Plus size compare and contrast

I noticed a weird thing when I was on the Old Navy webpage a couple of weeks ago. The women's plus size clothes cost more than the straight size clothes, but the largest men's size was the same price as the smallest. 

I wondered if that was something that held up across the board, so I decided to do a comparison at stores that had both men's and women's clothes. Please behold my unscientific research!

Old Navy-

I didn't notice until I put the screenshots side by side that Old Navy is using mannequins for the plus size clothes and actual women for the straight sizes. I am not loving that at all.

Also note the difference in the slogans available for each group. I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I will note that 'Zzzz all day long' is only available for fat women to wear. 

Again with the mannequin. Wtf. Also note the price difference.  

And here we see that the exact same shirt goes up to a 3XL for the same price. Old Navy used to have plus sizes in their stores, but now they no longer carry them in the physical stores. If you receive an Old Navy coupon, it may not be good for women's plus sizes, and if you need to return anything, you would have to mail it back, rather than being able to bring it into a store like someone in straight sizes (or up to a men's XXXL) can.

The Gap and Banana Republic​- 

The Gap

Banana Republic

There's no women's clothing to compare here because the Gap and Banana Republic do not stock women's plus sizes. This is also true for Abercrombie and Fitch.

H & M- 

What stands out to me the most with H & M is how few larger sizes they stock, in both men's and women's. This is always a problem, in every store, but it seemed particularly bad with H & M.  Why bother saying you stock men's XXL, if that's only ONE shirt style? 

The women's coat selection is poor but noticeably better than a week ago when I was first looking into this, where they had one parka, but had posted three photos of it in different colors to make it look like they actually had three coats. Pathetic. 

JC Penny-

This is actually the best you could hope for. The same selection, on appropriate models, for the exact same price. Good job, JC Penny!

There is a difference in price for the men's bigger sizing, but they did seem to have a good selection of items that had both size ranges.  Even though I'd like to not see a fat tax on the men's big and tall clothes, JC Penny is the best of this bunch.

Macys-

I really don't like velour hoodies. But I'm including them here because I almost couldn't find anything that was the same to compare. Not only are the Macys plus size clothes more money and there's fewer items to choose from, they mostly have completely different clothing than the styles they are selling in their straight sizes. 

I hate this. I have always hated this. Old Navy is doing the same thing, and it's extremely common. The plus size clothes are frumpy and not on trend.  They are frequently many seasons out of date fashion-wise and insultingly obsessed with being 'flattering' (covering up all your fat bits). No thank you.

Also, not every Macys has a plus size section in their physical store.

I gave up on trying to find a men's B&T that I could compare to it's exact same straight size item, because there just isn't one.  The difference in price is appalling. HUGE thumbs down to Macys.

Sears-

With Sears, I also had a really tough time finding items to match exactly to compare prices. There is a very limited range of extended sizes, especially for men.  And of course, everything costs more, because it always does.

Target-

Women's sizes

Men's sizes

With Target, I had such a hard time finding things to compare, that I gave up.  The screenshots are here to highlight the difference between the number of items available in extended sizes versus straight sizes. The number of bigger men's items is even worse than the women's. 

Also, Target is always flirting with completely removing their plus size clothing from their physical stores. Because they suck.

Walmart-

Walmart has a pretty decent selection of extended sizes. They cost more, just because. But they do exist. Now when you hear someone make fun of fat people (by which they also often mean working class people) for wearing Walmart clothes, you can remind them that for larger people, a Walmart is often the only physical store they can go to that will have clothes in their size.  You can also call that person a fatphobic, classist asshole.

Stores that I looked at but couldn't actually make any comparisons at all-

Forever 21 has their women's plus size line completely segregated into what is basically a whole different store. There is nothing to compare it to in straight sizes, except there were more straight sized clothes. Because there always are.

Forever 21 doesn't have men's extended sizes.

I also checked Urban Outfitters and Express. They don't carry any extended sizes at all.

So, that's US extended size shopping. 

