“This week, on a Very Special Unstapled….” Trigger Warning: This week’s recap touches on both alcoholism and WLS.
Last week: Carnie is a giant fatass (though she says it like it’s a bad thing). Dallas tore through Carnie’s pantry. Carnie went back to work at The Newlywed Game. There was farting.
We begin this week’s episode with Carnie confessioning that she woke up this morning feeling as though her whole world was “wrong”. And if that weren’t bad enough, Dallas is here, and he’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves still attached. OH MY GOD now I feel as though MY whole world is wrong. Dallas, sleeves? Why?
They head out to the back deck with their yoga mats and begin the pre-workout stretching. Dallas asks Carnie if she’s been doing the workout without him. She says no. In fairness, in my experience, doing that kind of choreographed workout by oneself is boring at best. This makes it an exercise form very unlike, say, putting Lady Gaga on as loud as your neighbors can stand and free-form dancing around your living room in your underwear, which is a workout best done alone. Not that I would know. But following choreography without a leader can be frustrating and seriously unfun. (Here, I almost made a joke employing the word “CHORE-eography” but I have refrained. Be grateful.) At least with a DVD or something there’s a pretend-person there with you, shouting encouragement with a deranged smile.
Navy polka-dot dress is by Jane Bon Bon on Etsy;
brown cardi from Marshalls (FINALLY DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR A DECENT BROWN CARDI);
green & black plaid scarf from Marshalls;
burgundy tights from We Love Colors;
yellow flats from Target.
It’s Friday, kids, and that means it’s time for another installment of Kirstie Alley’s Twitter Wisdom! This week Kirstie gives us choices, and muses on the nature of power and oppression.
The questions keep coming, and I am trying my best to provide my own plucky brand of homespun wisdom and advice. Want to join the conversation? Click over to my formspring.me page and read the 75 mostly-anonymous questions and answers I’ve posted so far, or ask me a question of your own. Below, I answer a recent question about size and space.
Q. How can I reconcile taking up more space? The hardest part for me, and what can easily derail my day, are the bus rides to and from work. My esteem can be pretty well massacred by the realization that people don’t want to have to be near me.
A. The issue of space — and how much space we’re individually entitled to, and how some folks resent our taking more than our so-called fair share — is so common, and it’s unavoidable for any of us who use publicly-shared transporation, including commercial air travel. I used to joke that if I wrote a fat memoir, I’d want to call it Adventures in Space, because so much of being a body of a certain size in public is about negotiating spaces that are sometimes just too small for us. Booths in certain restaurants, squeezing between clothing racks in a store, theme-park rides: all of these represent scenarios some fat folks have to think about a lot harder than smaller people. And I know, all too well, how a bad experience on the bus or train can ruin a morning, or a day or a week.
Here are some tips in list form:
1. It isn’t about you. It’s not. The people throwing shade your way don’t know a damn thing about you; they’re blinded by their own assumptions, which say more about them than about you, by far.
2. Or, it IS about you, but not how you think. I fly several times a year, and occasionally find myself on not-full flights. More than once I’ve had a seatmate rocket to an empty seat next to a smaller person, and had to fight the urge to take it personally. Until on one flight, a woman seated next to me asked a flight attendant if she could move, and before she did, she paused to tell me, very kindly: “I’m not moving because I don’t want to sit next to you, but I think you will probably be more comfortable if I do.” Oh, I almost cried! It was such a simple, judgment-free acknowledgment of the limitations of space on an airplane. It’s cramped. It’s uncomfortable even for smaller people, and worse still for those who are fat or tall (or both). Assuming that everyone is looking at you with disgust will only make you feel badly, and more than that, it’s probably not universally true.
3. Even if you are getting legitimate bad vibes from someone, you cannot, in the moment, amend the space you occupy. In other words, you canna change the laws of physics, captain. You will take up the same amount of space whether you are anxious and uncomfortable, or relaxed and unapologetic. Remember this and try not to get bogged down in those negative emotions; they don’t help the situation, and only make you more self-conscious. Some people will project their own expectations onto you no matter what you do, but you don’t have to soak them up; they may impose negativity on you, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept it. Wear headphones, read a book, tune them out, live your life.
Never regret the space you take up. Occupying space is an inexorable part of existing, and regretting it or feeling guilty about it can take a tremendous and exhausting emotional toll over time, as you are, in essence, allowing yourself to feel badly about being in the world. The stranger on the bus who might make you feel badly will likely forget the encounter as soon as he or she gets to work, if not sooner; you shouldn’t carry it around with you either. If someone doesn’t want to be near you, focus on the bright side, remember who you are, and that you’re more than what they see… and enjoy the extra space.
