The state of MeMe Roth's mental health

I live in a part of the world where Meme Roth has no currency as a media pundit. This could change at any moment, all it takes is one journalist to give her a platform, and she'd be away, they'd all be calling her up because she provides what they want: colour, sound-bites, antagonism, and outrageous opinions. It doesn't matter that her claims are spurious, her expertise a sham, her organisation a front. The war on obesity is fashioned by mainstream media as a duel of twirling show-offs. Though Roth is no friend of mine, and there is nothing about her message that I support, I think she is really good at what she does within this context. Wannabe media-jammer fatties could well take a few tips from her. Fat activists might think about developing a critical approach to media too, why not criticise these dumby 'debate' formats? Or the system that creates and supports unsatisfying mass platforms for discussing fat?

A few of us (hi Corinna and Hannele) are noticing a trend in the way that people talk about Roth. Again and again she is dismissed as mentally ill, and as someone suffering an eating disorder. These diagnoses are handed out by such experts in mental health as law professor Paul Campos; Jezebel.com contributor Jenna Sauers; and approximately 5,000 (give or take a few) angry bloggers and commenters, such as those adding their words of wisdom to Ruth Davis Konigsberg's profile of Roth for Elle in 2008, or those that turn up if you Google "MeMe Roth" and "mentally ill".

Such pop diagnoses are worthless, but act as shorthand for: I don't agree with you, I don't understand you, I wish you did not exist. These sentiments are valid, but why wrap them up in accusations of mental illness? Demonising someone doesn't make them stop, it doesn't solve any problems.

Historically speaking, "You must be mentally ill" has been used as a slur against women and against dissidents, a way of shutting up those of us who are angry and unruly. Perhaps some commentators will only be happy when Roth has finally been lobotomised or had her brain zapped in some Frances Farmer scenario. Lock her up in a secure unit from which she can never escape. That would stop folks from listening to her say mean or stupid things about fat people! That would remove the onus on people like us to just switch her off whenever she comes on the TV, to stop adding to her mythology.

I'm angry about how accusing Roth of being anorexic and mentally ill adds to the stigma and shame that makes life extremely difficult for people with these conditions, as well as those who love them. Mental illness is a tough ride, I've been there myself, and people experiencing it deserve compassion and support.

I'm furious, too, that people who call Roth mentally ill are saying that so-called crazy people, or people with eating disorders, supposedly have nothing to contribute to anything and should just crawl away and die. Has no one ever heard of Mad Pride or the psychiatric survivor movement? And what if Roth responded to her accusers and said: "Actually, yes I do have an eating disorder, yes, I am mentally ill." What then?

Is this what killed Fat Liberation?

I came across a fierce account in a Québécois lesbian separatist anthology last week. Writing in the early 90s, Kate Moran explains how the ideology supporting Overeaters Anonymous basically decimated contemporary Fat Liberation in lesbian communities in the US (and presumably Canada). It's an understandably angry piece, I'm not sure how rigorous it is, and it's certainly of its time, but it still caught my eye.

You might not think that radical lesbians, and separatists in particular, are particularly relevant to fat stuff today. But they were the ones pushing for new ways of thinking about fat at the time, and I think their legacy in terms of fat activism has since become more mainstream. So it's interesting to me that there is this account accusing a movement, that was certainly influenced by feminist psychoanalytic explanations of eating disorders that conflate compulsive eating with fatness, for devastating fat politics. I would like to find other sources that discuss this theory.

The reference is timely because the publicity for a two day seminar celebrating and discussing Susie Orbach has just gone out from my university. The discourse that dismays Moran is still alive and well, and being perpetuated in the academy.

I must admit to a strange fascination with early 1980s feminist psychoanalytic accounts of fat women. Orbach, Kim Chernin and Susan Bordo are the Holy Trinity of academic discourse on fat in the social sciences. Bordo is less rooted in psychoanalysis, but I think her need to explain fat in terms of symbolism and pathology makes her fit right in with the others. Marion Woodman is also cited occasionally.