It's pretty pathetic when people say there aren't any clothes for larger people because they won't buy them. How on earth would you know that? We barely ever get an opportunity to buy them.

It adds up to an unfair tax on fat people.

Preventing Twitter Impersonators

I love Twitter. I am a very active user of Twitter. I have made so many real connections there. This past summer I had some very bad family stuff go down, and my Twitter friends helped and supported me so much. I can't even express how grateful I am for the people I've met there.

But while Twitter is the best of the internet, it is also the worst as well.  Having a public, unlocked account allows me to interact with new people, but it also gives any teenage boy with an internet connection the ability to call me names.  

I have been watching the Gamergate bullshit that has been going on, 4chan trying to impersonate feminists to discredit the movement and the harassment of the #notyourgoodfatty hashtag prior to that. 

It's infuriating. Twitter refuses to do anything to help us. Twitter clearly doesn't care about marginalized people being harassed and threatened on their platform.

What can we do? If you are concerned about this kind of harassment, you should check out The Block Bot which auto blocks some of the worst (known) offenders.  Block Together lets you block accounts that are less than 7 days old & less than 15 followers, which helps with the worst of the Reddit/4chan sockpuppet accounts.

I would also like to suggest that if you are using an account name with either an uppercase i or lowercase L, that you lock down possible impersonator accounts yourself, because you never know.

Why do this-- Because of the font Twitter uses, an uppercase i & a lowercase L look exactly the same. My Twitter acct name is Artists_Ali.  All someone has to do is get the same Twitter name, swap out an uppercase i for the L, then download the photo that I am using as my user photo from my account (which Twitter could fix, but doesn't), and then they can go around pretending to be me. 

As I learned earlier this year, if you have an impersonator, do not expect Twitter to help you because they won't.  The best you can do at that point is request that the account is added to the Block Bot, which is not run by Twitter. 

You can pick a new user name that doesn't have an i or an L in it. Or you can register a new Twitter account swapping out the i and the L. 

How to do this-- You can't reuse the same email account for a new Twitter, but it's easy enough to get another account on gmail.

If you already have a Gmail account, then it's super easy.  Gmail doesn't recognize periods in their email accounts as different accounts, but Twitter does.

So if you normally use the email youremail@gmail.com, Twitter will let you use your.email@gmail.com as a different account, but the emails will go straight to your normal gmail.

My Twitter.

The Twitter I registered to protect my user name. 

If you post occasionally to this account every few months, if shouldn't flag as inactive.

This will not stop you from being harassed on Twitter, but it could be a little bit of harm reduction. 

Hello internet people!

Hello!  I am speaking to you on Saturday, when I normally update on Fridays.

See, here's the thing.  I have this problem where I chronically and disastrously underestimate how long it's going to take me to do things.

The prime example this weekend- Save the Date cards.  So wedding, blah blah... I've got these cards I have to send out. 

Even though I am basically sending out cards to pretty much everyone we know, and stamping them with cutesy stamps (b/c suuure... why wouldn't you do that?)- I thought to myself- Self, I know we're pretty destroyed with this DOOM COLD, but I'm pretty sure we can address and send out a cards to everyone we know in say... an hour!

And then I high five myself!

Roughly halfway thorough the list, and I am pretty convinced that I will never finish.  Basically, it destroyed my entire Friday, and Trick or Treating took care of the rest.

Every year, I think- I am going to nail the amount of candy I need to buy this year.  And every year, it's a nope. This year, I way over bought. We got almost no kids, which is a first for me.

Then Josh and I tried to put up new hooks and because the walls are plaster, ended up drilling a billion holes into the walls and then I decided to have a huge vodka drink b/c trying to make the whole hook situation work killed all my calm.

That's my weekend so far. I wanted to do this whole photo heavy post about clothes, but sometimes you have to know when to give up.

Bad Photoshop

I use Photoshop. I love Photoshop. But Photoshop is not easy, especially if you are self-taught. When you first start using Photoshop, it has a thousand buttons and no way to really tell what any of them do. Teaching yourself to use it can be a steep hill to climb, and there are always more things to learn.

