On the way home this weekend, I was tuner-scanning and landed on a radio program hosted by a John Tesh, called "music and intelligence". As it happened, two of the "intelligence reports" interspersed with the music contained the following things.
Many in this community like to note that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 12. Turns out, size 12 in the sizing system of her day is equivalent to size 6 today. According to Tesh, marketers for women's clothing have for years engaged in a trend of marking the same size clothing with progressively lower numbers. Why? Because most women, who prefer to minimize perceptions of their size, are more likely to purchase clothing with lower size numbers on the tag, and more likely to leave behind clothes of the exact same dimensions with higher size numbers. Ironically enough, because men are more likely to want to inflate perceptions of their own size, progressively smaller sizes of men's clothes are inducted into the scope of "large". One more way to illustrate what Noam Chomsky says: we are often slaves to the programming we receive by the powers that be. At least that would seem to explain where size 0 came from.....
The next intelligence report mentioned an interesting thing about mixing alcohol and soft drinks. Sugar, it seems, inhibits absorption of alcohol, while aspartame accelerates it. The result: drinking liquor mixed with sugarfree soft drinks gets you smashed harder and faster than drinking the same liquor mixed with sugared ones.
Today the KPFA women's program took on breast cancer from a feminist perspective, narrated largely by a woman describing herself as the only fat woman in her support group, despite what she reported was a RedBook article seeming to proclaim that fatness was the sole arbiter of who would contract this malady. That can be found here:
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=22663
One interesting part of the show was an interview with a "cancer navigator", described as a volunteer from a group specializing in escorting cancer patients to their medical visits and helping them feel more confident and take more control of their care. Makes me wonder if this might be something for the Health At Every Size advocates to consider: "fat navigators"!
Many in this community like to note that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 12. Turns out, size 12 in the sizing system of her day is equivalent to size 6 today. According to Tesh, marketers for women's clothing have for years engaged in a trend of marking the same size clothing with progressively lower numbers. Why? Because most women, who prefer to minimize perceptions of their size, are more likely to purchase clothing with lower size numbers on the tag, and more likely to leave behind clothes of the exact same dimensions with higher size numbers. Ironically enough, because men are more likely to want to inflate perceptions of their own size, progressively smaller sizes of men's clothes are inducted into the scope of "large". One more way to illustrate what Noam Chomsky says: we are often slaves to the programming we receive by the powers that be. At least that would seem to explain where size 0 came from.....
The next intelligence report mentioned an interesting thing about mixing alcohol and soft drinks. Sugar, it seems, inhibits absorption of alcohol, while aspartame accelerates it. The result: drinking liquor mixed with sugarfree soft drinks gets you smashed harder and faster than drinking the same liquor mixed with sugared ones.
Today the KPFA women's program took on breast cancer from a feminist perspective, narrated largely by a woman describing herself as the only fat woman in her support group, despite what she reported was a RedBook article seeming to proclaim that fatness was the sole arbiter of who would contract this malady. That can be found here:
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=22663
One interesting part of the show was an interview with a "cancer navigator", described as a volunteer from a group specializing in escorting cancer patients to their medical visits and helping them feel more confident and take more control of their care. Makes me wonder if this might be something for the Health At Every Size advocates to consider: "fat navigators"!