My training as a psychotherapist has led me to reject psychodynamic unconscious process explanations for how bodies look. I lean less on the supernatural and more on the practical, I think that fat bodies are part of the fabric of humanity, part of human body diversity, not evidence of disrupted inner processes. It is stupid to make universal claims about 'fat women' because this group is so diverse. We're normal, and what fat represents is dependent on time and place, it is highly contingent.

The Holy Trinity's works are repeatedly cited as evidence that feminism has a grip on fat, but I think they've got the wrong feminism, it was the separatists, and the groups influenced by The Fat Underground who provided the stronger analysis of fat, linking it more authoritatively to structural power, being explicit about fat, and writing from direct experience. Orbach, Chernin and Bordo don't really write about fat, they use slenderness, dieting, 'body image' and eating disorders as proxies. In the long term I think this has been very damaging, fat has been obscured by other topics, the discourse has been stunted, with real-world repercussions.

I temper my dismay about this sorry state of affairs by a) doing my work, b) hoping that Fat Studies will replace the Holy Trinity, and c) grim humour. Woodman's absurd claim had me giggling in the library last week. She pronounces: "Every woman haunted by obesity knows the agony of looking into a mirror and seeing an owl staring back at her" (p.9). And there's more, which I'm reproducing here, in full snark-o-vision, in the hope that laughing at such preposterous, condescending nonsense will help reduce its power over us.

Edited to add: Look what cleanskies drew

Personality Problems of Obese Women

1. Tends to live life in terms of other people's needs and reactions. May compensate by becoming fiercely possessive. Danger of becoming an automaton.

2. Convinced of her own unworthiness therefore hypersensitive to rejection. May be compensated by an inflated view of her own self-worth. The unconscious body mirrors this in size.

3. As an adult, still dependent on the mother or father, at the same time rebellious against them.

4. Life a desperate search for her own identity, physically and psychically. Wants to feel she is in control of her own body and own life. Without this, a gorwing sense of despair develops.

5. Fears social contact with her peer group, develops and overwhelming sense of aloneness and loneliness.

6. Weak ego leads to inability to cope with reality, and flights into fantasy with a princely father or his surrogate. Fantasies tend to be very inflated.

7. Unaware of own shadow. Feels herself manipulated and victimised by evil forces from outside (eg. parents, Devil, God), but blind to the personal reality of evil.

8. "Passivity" terrifies her. No understanding of positive feminine energy. "To surrender" for her means giving up, cowardice, loss of control, annihilation. Cannot understand "losing one's life to find one's life," either sexually or spiritually. Resultant fear of sexuality, spontaneous feeling, and orgasm.

9. Devoted to Appollonian order and discipline. Terrified of anything remotely smacking of the Dionysian, therefore prone to possession by it (eg. midnight binges).

(Woodman, 1982:40)

References

Chernin, K. (1983) Womansize: the tyranny of slenderness, London: The Women's Press.

Moran, K. (1992) 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Fat Liberation and Overeaters Anonymous', in: Charest, D., Coulombe, J. & Turcotte, L. (eds.) Dossier: Oppression de la Grosseur. Montréal: Amazones d'Hier, Lesbiennes d'Aujourdhui, 103-112.

Orbach, S. (1978) Fat Is A Feminist Issue: How to lose weight permanently – without dieting, London: Arrow Books.

Woodman, Marion (1982) The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine, Toronto: Inner City Books.

I am now Dame Charlotte Cooper

Last night I got made a Dame because of my work as a fat activist.

I was at this place called Bird Club, which is a wild club night in East London, run by a woman called Bird la Bird. This sentence doesn't come anywhere near describing the world that Bird Club represents; specifically, an amazing mixture of politics, performance, old and new school homosexual women-ish people, mixed with saucy comedy, which itself is part of a lively, offbeat, often queer, clubbing culture in East London. Okay, that comes closer, but Bird Club is really unique too, thanks to Bird's vision, organisational powers and artistic sensibility. What can I say? It's a hoot, and one of the few places where I get cruised by hot fatty-loving dykes when I'm out and about.