I always try to remind myself of that, when I see terrible Photoshopping. Because it is EVERYWHERE. And it bugs the fuck out of me. I can barely stand to look at some of these.

Photoshopping is not easy. People of the world-- You should hire an artist that specializes in it to do your photo editing. Not just some guy.

It irritates the FUCK out of me when people just assume that what I do is easy and that anyone could do it.  No. Not true.

So, all that being said-- It's time to gaze in wonder on botched Photoshopping.

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(Explanation for people who didn't do theater- Stage left is the actor's left when they are facing towards the audience.  It's THEIR left. When we look at the someone facing us, their left is on our right. Got it?  Ok.)

---

In addition to being just generally terrifying because it's a Left Behind movie with Nic Cage in it- look at the head placement.  The head Mr Cage is currently sporting is not the one that photo had originally.

Because of the positioning of the body, the natural, relaxed eye line/head placement should have Nic looking in the direction of the red arrow.  We should see his entire stage right ear and none of the left, where the blue arrow is pointing.

How do I know this? Because we can't see his stage left arm or shoulder at all. Just a little of the left hand.

Of course, it is possible to turn the head and look in a direction you aren't facing, but that involves twisting of the neck.  The way the neck here is set into the collar- it's just wrong. That's not how his neck would look if is was naturally turning.  

*Shudder* God. It gives me such a weeb to look at.  The eye placement is off. It looks like he has a broken neck.  

Want more proof?  Check out this side by side comparison.  (Also, why are there so many Left Behind posters??  It's too weird.)

The second photo looks like Nic still has all his original body parts.  The body on our left is not even turned quite so much, but we see much more neck because of the twisting the neck requires to look in a completely opposite direction as the one you are facing.  

It's possible that the person who swapped out Nic's head was even using differently sized photos because the head also seems weirdly sized to me.  Like it's a touch too big, maybe.

Ok, this next one is really bad.

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Excuse me.  I need to go lie down.  Dear god. Where to even begin?

Let's do a side by side with the original movie poster, which is clearly the unaltered photo that now been slaughtered by Photoshop.

We're not even going to discuss the atrocious font or terrible use of mirroring on the text for no reason.  

Ok, first of all.  The blue layer over everything is appalling.  (Blue for BLUE RAY? Dear god. Let's hope not.)  It makes Tommy Wiseau look like a Smurf with a skin disease.  It's been applied in a way that takes Tommy's normal skin texture and makes it look extremely pocked and uneven.  

His hair has been blurred out/removed.  It looks like the Golden Gate Bridge is puncturing his face, and the bridge does not look like it is not connected to the background in any way.  

But the worst thing here is clearly the eyes. What in the holy name of fuck is happening here??  Copy and paste to make his eyes look more closed and then the blur tool just smearing his face and then whole thing looks like it's melting.

Dear lord. His whole face looks like something made out of wax that you left it in the car out in the sun in the middle of August.  

The person on the right- human face.  The person on the left- terrifying melted wax monster of doom.

Bad Photoshop.  It's everywhere.

Riots not diets

I started a new Twitter acct that tweets that it's ok to be fat and nice stuff about fat people.

Follow it to see radness in your timeline.

Live fat. Die free.

I'm only talking about myself!

I am really over men who respond to being checked on their fat hating behavior with, "I'm only talking about myself!"  It happens all the time. It needs to stop.

It is especially egregious among so-called liberal/progressive men. These guys seem to at least understand that fat shaming is bad, but don't seem to have any kind of handle on why what they are doing IS fat shaming.

So let's dive into why this is a problem.

Example- Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek and general nerd fame. 

Wil Wheaton decided that he would like to 'get healthy' and referred to it as “Project Fat Piece of Crap Don’t Be One Anymore”.  When he was gently checked on this fat hating behavior, proceeded to throw a huge manbaby tantrum all over the internet. 