Oh, this is just what I needed today. As a counterpoint to the extreme self-consciousness of famous fat ladies like Carnie Wilson and Kirstie Alley, below is a clip of the always-wondrous Gabourey Sidibe talking about her Oscar nomination on Good Morning America.
Gabby is a treasure because she is completely at home in herself, at least she is now, and I hope she will continue to be in future, and I hope she has a fantastic career regardless of her size. She is entirely human, and she is normal enough that I feel enabled to call her “Gabby” like I know her personally, which I do not. Her enthusiasm is infectious. We want to root for her not just because she is the underdog — though she is — but because she is so like us, or like a family member we love, or like a friend we don’t see often enough. We want to root for her because some people are so astonished that anyone who looks like Gabby could possibly have any depth that they witlessly confuse the actress with her character. A nigh-universal assumption about fat folks, especially fat folks who are also not white, is that they’re all unintelligent, unhappy, pathetic, and pitiable. Though the character of Precious may, on the surface, be seen by some as fitting these descriptions, the actress Gabby does not. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to watch her as herself for more than a few seconds and seriously argue that she’s any of the above. What’s fascinating to me is that while the role and the character she portrays may not do much that is new for cultural representations of fat folks, especially fat folks of color, Gabby herself, just being herself, talking on late night television or popping in on Good Morning America — she is, individually, a revolution.
When I talk about representation, what I mean is the predominating picture that media paints about certain marginalized groups. When I say “marginalized”, I mean those people who don’t get “normal” roles in the television and film worlds that govern so much of our discourse, but instead get stereotyped or caricatured. The fat best friend of the (thin) heroine. The disabled person who inspires the (able-bodied) hero to do good. The black dude who tries to rob or rape the (white) heroine. The poor stranger who gives perspective and bequeaths the wisdom of poverty to the (well-off) hero. And it goes on. These stereotypes are generally presented in contrast to the protagonist, and it’s the protagonist with whom we’re expected to identify, while the supporting pieces serve their purpose to draw the hero out, to make him a deeper character without having any depth of their own. Precious is unusual in giving us a main character so different than what we’re accustomed to, and challenging us to relate to her over the course of the film. Even when we don’t want to. Even when we’d rather turn away, like we would if Precious were a living person on the street, and not a comparatively safe image on a screen.
Gabby, however, takes this further by not only making us want to relate to her as an actress, in opposition to our comfort level, but by also being, herself, a contradiction to what we expect fat black women to be. She is smart, engaging, funny, and above all, charming. I keep reading folks acting like Gabby is the rarest jewel on earth, that nobody else in the world could possibly look like her and have even a tenth of her self-confidence and appeal.
Bullshit.
Gabby represents me. Gabby represents my friends, people I know and love, first-person, real world. Gabby represents a lot of us that our culture and our media don’t believe exist; we are fat unicorns, frolicking in fields of candy flowers, having the unfathomable gall to be happy and enthusiastic and funny and real in a world that demands we be apologetic, and shamed, and chastized, and isolated. My heart bursts with joy when I see this woman on the television because, yes, I feel recognized, and I feel validated. I’m here. I’m real. It’s a miracle. It’s a bloody fucking miracle of impossible proportions, more than I expected, now, ever. How can this be happening? It is.
“Your posts are forcing me to see her humanity and I don’t like it one bit.”
Here, Joy has said something in a few words that would have taken me pages to explain. I want to take a moment to explain my approach to being so hard on fat celebrities, whether it’s via extreme satire, snarky recaps, or simply being a smartass in my usual way, while still trying to recognize that humanity.
The really real reality is that famous people are still people. They’re simply people with an audience, and occasionally with very strange lives. (Not to mention houses with walls around them.) They’re not evil, nor are they sainted; they’re just flawed, conflicted disasters like the rest of us, trying to get by on their love of performance. And that’s not something to be ashamed of, even when the media they make is terrible. They’re following their dreams, and being willing to do so publicly is admirable.