So onto the Dame thing. People who live in the UK will probably know what it means to be a Dame. People outside, or beyond the British Empire's grasping claws, might not be so clued-in, so I'll explain. Basically, a Dame is a woman who the Queen, or King, but essentially the British establishment, has decided is a brilliant person. It's a rare honour to be made a Dame, it means you've really made it.

Sounds great eh? The only problem is that the Queen is the head of the British class system, as well as the figurehead for a power structure that ensures and enshrines privilege for the few at the expense of the many. Often this privilege is hereditary, you don't earn it, you are born into it. You don't have to be upper class to be a Dame, but it helps. The other thing is that titles such as Dame or Knight or whatever, which sound like they've jumped out of a jolly fairy tale, are related to British colonialism. If you don't know anything about the British Empire, I advise you to find out about this vile system of global oppression that the UK (but mostly England) spawned, because the values and symbols of its heyday still influence the British character and landscape today. So Dames and royal honours in general: not such a great thing. The Queen and all she stands for, not such a great thing either. I would love to see the Royal family disappear down the dumper, though there are probably monarchists reading this who would disagree.

I will never appear on any honours list produced by a British monarch and I wouldn't want to. I don't want people who uphold a system I hate to champion my work, such support would be an insult, it would be appropriation. I respect people who refuse to accept the honours when they are offered. But being made a Dame at Bird Club is a different matter. I'm thrilled beyond belief.

Back to the story. Part of Bird's genius is that she's managed to create a universe of her own, where things make sense even though they're quite strange. You may have read her manifesto in the sublime Femmes of Power (and look, there she is on the cover with Maria Mojo), and Bird Club is a living manifestation of that, and more. One of the things that Bird Club does is honour people who are worth honouring. Bird and her co-organisers do this by making people Dames. This is not a Queen-establishment-colonial type deal, it's a parody of that. Parodies are critical. Bird declares a hatred for the Empire, and although being a Dame at Bird Club is an honour, it's also acknowledged as an excuse for a bit of arse-kissing.

Last night I got called up to the stage in front of a couple of hundred of East London's finest dykes (and queers, trans'es, heteros, and friends... sorry for the erasure and thanks for the reminder Finn), cheering, to receive my honour: a golden budgie statue with a plaque that declares Dame Charlotte Cooper. I jumped for joy! I pushed people out of the way to get to the stage! Sorry! I got my arse kissed! It was brilliant. My investiture was shared with Dame Lindsay River and Dame Lois Weaver, two incredible and inspiring femmes whom I was proud to be among.

Whereas becoming a 'real' Dame would be like sucking the devil's teat, my new title feels like a beautiful blessing from the extraordinary community I come from. I'm not going to pretend I'm some rock hard character, I worry sometimes that I'm being too obsessive about fat, or 'taking it too far,' or believing in things that make no sense to most people. It can be hard to say things that don't win you any friends or which make people uncomfortable. But as a Dame I feel so encouraged, it makes me feel validated, and I'm totally grateful, and I'll keep doing my fat work with renewed determination. Thanks Birdy!

Bird Club Photos via the fabulous skull_bone's Flickr stream.

Come and see me give ten reasons why I'm a fat activist

I'm giving a little talk as part of the Goldsmith's College Student Union Ladyfest. It's called Ten Reasons Why I'm A Fat Activist. Why don't you come along? You don't have to be a student, fat or an activist!

Meryl Trussler, who invited me, is helping to put on a gig for the 'fest too. Fancy it?

Ten Reasons Why I'm A Fat Activist
by Charlotte Cooper

Wednesday 24 February 2010
4pm

Stephen Lawrence Committee Room
Student Union Building (also called the Tiananmen Building)
Goldsmiths College
Dixon Road
New Cross
London SE14


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Diet Songs: Tab

The repetition of the word 'beautiful' in this diet song is remarkable. It's not just that Tab is a beautiful drink, drunk by the beautiful people you'd like to be, themselves made beautiful by a fizzy diet drink; it's more that Tab itself is a philosophy of beauty. Whilst I like Tab's groovy lettering, I think this application of 'beautiful' is massively overstated and, basically, a lie.

