Personal – Page 2 – Shoshana Kessock

2C0C7AE100000578-3225342-image-m-2_1441642006347 — Nicole Arbour in ‘Dear Fat People’

This past week, a video has gone around by YouTuber and comedian Nicole Arbour, whose past hits include such titles as “Dear Instagram Models”, “Why Girls Are Crazy” and “Why You Really Got Divorced.” In this video, entitled “Dear Fat People” the wannabe shock-vlogger decided to go after her new target, which was pretty much anyone who is fat.

I won’t link to the video, or pretty much any of her other videos, because I refuse to assist in her channel getting further hits. However, here’s some of the glorious highlights of that 6-minute hate fest.

‘Fat shaming is not a thing. Fat people made that up,’ she says. ‘That’s the race card with no race. “Yeah, but I couldn’t fit into a store. That’s discrimination”. Uh no. That means you are too fat, and you should stop eating.’

‘If we offend you so much that you lose weight, I’m okay with that,’ she says. ‘You are killing yourself. I’ll sleep at night. Maybe I am jealous that you get to eat whatever you want.’

‘Obesity is a disease?’ she asks. ‘Yeah, so is being a shopaholic – but I don’t get a f***king parking pass. It would make a lot of sense if I did. I am the one with all of the bags.’

‘I am not saying all of this to be an a**hole. I am saying this because your friends should be saying it to you.’

Actually Nicole, you’re just being an asshole.

So let’s start with the facts: fat shaming is a thing. Fat shaming and other forms of body shaming are a way for people to impose society standards and their own upon you and your body. It is a type of discrimination that is rendered against those who are considered overweight, and especially those who are considered obese in our world. It comes in many forms, from advertisements that tell you to lose weight so you’ll be happier (‘just shed those pounds and you’ll be frolicking in this field like me!’) to the poor media representations of obese people, to blatant and outright hatred like that expressed by Arbour above. Fat shaming exists. It also doesn’t work.

This, from Professor Jane Wardle, director of the Cancer Research Health Behavior Center at UCL:

“Our study clearly shows that weight discrimination is part of the obesity problem and not the solution. Weight bias has been documented not only among the general public but also among health professionals; and many obese patients report being treated disrespectfully by doctors because of their weight. Everyone, including doctors, should stop blaming and shaming people for their weight and offer support, and where appropriate, treatment.”

Yup, that’s a scientific study, Nicole. Stick your fingers in your ears all you want, but the science and years of experience from plenty of fat people out there says that fat shaming does not work. Getting on YouTube and supporting fat shaming in defiance of the scientific evidence puts you right up there with anti-vaccers and climate-change deniers, people so intent on supporting their own bogus viewpoint that they won’t pay attention to actual facts. Fat shaming fits every definition of bullying and does not work.

In fact it has the opposite effect. People who experience body shaming are prone to have more problems, like depression and anxiety, eating disorder issues, body dysmorphia, etc. And to me, that’s a no brainer moment. I don’t have to sit here and think hard about the fact that shaming someone doesn’t increase their overall life quality. That’s not a stumper. The part that gets me is how other people don’t see that.

The good part is, plenty of people did in the case of Nicole Arbour. Her video was pulled from YouTube for violating terms of service, for which Arbour screamed censorship. Next, blogs all across the internet responded with articles blasting the hateful video, and YouTubers began tossing out their own response videos decrying the fat shaming Arbour espouses. My favorite video comes from Whitney Thore of My Big Fat Fabulous Life, whose whole video I’m going to link here at the bottom. But Thore tells it like it is about what it’s like to live as a woman being fat after gaining weight from poycystic ovarian, stating, “You can’t see a person’s health by looking at them.”

Tess Holiday, the fabulous plus sized model had a fantastically dismissive response:

And that’s where I stand on Arbour and her kind too. Yes, her kind. Everyone’s met one in their lifetime. The self-righteous, hateful kind who hold to the idea that they have a right to shame another human being for how they look. That they can judge someone for how many pounds they are, or what they look like in clothing. You’d think Arbour would have seen one or two after school specials growing up to know that bullying isn’t okay, but clearly the lesson didn’t take.

Arbour says she’s just telling it like it is, and it’s no secret that shock comedians have been doing this kind of thing for a long time. What Arbour and many others still seem to be missing is that the age of ‘all press is good press’ is coming to (if not already at) an end. It’s no longer a game online of just getting your name known. Now people can just Google your work and see what you’ve said, and make their own judgements. Case in point, what happened to Arbour after she posted up this video.

You see, Arbour was relying on the out of line content of her six minute bit to get her attention. And it did. She was fired from a movie after director Pat Mills saw her ‘Dear Fat People Video’ because – wait for it – the movie was about young dancers discovering body positivity! Way to shoot yourself in the foot there. And it’s the response by director Pat Mills of Don’t Call Irene (which I’m going to be checking out in response to this move) that makes me feel like maybe, finally, folks are getting the point.

Arbour certainly didn’t. She responded by defending her video, saying she wasn’t really shaming people. That it was all an act.

“I don’t shame people. It was an act. It was one bit and I do a new bit every single week. I don’t hate anyone. I don’t shame anyone. I don’t actually believe in bullying at all.”