Check out my friend Elizabeth Hawksworth's blog post about this incident. 

Let's break this down. Why is this such a problem and not, as Wil would have you believe, ok because he was only referring to himself.

No one reacts more like a toddler being told no for the first time than a white guy who is asked to stop doing something to hurt other people in a group he is not in.  

"Hey, this thing you could easy stop doing really hurts a group of people who get hurt all the time, and it would be really easy for you to not do that, so could you please stop?"

Manbaby reply- "WAH NOOOO!  FREE SPEECH! You're censoring me!  My right to free speech is more important than the lives of people who aren't me!! Fuck those people! They aren't white men, so who gives a shit about them? NOT ME!"

Fatphobia hurts women more than it does men.  At the end of the day, a fat man is still a man.  And he still has all the power of male privilege (which is A LOT of fucking power).  If we are to judge by representation in media- fat men can still expect to find an attractive mate.

Examples include- The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of Queens, The Flintstones, The Sopranos, and on and on. 

The stereotype of a fat woman who is too disgusting to be loved really doesn't seem to apply to men.  I see plenty of heavy guys in movies and on TV.  They have jobs.  They have kids and wives.  Yes, they are often the 'funny guy' who makes the jokes. Or is the butt of the joke. But their mere existence is not held up to ridicule and horror.

They're men!  Men (especially white men) don't have to justify their existence. White men just get to exist and be the default.  White maleness get to be defined as "normal".  And the rest of the non-white and non-male world has to justify our abnormal existences.  

When women are treated as only existing as the extension of a man, with her main function to be a sex object- and since fat women by definition are sexually disgusting- fat women are worthless to a misogynistic society since they can't fulfill their socially ordained role of sex object.

When someone like Wil Wheaton calls himself a "fat piece of crap", it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Wil is famous.  When he associates being fat with being a piece of crap, this reinforces the fat hatred in our culture and a lot of people hear what he says.  

Wil is not fat. We have really confused the notion of feeling fat with BEING fat, and they are two different things.  Why does it feel so bad to 'feel fat'?  Because we associate fatness with being bad. With being lazy, smelly, morally wrong. Fat people are out of control. They're dirty and objects of disgust. 

When you say, 'I feel fat', what people often mean is- 'I feel bad'. We all do this.  I have been reading about fat acceptance for a long time, and I still do this sometimes in my private life.  I feel fat = I feel bad.  Because fat is bad. 

So when someone like Wil Wheaton says 'fat is bad', the question is will this idea rebound onto Wil Wheaton and effect his life in a negative way?

Nope. Not really.  Which is why it means nothing for him to say it.  

"Fat sack of crap" in the mouth of a man is a joke.  When a women says it, it is self punishment and a request for reassurance.

I'll give you another example- Patton Oswalt.

I had to stop watching the most recent comedy special that Patton did. He opened with a very long bit about how fat he is. How he is going to die. How he is going to need a mobility scooter to get around. He used the phrase 'swabbing the folds' to describe his fat body.

He's only talking about himself.  Does that make this level of fat hatred ok?

Nope. 

Patton still has access to all the privileges of being a white man. He can expect an attractive wife, a career (in entertainment, no less), and a child. Love and success are not supposed to be automatically denied to him because of his weight.

When anyone increases the amount of fat hatred in the world by speaking their hatred, that is a bad thing. When someone with a huge platform does it, that is a very bad thing. And self-hatred is still hatred. 

Does the fatphobic self-hatred of Patton Oswalt rebound to hurt him? I'm sure it doesn't make him feel very good.  But he does seem to be making money off of it. We have a long tradition of fat male comics and comic actors making money out of being the so-called 'fat sack of crap' for money. 

The rhetoric Patton uses- the elaborate description of a fat body as disgusting- this is the same language fat women are attacked with.  When I was the subject of Reddit harassment, the attackers went out of their way to describe in minute detail how revolting they thought my body is.  