In fact, if I rewrote the jingle to better reflect reality I might sing that Tab cola is a product of early diet-era marketing savvy, drunk in the name of fat hatred by people who don't care about its carcinogenic artificial sweeteners. Where's the beauty in that?

Maybe it's the multiple re-formulations in the wake of the cancer scares, and auxiliary brand failures (Tab Clear, anyone?), that signalled Tab's demise. The Coca-Cola Company poured its energy into Diet Coke's world domination, though I hear that there are still some die-hard fans who insist they like Tab for the taste. I imagine the Tab office in some dusty corner of the Coca-Cola Company's empire, the beautiful Tab people still working there despite it all, they've become all dusty and a bit dotty.

The original diet song is very frantic but nowhere near as frenzied as the Diet Pepsi song, or the one for Diet Coke. These jingles embody mid-80s hysteria. Our version is more mellow, starting off quite folky and then given some Pierre Henry/Les Yper-Sound treatment. I drew some beautiful people to go with it.

Diet Songs: Tab by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 600kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Continuing the discussion about fat and disability

I'm a bit late in mentioning this but I've only just come across it myself, though as Lucy mentions, I saw an earlier draft.

Last December my friend and colleague Lucy Aphramor published an article in Disability & Society in which she extends and updates my own paper, which appeared in that same journal over ten years ago.

It's exciting to see developments in the work I did on my MA in the early 90s, which was then reformulated as my book Fat & Proud, as well as in my original Disability & Society article. Hannele Harjunen has also used this paper as a starting point for her own research. My own work didn't come out of nothing, I remain indebted to my MA supervisor at the University of East London, Dr Jenny Corbett, who had the brilliant idea of applying the Social Model of Disability to fat stuff.

One of the things that I like about Lucy's work here is that it shows how valuable it can be to explore experience and identity through different approaches. I think this is a dynamic process that has potential to instigate open dialogue usefully, and benefit all parties. This is especially so when, as so often happens, the identity is usually restricted to one sphere, namely medicalisation.

Anyway, please read and comment. Let me know if you have trouble gaining access to Lucy's paper.

Aphramor, Lucy (2009) 'Disability and the anti-obesity offensive', Disability & Society, 24:7, 897-909. (Here's a link to the journal)

Cooper, Charlotte (1997) 'Can a fat woman call herself disabled?', Disability & Society, 12:1, 31–41 (I put it online).

Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue - this conference looks incredible (and I'm one of the keynotes! Yippee!)

Holey moley, check this out! Spread the word!

Conference Call For Papers
Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue
10 – 11 September, 2010
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

While cultural anxieties about fatness and stigmatisation of fat bodies in Western cultures have been central to dominant discourses about bodily 'propriety' since the early twentieth century, the rise of the 'disease' category of obesity and the moral panic over an alleged global 'obesity epidemic' has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, to give voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies.

This two-day event will put Australasian Fat Studies into conversation with critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together scholars from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as activists, health care professionals, performers and artists. This conference seeks to open a dialogue between scholars, health care professionals and activists about the productive and enabling critical possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant notions about health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, political interventions, and beyond.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

* Charlotte Cooper
(Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)

* Karen Throsby
(Department of Sociology, University of Warwick)

Abstracts are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):

* Interventions to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise programs, weight loss pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgeries);

* The ethico-political implications of the medicalisation of ‘obesity’;

* Constructions of the ‘fat child’ in childhood obesity media reportage;

* Representations of fat bodies in film, television, literature or art;

* Intersections of medical discourse and morality around ‘obesity’;

* The somatechnics of fatness;

* Fat performance art, fat positive performance troupes;

* Histories of fat activism and/or strategies for political intervention;

* Fat and queer histories/identities;

* Fat embodiment online, the Fat-O-Sphere;

* Feminist responses to fatness;

* Constructions of fatness in a range of cultural contexts;

* Systems of body quantification, measurement, and conceptualizations of (in)appropriate ‘size’;

* Fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, disability and/or ageing.

