Sandie S-R
Well-Known Member
Found this article about a San Diego Club....
Enjoy!
Big Beautiful Women show us that being large isn't the end of the
world
By Kinsee Morlan
Padre Gold isn't a fancy bar. The American Legion-owned watering
hole and banquet room is a low-key neighborhood joint in Linda Vista
with a nice-size parking lot, cheap drinks and a sweet wooden
checkerboard dance floor. There's nothing frilly or pretentious
about the place, which makes it the perfect setting for Kathy
Hernandez and her new Big Beautiful Women club night, Club Catalina.
"Five dollars to dance or free if you're just here to drink," says
Kathy, roosted at her typical spot at a desk just inside the doorway
beneath a huge American Legion logo painted on the yellowish-gold
walls.
It's just after 9 p.m. and the crowd is slowly starting to trickle
in. Kathy's carefully painting on a second coat of "Big Money Frost"
green nail polish to complete her look for the night. It's a week
away from St. Patty's Day, but next week she's taking Club Catalina
on a field trip to the Santee drive-in, and the week after that
she's got an Easter/spring- fling theme planned. Kathy's red wig and
bright-green, oversized plastic hat make her blue eyes even more
piercing than usual tonight. Her smile, too, seems prettier. Maybe
it's the perfectly applied lipstick or her soft white skin, which,
by the way, makes her look about half of her 41 years.
Kathy's got a beautiful face. She's been told that her entire life,
especially by people who are meeting her for the first time. It's a
nice but unintentionally underhanded compliment that many bigger
women get from family and perfect strangers alike.
"Your face is so pretty," they say. Translated, that means: "If only
you could lose some weight."
Kathy twiddles her necklace, a gold chain with a pendant shaped like
a baby with her son's ruby-red birth stone in the middle. She never
takes that necklace offnot even when she showers.
"Hey, how are you doin'?" Kathy asks as a few Navy boys pay the
cover and walk on through. "Que paso, A.J.?" she says to the next
guy.
Kathy's fluent in Spanish. Her ex-husband is Mexican and, when
explaining the whole Big Beautiful Women (BBW) club thing to
outsiders who aren't big, she often likes to cite her husband's
reasoning, "If he saw you, he'd say, `Eeeeew, fea flaquita'"
(translation: Eeeew, ugly little skinny girl). Some guys feel like
they're hugging a bag of bones when they hug a skinny chick, she
says.
Kathy's bright-red phone rings. "No, you know what, he didn't come,"
she says in a serious tone. "He said he was gonna come and he didn't
come. Don't make excuses for him . OK, well, just get here when you
get here and do not drive too fast, OK?"
Kathy has a strict policy of no-nonsense and self-respect when it
comes to men. Men, it turns out, think they can get away with
certain things when it comes to dating a fat chick. She says they
try to pull the ol' midnight booty call, the "Let's just hang out at
my house instead of going out in public" move, or they'll follow a
girl out to the parking lot after ignoring her at a club the whole
night, and only after they're out of their friends' sight will they
ask her out. But that crap doesn't fly with Kathy and her crewno
way.
In an official-hostess role now, Kathy gets out of her seat and
makes her way around the club. After three years' experience
promoting another BBW night in San Diego, Kathy knows her role. It's
her job to make everyone, especially newcomers, feel welcome. She's
got to herd people onto the dance floor if they aren't dancing
already. She has to take dozens of digital pictures to go up on the
club's website, and she has to monitor the one or two Padre Gold
regulars who inevitably find their way into the banquet hall part of
the bar without paying the $5 coverusually she finds them grinding
up against "her girls," as she calls them, a big smile plastered
across their faces.
The guys who come to Club Catalina every Saturday are a mishmash of
military men, young black guys, old white guys, corn-fed
Midwesterners and everything in between. Some guys treat it like any
other clubit's a meat market serving up bigger-than- average racks
of lamb. For others, it's a chance to take their longtime ongoing
personal ad, "SM seeking fun-loving BBW," off the Internet and into
real life. Other guys, though, say they just go for the friendly
atmosphere. They say everyone's just out to have fun without
pretension at Club Catalina, and they dig that.
The girls who come to the club are one big group of friends. They
all know each other and treat each other with the kind of shit-
talking yet funny swagger most save for bosom buddies. It's not like
other clubs, where clumps of females stand around in their closed-
off, cliquey waymost of the girls are outgoing and won't hesitate
to invite you to their table for a drink or drag your ass on the
dance floor.
