Protest Poster

A little over a month ago I stumbled across a horrible story. One morning a particular columnist woke up to find that a picture of herself in a Halloween costume had gone viral. She had dressed up as her fictional hero Lara Croft, who she admired for her intelligence and bravery. However, instead of admiring her costume, the people who saw this image simply laughed because the women is overweight—and then sent the image to all of their friends. As she read through the many comments she found on her viral picture, she found that people assumed she must be completely addicted to food, too lazy to exercise, etc.

However, this columnist was really the opposite, as she describes herself in her article “My embarrassing picturewent viral:”

I eat right (most of the time) and I exercise (an inordinate amount), but it does little, thanks to a struggle with polycystic ovarian syndrome and a failing thyroid gland. I’m strong, I’m flexible and my doctor assures me my health is good, but the fact remains: I’m larger than someone my height should be.

As Peter Attia addresses in his TEDtalk, fat is not a causer of health problems. Instead is a symptom of greater problems like insulin resistance, food packaging & processing, psychological struggles, and hormone imbalances. Attia even suggests that doctors most likely aren’t even aware of most of the problems that cause weight gain. How are people supposed to fix problems when they haven’t the foggiest of how to fix them?

So while people are told to “lost weight” and find they hardly can, they can be slandered without consequence. It’s an accepted bigotry. A surprising majority of people believe everyone can lose weight if they just try hard enough, and they believe that by shaming those who are overweight, they’ll be motivated to lose weight. Turns out the opposite is true… when people feel shamed they simply put on more weight (read more on that here). Which I don’t think is a huge surprise. Additionally, shaming can lead to even more serious consequences than that, with eating disorders such as Anorexia and Bulimia rampant.

And yet the rude comments continue. Just think of a few months ago when the CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch declared all overweight people “just not cool enough” to wear his brand of clothes. Or of Marie Claire writer Maura Kelly, who wrote that she was disgusted by overweight people simply walking. Or all of the rude comments directed at Adele. Dr. Carolyn Ross even reveals that doctors and nurses aren’t as kind to their overweight patients, that overweight defendants are more likely to receive a guilty verdict, and that children as young as 4 don’t want to make friends with an overweight child.

Of course, at the same time, you can hardly blame most people. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her TED talk, people have been subject to receiving a “single story” of fat people. While Adichie may have fallen into the trap of stereotyping Mexican citizens, most people fall into the trap of stereotyping overweight people—and the media, of course, is a prime factor in that. Advertisements tell us that carrots are “good” and sugar is “bad”—though I don’t think inanimate objects like food really have such moral gravity. Movies tend to portray only the young, thin, and beautiful—with overweight characters being pushed to the side as comics or villains. I believe that I might have dismissed overweight people as well, if I had not been lucky enough to have several amazingly positive stories with overweight people. 

Granted, it’s not safe to create a single story in the other direction either. Most movements fighting Weight Stigma have the catch-phrase “everyone is beautiful”—which I don’t think helps at all, as it simply redirects the attention to a person’s appearance and encourages a dismissal of general health. And, as many of my commenters on Facebook pointed out, thin people certainly can’t avoid judgment either. Thin, beautiful women are often thought of as vain, stupid, or power-hungry, and maybe by pointing out only the problems overweight people face I’m letting the problems of thin people carry on. The figures, words, and format in this poster are as one-sided and inhuman as Weight Stigma is-- for they certainly cannot adequately represent humanity.

However, with this poster, I hope to make people simply stop and think about the words they assign to people based on their appearance. Do you think of a fat person as “lazy”? Or do you think of a thin person as “vain”? To me there is very little difference. It’s unfortunate that overweight people have to carry their struggles so publicly, but there is hope. I hope that we all-- myself included-- can lay such labels to rest, and just enjoy each other as human beings, regardless of sex, skin, or size. 

Webspinna Battle

Old-Fashioned Telephone

Voice Clip: "Your mission, should you choose to accept it"

Mission Impossible Theme

Ain't That a Kick in the Head

Car Noises

Mission Impossible Quotes

Indian Music

Mission Impossible Dialogue

Running Sounds

Explosions

I was insanely pleased with Peter Jackson et al. when I watched the trailer for the first Hobbit movie—almost solely because of the music. The “Misty Mountains” theme exemplified everything Hobbit to me.

            And why? When I was a kid my dad had a 5-disc audiobook of The Hobbit. It was read by some old, staunchly English actor with a deep voice that he could distort into dozens of other voices—one for each dwarf, at least. And the best part? The narrator sang every song. I listened to those CDs dozens of times while lying on my little flower-decorated bed. And so, when I sat down with my laptop and listened to “Misty Mountains” as I watched the trailer, a whole swoosh of memories came back to me. The sound of that music told a story—drawing from the traditions of Middle Earth, the previous portrayals, its own merit… and my own memories.

            Try to draw from this and other experiences, I decided to frame the sounds of my Webspinna in a way that would tell a story—kind of like how Jonathan Lethem framed his plagiarism in such a way that it made an amazingly cohesive essay, or how in that same essay he mentions how some of the best stories come from re-using (like West Side Story, for instance). Consequently, I made my theme “Mission Impossible/Ethan Hunt.” I feel like most people, especially those in our program, have an experience with Mission Impossible—so that brings in the memory element. As I formed my Webspinna with Sarah, I tried to order the sounds in such a way that they would create a story like a Mission Impossible film: I opened with the mission itself, the classic theme, went to cars screeching to the song “Ain’t that a kick in the head”—used as a signal in one of the films, to the music from India—possibly one of the exotic places visited in the films. And, of course, it ends in an explosion. And that pretty much tells the story of a Mission Impossible film.

            In a similar vein, I felt like the whole Webspinna Battle was a story in and of itself. Meeting in a “secret” location and performing beneath personas created an atmosphere that was happily a step or two away from reality. Getting to be so interactive and immediate with the creativity of everyone. It made it almost palpable. The challenge of doing something so completely out of my comfort zone was rewarded by having a truly unique experience.