“The video was about obese people. I was very specific that it’s not the average guy with some cushion for the pushin’. [The message is that] we really care about them and we want them to be healthy because I’m selfish and I want them to be around,” she told BBC. “I don’t think it’s a cheap laugh. Twenty million views isn’t that cheap. I’m an equal-opportunity offender and it all goes back to comedy.”

Oh, so it was just acting. And besides, it was about obese people, not regular people who have some “cushion for the pushin'” (which is just the worst term ever, please stop using it right now, this instant). Fact is, if you don’t think that what you said is shaming, Nicole Arbour, I don’t think the word means you think it means. And just because it’s comedy doesn’t mean that people won’t think you’re awful for what you’ve said. There’s a clap back headed your way from a lot of people, Nicole, and it’s pretty awesome.

There’s no denying that this issue is a personal one for me. As a woman who has been fat all my life, having hit about two hundred pounds at the age of twelve, I have literally spent twenty years of my life dealing with the stigma of being overweight. I’ve had the unfortunately not so unique experience of enduring callous, hateful, disgusting, often terrifying comments thrown my way. I’ve had people tell me I should kill myself for being fat. I’ve had kids chase me in the subway, snorting at me and screaming ‘fatty!’ while others looked on.

I’ve had people I respect, trust, and love tell me such heartbreaking things that, I’m sure, they thought were just helping. Things like:

“When I look at you, I see the beautiful person trapped inside all that fat, waiting to get out.”
“If you don’t lose weight, no man will ever want to marry you. Then you’ll never have children, and die alone.”
“There’s nothing beautiful about being fat, it’s all just a mess that makes me sad to look at.”
“You don’t need to wear a nice dress, nobody’s looking.”
“God, I look so bad today. But at least I’m not fat. If I was fat, I’d just kill myself.”
And this, when I asked a guy out and he turned me down: “You know how some people don’t like some kinds of porn? I don’t like fat people porn.”

These are all quotes said to me, each by people I know: family members, friends, co-workers. The last was a guy I knew in college that I wanted to date. And you can bet that I remember his name, all right. I remember he was a funny, skinny nerd guy who wrote video game music and lamented about the way he was bullied for being a nerd in high school. I remember him as the guy I never spoke to again, whose name is now synonymous with hypocrisy.

So when I say I’ve heard this all my life, that I didn’t need the science to explain to me that fat shaming doesn’t work, you can trust in my experience. And that this article comes with no small amount of happiness to see the responses

Fat bodies in our society are reviled, belittled, hated, and fetishized. Those who are overweight are ignored, demeaned and shunned. We are expected to accept vile bullying because society still accepts that fat is one of the worst things a person can be. Fat shaming is expressed in every part of our culture, in every place people build communities, even those that are meant to be accepting, inclusive, and safe. And it’s because people still perpetuate the notion that fat is the worst thing that you can be.

But there’s a silver lining in this story. If you google Nicole Arbour now, all the articles that come up as the top searches aren’t about her, exactly. It’s about how she was fired from a movie because of her hate-filled little video. And if you look at nearly all the comments responding to this nonsense, you see people calling out her video for what it is: jealous, narcissistic hatred. Hatred from a woman so trapped within the rat race of societally acceptable beauty that she would turn against other human beings and mock what they look like for the sake of five minutes of fame.

Well, she’s famous now, all right. Only the tide has started to turn, maybe, just a little. And the same #bodypositivity folks Arbour was so prepared to mock might just have a louder voice than she does. Because love of yourself and others does have a louder voice than hate. Afor once, maybe we’re seeing an example of it.

[[NOTE: This post started out as a discussion on my feelings about forgiveness. Over the course of writing, it turned into a revelation I had about enabling. It rambles a bit at the end because of that, but I think the conversation with myself explains the idea. Needless to say, this is a more self-reflecting post and personal. We’ll be back to gaming and such in the next one, promise.]]

I woke up this morning with the urge to forgive.

The impulse has come over me in the last few months every once in a while. I’ll wake up in the morning or look up from something I was doing, and think: “I don’t really need to be so angry over all of this. Just let it go.” And for once in my life, I really am. I’m learning to let it go.

It’s not something I’m used to doing. In the past, I would hold onto so many slights and fights for ages. I would have laundry lists of reasons why I shouldn’t trust someone, or why someone had hurt or shamed or embarrassed me, reasons why they shouldn’t be a part of my life. These memories would stick with me, ‘cautionary tales’ I held onto for years. But in the last few months, I have come to a place where I want to shrug my shoulders and say, “Nevermind all that. It’s not worth it. Just forgive them.”

This all started in June with my graduation and my brain surgery. Graduate school was not an easy time for me. I worked through a great many difficult things during that time, faced down an obscene amount of pressure, and in the process isolated myself a good deal from others. I fell into the trap of letting negativity rule my life because of that stress. Because of it, I wasn’t always the most kind or considerate friend. I pushed people away and I was harsh. Sometimes I was downright selfish and cruel. It was never out of the impulse to become that way, but always out of fear for self-preservation, hurt over slights I imagined or that were actual, or just plain selfishness associated with trying to survive in an unbearably stressful lifestyle. Without using it as an excuse, a lot of that was also due to the tumor in my brain producing too much ACTH, pushing my body into hyper-stress mode, but that doesn’t unring the angry bell. It doesn’t excuse ages of being so angry, so stressed. I look back now on those two years and wish I’d been kinder. Wish I’d been more open to people. Wish I had been able to process my stress in a less negative way. Wish I’d been less afraid.

