibility for being fat. It's something about that intense, focus on individual people's bodies, tapping into the strong stream of socially sanctioned fat hatred -- it sets off all kinds of internal noise that is SUCH an effective distraction from so many other things, including ways to try to take power. And the collective nature of our pain about this stuff -- how shared it is.

[firecat]

Yeah. Well said (of course!)

[charlottecooper.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about doing a book about the relationship between economic greed and US overconsumption and the way fat people get used as scapegoats for all of that.

I would looooove to read such a book.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

You know, I wrote an article about this that was published in The Women's Review of Books a couple of years ago. I'd be happy to email it to you, if you'd like to see it.

I'd email it to anybody else who's interested, too.

[charlottecooper.livejournal.com]

Oh yes please. Thanks.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Done!