Please send abstracts of 300 words, or panel proposals, to Dr Samantha Murray via email at Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au by Friday, 16 April 2010.

Sponsored and hosted by the Somatechnics Research Centre, Macquarie University, Australia.

Two Fat Studies Calls For Papers

The Fat Studies Interest Group
US National Women's Studies Association Conference
11-14 November 2010, Denver

Proposal deadline: 20 February

Fatness, Gender and Popular Culture: Critical Interventions, Creative Resistances

This session seeks to utilize the conference subtheme “the critical and the creative” to examine fat feminisms and their important work to challenge weightism, fatphobia and sizeism in dominant society and popular culture. This work, comprised of multiple activist strategies, seeks to utilize fat-positive feminisms to dislodge patriarchal notions of bodily “perfection” and thin- supremacy. In this session, we invite papers and speakers which speak about the work of the fat liberation movement, particularly social, political, artistic, performative, media and literary strategies of resistance to hegemonic ideologies of gender and weight. Topics might include:
* Fat positive performance troupes: burlesque, cheerleaders, dance squads, performance art, theatre etc.
* Fat positive media and new media, such as film, digital video, blogs, vlogs, zines, YouTube, websites etc.
* Fat Positive political activism, demonstrations, picketing, street theatre, conferences, e-activism etc.
* Fat positive creative writing and fat affirming literature
* Critical and creative pro-fat challenges to the hegemonic medical conceptualizations of “obesity”
* Creative/critical Fat Activist work as it intersects with race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, transgender, disability, age and religion

Advancing Fat Feminisms

Fatness continues to be a contentious issue among feminists. Although Women’s and Gender Studies scholars are comfortable critiquing the “cult of thinness,” few are comfortable talking about fatness rather than “obesity.” This is puzzling considering the longstanding feminist tradition which rejects the medicalisation of women’s bodies. Fat feminist scholarship is increasingly legitimized, yet seldomly recognised, integrated into texts and coursework, or utilized in scholarly conversation. Fatness within feminism remains largely invisible. We are currently seeking papers that address any of the following questions/topics:
* Why does fat feminism remain an “outsider” feminism?
* Why are feminists still so uncomfortable with fatness?
* How can we advance fat feminisms? What hurdles lay before us?
* Can fat feminists learn from and/or work with other outsider feminists?
* How do we teach feminist scholars and teachers to engage with and utilize critical discourses on fatness?
* The history/herstory of fat feminisms or the progress of fat feminisms within feminism.
* Analysis of fatness as treated in Women’s and/or Gender Studies textbooks.

If you are interested in taking part in either of both of these sessions, please send the following info:
Deadline: 20 February 2010
Fat Studies Interest Group Co-Chairs: Joelle Ruby Ryan and Michaela Null: (Joelle.Ryan@unh.edu) AND (mnull@purdue.edu)
Name, institutional affiliation, snail mail, email, phone, title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session. Each person will speak for around 15 minutes, and we will leave time for questions and answers.

Concern trolling the fatties aka civilised oppression

I was a witness to a conversation this week in which a friend of mine made reference to the term 'concern trolling'. I thought this was a great expression, and she used it to describe the mean little oppressive actions - given with a smile - that fat people are often subject to.

As fat folks, we all have stories of public attacks and discrimination, but I think concern trolling is a more commonplace experience, especially that now the idea of being a fatphobe is less socially acceptable in some circles. What used to be overt hatred has been transformed into much more subtle signals of disapproval and disgust.

Perhaps this has something to do in paradigm shifts in public policy that now blame our terrible affliction on 'obesogenic environments' and the like; 'it's not your fault you're like that,' they appear to say, 'but you're still a problem and you still need us to fix you, to make you nice and normal and thin, just like us.'

Concern trolling sounds very much like 'Civilised Oppression' (or Civilized, the term was generated in the US where they spell things differently). This is a concept examined by Jean Harvey and developed in terms of fat by Mary Madeline Rogge and Marti Greenwald in a paper that was published in 2004.