But then came my brain tumor. My last week of school, I was rushing to finish up everything in preparation for graduation. I had to get my end of the year show presentation ready. I had to present my work, and stand up and talk about my thesis in front of the department. And that Monday I had discovered that I had Cushings, that I was going to have to have brain surgery. I graduated, walked the stage and sat listening to Martin Scorsese give the commencement speech. I flew that very evening to Los Angeles through some of the worst travel delays I had ever experienced to run Dresden Lives at WyrdCon. And the entire time, echoing in my ears were the words: you have a brain tumor, you have to have brain surgery.

I sat that week and thought about a lot of things. I thought about the fights I had had that semester, the stress and the people who had left my life in the last two years. I sat in the hospital room before the surgery and worried about the possibility that I would not survive the surgery. I thought about what I’d like my future to look like if I did.

Well, spoilers: I did survive the surgery and it went brilliantly. And as I lay there, post ACTH-tumor, a strange calm filled me. I felt more relaxed then I had in years. Mind you, most of that was the lack of rawr hulking-out stress hormones flooding me. But I had also come to a calm about my life and the past, and what comes next. And as I recovered in the next few months, I had the opportunity to think over a lot of the last few years and decide that a change had to happen. I had to learn to let things go.

I started to see that so much of my behavior was ruled by reactions to other people’s slights. My anger, my course-corrections in my life, were really heavily influenced by negative things that had happened to me. And as opposed to reacting in a positive way, I let those negative things course-correct me towards safer paths, or curbed what I wanted to do. I allowed myself to be steered away from career paths that could have been very rewarding. I let myself be influenced to believe that my work wasn’t good enough to make it in the creative world because “there’s just so many people out there trying harder and being better than you.”

Some of the anger and fear responses were, of course, reasonable beyond a shadow of a doubt. My history of sexual assault makes difficulties I have connecting in relationships understandable, I believe. So does the years of fat shaming. But as I recovered from the surgery, I realized that the older I get, the more I understand the need to let things become part of the past. More than anything, I don’t want to be defined by my difficulties, but improved by them.

Mind you, I don’t know that I can forgive everyone. I certainly don’t forgive the person who sexually assaulted me, though I (in a weird way) understand his actions and motivations. That neither excuses nor eliminates the horror, the hurt, or how utterly wrong it was. Yet I’m no longer blaming life for putting these things in my path. I’m no longer blaming myself for the actions that led me to that and other awful places. And I’m no longer resenting life for the hard things that have happened, only trying to look for positive ways to make changes and move forward.

So the process is a hard one for me. It involves:

Looking at things that bother, frighten, anger, frustrate or stress me out.
Analyze what the causes are to these situations (i.e. what is making them happen, including other people’s motivations) and try to understand why other people are doing what they do.
Forgive and/or let the interaction go.
Try to find positive ways to move forward instead of dwelling on the negative reactions.

This is the uphill battle I’m going to tackle going forward. I’m not going to discount the negative emotions I feel, but instead process them and try to find positive solutions instead of holding onto them. And in the process of doing this, I came to a startling revelation in the last few days:

Forgiveness can also enable bad behavior in others. There is a balance when dealing with people in my life between letting bad behavior go because a person’s reactions are ‘understandable’ and holding people accountable for what they do. Sometimes, when a person brings negativity into your life it is necessary to tackle that issue head-on with the person instead of just letting it go. I don’t believe in giving up on people. But sometimes, you have to make it clear that tho you understand the other person’s perspective and want to let it go, you cannot allow the pattern of behavior to continue. You can still care about them and want them in your life, but you cannot continue to allow that person’s negative behavior to harm you and others. I didn’t understand how this boundary was so important until recently, until I started to see that my constantly forgiving another person’s bad behavior was fostering new opportunities for that person to continue hurting me and others. Too much understanding without repercussions can lead to enabling.

For some people, this is a pretty simple idea. For me, it’s a bit of a new boundary I am going to have to foster. Moreover, it’s helped me put aside a lot of the anger I had towards friends who distanced themselves from me while I was myself doing destructive behavior in the last few years. I get it more now than I did before, and I understand. I’ll work towards forgiving THEM for letting me go when it needed to happen.

Whew, confusing circle, isn’t it? It’s Forgive-ception. BWAHHHHHHH!

Okay, that was just to lighten things up. Because whew, heavy stuff here. But that’s what this blog is about. It’s not just about work, and writing about media. It’s about exploring things that influence me as a creator and my life, without fear where I can. And with forgiveness, when I can.

Category: Personal

Fat Shaming Is Indeed ‘A Thing’, Nicole Arbour: A ‘Dear Fat People’ Response

Forgiveness and the Paradox of Letting Go