The BBW community is tight and surprisingly small, considering the
size of San Diego. If you're checking out Club Catalina for the
first time, both the girls and guys want you not only to come back,
but to come back with all your friends. And if you're one of those
young BBWs who didn't know this type of club existed, or didn't know
you yourself could be categorized as a BBW, they really, really want
you.
"I'm 38, and I have not always had this same attitude my whole
life," says Kimberly Johnston, a single mother who 15 years ago was
wearing clothing five sizes too big for her because she thought she
could hide her fat. Now she alters her clothing by hand to make
everything hug her voluptuous curves. "If I had this attitude when I
was youngernot that I didn't go out at allbut I always felt like a
fish out of water. Had I had this attitude back then, man, I would
have been a completely different person. I would have been going out
all the time. I guess I would have evolved a lot quicker."
But evolution for fat people is actually more like adaptation to a
world that doesn't understand or accept them. Social groups like the
one found at Club Catalina exist in cities across the country
because the thin-obsessed contemporary United States culture isn't
so kind to bigger folks. People like Kathy have found that it's
better, or at least easier, to separate from the mainstream and form
a subculture where size acceptance is the raison d'être. As things
stand, fat people are still metaphorically sitting in the back of
the bus.
"Would it be acceptable for me to go over to a guy in a wheelchair
and start berating him because he's in a wheelchair?" asks
Kathy. "That wouldn't be socially acceptable. But three guys over
there walking by and going, `Look at that fat cow.' Is that socially
acceptable? Right now it is. And I've watched mothers with children,
they go, `Mommy, she's fat.' Do the moms say anything to that kid?
Usually not. They go, `Hmm, yeah, she's fat.' But it doesn't bother
me. It can't. If I let it, it'd eat me up inside. If I had to worry
about these three guys coming in and looking at me with disgust and
saying, "Eew, would you do her?' I've actually heard that. What am I
supposed to say? Should I call them assholes? I've done that before,
don't get me wrong, but I can't do it every time."
As if the social ostracizing wasn't enoughgrocery aisles are still
too narrow, seatbelts too short, bathroom stalls too small, clothing
too limited, airplane seats nearly impossible, medical equipment
like MRI machines not accommodating according to the National
Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), if you're fat, it's
harder to get or keep a good job. Peggy Howell, spokesperson for
NAAFA, says a majority of letters the group gets come from people
who believe they've been victims of size discrimination.
"Before I was part of this whole size-acceptance movement," Howell
says, "my own boss told me to lose 20 pounds or lose my job.
"Discrimination against people of size is still rampant," she
continues. "It's still a very serious matter, and, yes, it is a
civil-rights matter. Size crosses all other boundaries. People of
size are both genders, all nationalities, all races and all income
levels, so singling people out because of our size is not only a
civil-rights issue, it's absurd."
Even more absurd to Howell are things like Mississippi House Bill
282, a bill introduced last year that would've prohibited
restaurants with more than five seats from serving people determined
to be obese by the state's Department of Health. The authors of the
bill, which was killed shortly after it was introduced, later
admitted that it had all been a silly publicity stunt meant to draw
attention to Mississippi' s obesity problem. Not funny to those who
would've been categorized as obese.
The World Health Organization defines "overweight" as someone with a
body mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher. BMI is calculated by weight
in kilograms, divided by height in meters, squared. You're
considered obese if your BMI is 30 or higher and morbidly obese if
it's 40 or higher. But in case you haven't heard the griping coming
from the size-acceptance campbacked up by books like Fat! So? by
Marilyn Wann, The Diet Myth by Paul Campos, Dispensing with the
Truth by Alicia Mundy, Fat Politics by J. Eric OliverBMI isn't
really a good determinant of unhealthy weight, and maybe, just
maybe, this whole so-called "obesity epidemic" is a bit out of
control. Just not in the way most people think.
BMI critics like to use Tom Cruise as the unwitting spokesperson the
short yet muscled man has a BMI of 31, which makes him technically
obese. Using BMI as the standard, according to the National Health
and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2001 to 2004, about two-
thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese and the estimated
total cost of obesity in the United States in 2000 was about $117
billion. The point authors like Campos, who's also a law professor
at the University of Colorado in Boulder, want to make is that the
numbers you typically hear associated with the obesity epidemic are
inflated. What the numbers suggest is that overweight and obese
individuals are likely unhealthy and therefore causing a strain on
the medical system.