All three authors explain that incidents involving civilised oppression have the following characteristics, they:

(1) are non-peer power-laden relationships, (2) involve interactions that diminish and control the recipient who has little recourse, (3) pose cumulative acts of omission and commission that distort the relationship(s), (4) cause harm or disadvantage to the subject, (5) may be without malicious intent, and (6) are insidious and obscured in routine or daily encounters. (Harvey referenced by Rogge and Greenwald, p.306)

Powerful stuff, eh? Even in this list, without a full explanation, it's easy to see these processes reflected in real life. I bet a handful of incidents just like this happened to you this week already.

Unfortunately Rogge and Greenwald replicate quite a bit of civilised oppression in their paper on civilised oppression! Fat people are very much passive research subjects, patients even, whose experience is mediated by medical professionals in this work. The language used to describe and frame fat experience is really limited by medicalisation, which is no surprising since the paper was intended for a nursing publication. Yet I feel pitied, pathologised, and made limited as a fat person when I read this work because of its framework, even though it is offering me tools with which to analyse my oppression.

Nevertheless, concern trolling and civilised oppression remind me why it's often hard to talk about my work, or my fat experience with people whom I'm unsure will get it. It reminds me how vulnerable I feel when I open myself up in this way, because the faux-kindly comments I might get in return are really not so helpful. It's complicated and draining to call people on their actions when they oppress me in a friendly way, it's easy for both parties to deny that it's happening, it's so covert and minute a lot of the time. Yet it's felt as oppressive all the same, and it's cumulatively damaging.

References

Harvey, Jean (1999) Civilized Oppression, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Rogge, Mary Madeline and Greenwald, Marti (2004) 'Obesity, Stigma, and Civilized Oppression' in Advances in Nursing Science, 27:4, 301-315.

Eat Me!

Eat Me! is a QueerFoodPorn zine made by a bunch of rad fatties in the UK and is all about yummy, sticky, dirty treats. There's some smut by me in there too. It's been a few months in production and was worth the wait. I got back from the dentist today to find this sweet treat waiting for me at home. Now I have glitter in my teeth from chewing and sucking on this thing.

Get your own copy via the Eat Me! blog, and become an Eat Me! fan on the devil's Facebook.

Sorry for the corny and overly literal pic, I couldn't resist.

Fatshion goes mainstream

It was great to see a bunch of fatshion blogs get credit in Saturday's Guardian: Young, Fat and Fabulous. This stuff deserves attention. Nag Rao's quote, which tied up the piece, is right on the money:

Putting pictures of myself up on the internet is my small act of fat activism. When I upload my pictures, I always tag them with the words 'obesity epidemic' and '200lbs' because this is what the obesity epidemic looks like. It's not the huge, headless fatty that you see in the newspapers. This is it.

Can I just get a swoon for the headless fatty reference? It thrills me how this concept, which I am taking credit for (though let me know if you know otherwise), has become so popular.

Mini-gripes: I'd have liked to have seen Amanda Piasecki get her dues for starting the Fatshionista LiveJournal community back in the day. Remember her name! She is fantastic! Unlike Susie bloody Orbach, who pops up to offer very little, because, you know, she's got so much to say about fatshion.

I can only hope that this article marks a change for Kira Cochrane, the journalist who wrote the piece. Cochrane's previous claim to fame on the 'Timebomb was a depressing series of columns that stretched over a year (or maybe it just felt like a year) charting her desperate attempts to lose weight, which won her a place on the 2008 Shitlist. These columns typified the allegedly progressive, liberal, even feminist position of dieting 'for my health'. They were painful to read, not least because of Cochrane's normalised body hatred right there on the page, but also because they reinforced the moral imperative of dieting-as-self-improvement. What could have been an opportunity to debunk this kind of body project was frittered away. I wonder if she's regained what she lost and is now looking for other ways of contextualising her fatness. My hope is that The Guardian will stop publishing fat-pity fat panic articles. Unlikely. Today the front page boasted a headless fatty. Oh well, at least it's not just me that has a name for that shit.

PS. Hey, I've just seen this call for papers for the Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues conference at Oxford University in September. I hope the fatshionistas represent!