To be precise, I don’t think Carnie Wilson is a bad person. I don’t think Kirstie Alley is a bad person. I am rather made deeply sad when otherwise smart, outspoken women are laid low by body hatred. And sometimes, I have to laugh at things so I don’t cry. Hence: the snark. It’s easy to look at celebrities who frequently spout body-hating garbage and think they’re merely perpetuating a system of fascist beauty standards that hurt far more people than they benefit, and that’s true. But famous people struggle like the rest of us, if not more, because their exposure is that much more dramatic. It’s one thing to have your mother or your significant other give you a hard time about being fat; it’s something else entirely to hear it from TMZ.com, or to have it impact your ability to succeed in your career. Does that mean famous folks get a free pass? Fuck no. I can’t speak for everyone, but they get more scrutiny from me because they have a voice that reaches more people, and thus has the capacity to change things more than the average person. It’s true they don’t have a responsibility to do so, and it’s their right to do whatever they want with their bodies, but I also have a right to be angry with media figures who choose to actively support and distribute ideas that I believe are deeply damaging to the rest of us. It doesn’t mean I hate these people; I don’t know them enough to hate them. It simply means I’m holding them to a certain standard, even knowing I’ll be forever disappointed.
Carnie and Kirstie and a million other nameless women like them are living with blinders on; we all thought there was no alternative to hating ourselves, to deprivation and self-loathing and misery, until one day we discovered otherwise. Some people find new ways of being through friends or acquaintences, on the internet, or by accident. They randomly, or bravely, pick up a book that uses the word “fat” in novel and shocking ways, and lots of other words, in contexts and implications they’d never before considered. Some people see a confident fat woman performing, in a play or a song or a television sitcom, and they suddenly realize she is amazing, and they realize they can also be amazing. And some people see the light on their own; they get so fed up and so angry that one day they open their eyes and where once there was a long, dark corridor running in only two directions, fat and thin, that there is instead a vivid and multifacted three-hundred-sixty-degree universe all around, shimmering with infinite diversity and infinite possibilities, and they see that the fears that were shackling them to sadness and self-loathing are just wisps in the wind. What is the worst part of being fat? Hating yourself. Stop hating yourself, and being fat—or just not being thin, or just being in your body, whatever your body may look like—becomes a routine experience. When you hate yourself, you will always find things to hate; no matter how much weight you lose, you will never be satisfied, because the person you are will not change. It is necessary to accept ourselves for any of us to develop real security and self-esteem. It’s only through acceptance, of all our lives’ changing circumstances, internal and external, that any of us will find our happiness.
So remember this, whenever I’m viciously skewering some fat-hating famous person on the end of my invisible internets-pen: I’m doing it because I expect more from people with this kind of cultural power, because I want everyone on this whole bloody planet to find a peace with themselves that doesn’t rely on a number on the scale. It comes from a place of hope, and not hatred. Think of it as tough love, and I’d do no less for anyone, no matter who they are.
Here’s a shocking confession: I don’t really watch much television. There are but a few shows I follow methodically. Mad Men. Sons of Anarchy (SO underrated). Also, So You Think You Can Dance, when it’s on (when is it on next?). And there are other shows I watch when I happen to notice them. Man vs Wild, because Bear Grylls is completely off his kit and I’m fascinated that someone gave him a television program. The Universe and those crazy Planet Earth series in HD, because they’ve practically got narcotic effects. Sometimes Family Guy. My husband is a huge fan of Metalocalypse so I wind up seeing lots of that — actually, I should say, I wind up seeing it over and over again.
I think that’s about it.
This is all to say that my lack of television-exposure is useful in writing these recaps, as I am able to point out and laugh at things that might blow right past those who watch this stuff on a routine basis. But it also has its drawbacks. By the end of the More to Love recapping extravaganza last year, the concept of spending another hour in front of the TV taking notes was almost unbearable. To give a sense of my so-called process: each episode of Unstapled is thirty minutes long, with commercials. Subtract the commercials and you get, what, twenty-three or so minutes of show. It takes me between 90 minutes and two hours to recap, with the resulting post being around 3,300 words. The hour-long More to Love was a horror of even more ludicrous proportions, requiring between three to four and a half hours of watching and writing for each recap (usually spread over two days), which averaged around 5,000 words apiece. I do this for free. Why do I do this for free? I have no idea. I am sick in the head. Also I love writing, for any reason, which itself may qualify as a form of head-sickness. It’s true that if I had an editor (and I’m sure some of y’all wish that I did) the results would likely be shorter, but I’d still write them first in their original long-ass state.
Also in meta news: Unstapled is repeated about twenty times in a single weekend, clogging up my DVR like a dead rat in a drain. It actually caused my DVR to delete a bunch of episodes of The Universe I was saving for the weekend, so to speak. It’s as if Unstapled is forcefully trying to take over my already-limited TV-watching life.
The questions keep coming, and I am trying my best to provide my own plucky brand of homespun wisdom and advice. Want to join the conversation? Click over to my 