"It's not that there's no health risks involved with being
overweight or obese," Campos says. "It's not that it's 100-percent
falseit's just 97-percent false, and the risks are widely
exaggerated and manipulated for all kinds of purposes. You know, the
pharmaceutical industry is just behind so much of this propaganda so
they can get the next generation of diet pills through the
pipeline . It's estimated that the weight-loss industry pulls in 40
to 50 billion [dollars] a yeardouble the money people spend on book
purchases a year, just to put things in perspective. "
According to the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes
Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), all of which rely on BMI to cull their statistics, overweight
and obese individuals are at increased risk for numerous diseases
and health conditions, including hypertension, type 2 diabetes and
strokes.
Campos isn't saying that's not true. He's simply arguing that it's
only people who are in the highest weight ranges who are at risk for
health problems. "BMI is set at a ridiculously low level so we can
pretend there's this epidemic going on."
But why?
Once something is called an "epidemic," says Abigail Saguy, an
assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, who's written extensively
on obesity and society, media pay attention, the Food and Drug
Administration approves drugs quicker, researchers get funding and
private health organizations get their good-intentioned messages
about proper nutrition and exercise heard. If something's an
epidemic, it gets priority.
Saguy traced the origin of the term "obesity epidemic" to the mid-
'90s, after a publication by CDC researchers noticed the increasing
number of people who are overweight or obese according to the BMI.
Soon after the report was released, Xavier Pi-Sunyer wrote an
editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. In it, he said, "If this were tuberculosis, we'd call
it an epidemic."
"So it was metaphorical at first," Saguy explains, "but then the
metaphor was dropped and people just use it. Some people know that
epidemic can mean `more than to be expected,' but that's so
subjective, because what sort of numbers are we supposed to expect?
Most lay readers still hear `wild,' `uncontained, ' `spread'
and `contagion' when they hear the word `epidemic.'"
And more than just finding a nicer, politically correct term, Saguy
suggests rethinking or reframing the entire campaign. In a way,
she's saying we should leave fat people aloneit's the unhealthy
people we should be targeting with get-healthy messages. There are
plenty of people, she says, who are overweight and healthy.
Take Rachel Richardson for example. A journalist and graduate
student in Cincinnati, Ohio, Richardson writes The-F-Word.org a blog
about food, fat and feminismand studies the history of eating
disorders. She's also a survivor of bulimia and anorexiashe lost
175 pounds and eventually got down to 125, which was considered an
average BMI for her height. "But it required an anorexic lifestyle
to maintain," she says, "and now that I have the healthiest
relationship I've ever had with food, I'm back to being considered
as fat again."
Richardson is a vegetarian and tries to eat organic and locally
grown foods as often as possible, but her picture on her blog shows
a full-figured woman most would consider chubby.
Basically, the losers in the war on obesity, according to Saguy, are
people like Richardson who are visibly overweight but technically
healthy. The huge number of people who fit in that category are
continually stigmatized because of a public-health policy that says
being fat is inherently bad.
"The commonsense wisdom is that fat is a choice," Saguy says. "That
a lot of people are able to justify their bigotry by blaming fat
people for their predicamentyou know, I've actually heard people
say this: `I'm doing them a justice by making them feel bad.' That
by stigmatizing fat people you provide an incentive for them to lose
weight in the same way you stigmatize smokers to get them to stop
smoking. And I have no idea if it works with smoking, but what I
know is that it's rarely effective and it has all sorts of negative
effects with weight, often leading people to binge or stay indoors
and not go out. In general, I just don't think social stigma's a
good policy."
In a study published this month in the American Journal of Public
Health, researchers found that the difference between actual and
desired body weight is a stronger predictor than BMI of mental and
physical health. In other words, the results raise the possibility
that some of the health effects of the obesity epidemic are related
to the way people see their bodies, and the way people see their
bodies is the way society sees their bodiesfat, disgusting and
unhealthy.
"It's a big mistake to assume that because someone is fat, they have
a bad lifestyle," Campos says. "You know, that they compulsively eat
or never exercise, because there are lots of fat people who have
perfectly healthy lifestyles. And there are plenty of thin people
who have quite unhealthy lifestyles. It's very dangerous to
generalize about that stuff and it's very socially corrosive to use
body mass as a proxy for healthy lifestyles. And it's also very
false to tell fat people that they'll be better off if they try to
make themselves into thin people.
"The fact is," Campos says, "most diets fail. What we should be
doing is recognizing that healthy people come in all sizes and
especially that pathologizing heavier bodies doesn't help anybody.
It hurts. The attitude of our public-health authorities is literally
that the reason there are fat people is that they have not been
informed of the social desirability of thinness, which is just about
as crazy as thinking that there are poor people because they just
aren't getting the message that it's desirable to have money in this
country. And, to me, I don't think it's a coincidence that the
population has gotten heavier as the obsession with thinness has
gotten more intense."
