fat acceptance

Image: A dressed-up Phyllis Lapin with Bob Vance

As The Office is a show about white people and men primarily; it is also a show about size-privileged people primarily. However, its focus on folks of size privilege is not myopic; of the regular cast, Kevin, Phyllis, and Stanley are all visibly fat. Discrimination against their size is not ignored, but portrayed in a responsible and progressive way. Unlike most primetime shows, these characters are nuanced, three-dimensional players with lives independent of and often counter to stereotypes; their fatness is not erased, but instead a value-neutral part of their life.

Margaret Cho explores body image and self-love in her new television series Drop Dead Diva. I recently watched the pilot episode and spoke to Cho about her involvement in the show. The first person to be cast, Cho believes DDD has the opportunity to reach a diverse audience with the message that fat women’s beauty is not just internal.

One of the biggest gifts this year in the arena of 'sports/exercise' is the Wii Fit. It is billed as a game and an exercise space, only better, and it's virtually impossible to find. You can do everything from yoga to table balancing and apparently so many people are into it, a new affliction has been named for it (the Wii Knee:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/3854172/Doctors-fear-a-Wii-knee-epidemic.html).

Here is a clip of Wii Fit in its idealized form:

Kate Harding over at Shapely Prose (http://kateharding.net/2008/12/09/dear-oprah/) has a fabulous response to Oprah and her latest efforts at losing weight (http://www.omagazine.info/).