The politics of weight aside, Kathy and her girls are fat and having
fun. Back at Padre Gold the morning after Club Catalina, Kathy and
three friends show up for a "passion party," a new take on the
Tupperware parties of old, only with candles, sex toys and lotions
instead of air-tight lids and durable plastic. The passion party,
though, falls through, and the ladies make the best of it by
chatting over a pitcher of ice water instead.
"Forget it," one of the women, Cynthia, says. "I'm having a party
soon . This one, the lady brings plus-size lingerie. She has up to
size 8X."
"What size do you guys think Somber is?" asks Kathy. "I want to buy
her a present."
"Somber" is Susan Marquis. She's what's known as a super-size BBW,
and she helps Kathy charge cover at the door.
Somber is upward of 500 pounds and, because of her size, has to
order her clothing custom-made. She's never had any luck in the
lingerie department, so she makes all her bras and underwear
herself. Somber got her nickname years ago. She used to work in the
complaint department for a local business and was the only one who
could ever calm anyone down. It's easy to see howSomber is
hilarious and more confident than most women, thick or thin. She
drove up to Club Catalina in a small Toyota truck covered in mostly
political bumper stickers, including one small yellow one that
reads, "Fat people are harder to kidnap." A long black custom-made
velvet dress she was wearing cost her $500. She walked in limping
because her heart medication had given her gout.
Healthy or not, Somber thinks it's important to support Club
Catalina and other BBW events. She herself runs a Yahoo! meetup
group, San Diego BBW and BHM (big handsome men), which is a group
geared toward family-friendly socializing, and she also runs a
nonprofit that provides clothing for plus-sized people with low
incomes.
"I always try to support this establishment, obviously because I'm a
big girl," Somber says. "But, say if I go out by myselfwhich I do
go by myself because I'm not shysay I go to 'Canes or InCahoots,
people will give me attention because I'm different. And it's not
necessarily negativeI mean, it can get negative sometimes because
there are jerks, unfortunately, but you tend to just brush them off
because, especially me, I literally have thick skin." Somber laughs,
then goes on to explain that, both outside and inside the BBW world,
people as big as her can fall into the fetish category. There are
men, like a little Mexican man who was at Club Catalina the night
before and has been following Somber around for the past decade, who
are fascinated or obsessed with large women. There also exists what
are known as "feeders," men who target mildly overweight women and
feed them until they're huge. And then there are "squashers," men
who pay women over 500 pounds to sit on their chests.
But outside the fetish realm there are men with simple preferences
belly men who like girls with jiggly tummies and, of course, boob
guys and butt guys who like the plus-size versions better.
Eventually, the girls decide they don't know Somber's size and it'd
be better to buy her something else. They move on to the topic of
dieting and weight loss.
"It's my choice not to lose 50 to 60 pounds," Kimberly Johnston
says. "I mean, it's a vicious cycle, I could tell you all about
being fat: You're depressed, so you eat. Then you feel bad, and then
you eatyou know what I mean? I understand how it happens, and it
doesn't make me a bad person because I can't get out of it. But I
did do something about it. I got to the point where I had severe
health problems. I was diabetic and severely depressed. My
cholesterol was so bad I should be dead. It was so out of control.
My whole life was being depressed, sleeping then driving through a
drive-through. I couldn't pull out of it, and I didn't, so I got
weight-loss surgery to get better, and I've put some weight back on
since then. It's like any addiction, and I have to learn to live
with it. And coming to Club Catalina helps me. I don't have what it
takes to weigh 140 pounds. I weigh 200 pounds and, realistically,
I'll probably weigh 200 pounds for the rest of my life."
"You know what," Cynthia adds, "I work in the medical field, and you
would not believe the skinny people's health problems: hypertension,
anemia, cholesterol. Matter of fact, just two days ago, a skinny
person had cholesterol over 1,000the whole lipid panel. You know,
unreal. And big people come in with lipid panels that look great.
You know, I don't have any health problems at all. In my eyes,
health is 90-percent mental, 10-percent physical. It's the
circumstances of what goes on in your life and how you deal with it.
I went from 348 and lost 70 pounds. Now I feel fine. If you're
comfortable in your skin being big, who gives a shit, you know what
I mean? Promote how you feel. Promote who you are."
Club Catalina happens every Saturday night at Padre Gold, 7245 Linda
Vista Road. Check out groups.yahoo. com/group/ bBWClubCatalina or
www.myspace. com/bbwclubcatal ina.
http://www.sdcitybe at.com/cms/ story/detail/ fat_and_happy/ 6747/-1/
Enjoy!