The most frequent subject matter of these attacks on fat women-

• How much they imagine we eat and what types of food. Example- you must eat for every meal 3 pizzas and a gallon of ice cream
• What they imagine our hygiene practices to consist of- often the 'rag on the stick' or conjecture that we can't wipe ourselves properly after using the bathroom
• That we're breaking furniture

And many more-- These are all the subject matter of male comics, especially fat male comics like Patton.  These ideas that they keep spreading into the world are making the actual lives of fat women harder.

You don't get to get out of responsibility for that by disingenuously claiming that your fat hatred is directed only at yourself. 

Hail Seitan!

YESSSSS!

No one else can follow or unfollow me ever!

Fat Jokes

Good comedy punches up.  Good, responsible comedy uses humor to question the status quo, to take on the powerful.  To shake things up.

Mocking fat people reinforces the status quo.  It keeps everything right where it is. It pushes down on the people who are already down and makes us think they belong there.

Fat jokes have a nasty edge to them. They express disgust and disdain. They question nothing and accept all prior assumptions.

Fat jokes are inherently lazy and boring.  Most of them don't even follow any type of structure that would show them to be actual jokes.  There's no setup. No punchline.  

This is how joke structure works for fat jokes.

• Point out person is fat. 
• Wait for laughter.

That's not a joke. That's just being an asshole.  I know people get the two confused, but just pointing out a physical characteristic of someone is not a joke. 

Example-  "Wow, Bill really does have BLUE EYES."  Wait for laughter.  "They're SO BLUE." Wait.  "It looks like his eyes are LIKE THE SKY, AM I RIGHT?? SO BLUE!"

No.  That's not how humor works.  That's how mockery and stigma work, but FOR FUCK'S SAKE there should be a difference between stigma and humor.  It sounds weird when I make it be about someone's blue eyes because we don't have a cultural belief that having blue eyes makes you barely a person and that just pointing out what a non-person you are means that there should be instant laughter.

This is why some comics think they can get away with doing weird voices to indicate "Woman" or "Gay Man" and then just say some unfunny bullshit, like oh look at me- straight man pretending to be gay or a woman (or god help me, a racial minority) = SO FUNNY.  It's supposed to be funny because it's the contrast between someone who is clearly a person pretending to be someone who ISN'T a person.  

GET IT!?????  GET IT???? DO YOU???  WHAT, CAN'T TAKE A JOKE????

That is FUCKED UP.  And it's NOT FUNNY.

Do we hear people say- hey, look at Sally- SHE'S A WOMAN, and expect laughter, just off of that?  Don't they normally have to at least set up a premise about "bitches" or "gold diggers" or something?

But if someone pointed at me and said FAT and then started describing my fat rolls in a way that is supposed to be disgusting and off putting-- the 'joke' is just that I'm fat, right?  I haven't done anything other than just exist in the world.  Which leads me to believe the premise is that I just shouldn't exist?

(I have thoughts about the male comics who are mostly the ones perpetrating this shit, but I'm gonna break this up into pieces.)

So what would a good fat joke look like?  A non-stigmatizing fat joke. Because I fucking hate rape jokes, but I believe there have been a couple of good jokes about rape.  

Wanda Sykes had a great one about taking your pussy off and leaving it at home so you could go jogging without the fear of rape.

It's a good joke because it doesn't make fun of rape victims. 

A good fat joke wouldn't mock fat people. It wouldn't hold us up to scorn and ridicule. It would punch up and question the extreme amounts of fat hatred in our culture.

I've never seen one. 

Spanking and abuse

The past couple of weeks have been really difficult for me with the news coming out of the NFL about domestic violence and child abuse.  Because now everyone is talking about abuse and what is abuse and is it ok to do this and why didn't she leave.

I can't get away from it, because it's everywhere and everyone is talking about it constantly.

I'm in a place where I am having a lot of feelings, and they are getting stuck in my throat.  I am gagging on these feelings, and I spent so much time in my life choking on this stuff and teaching myself how to cry without making a sound.

And I still can barely speak or write about them.  I am trying to work through them in some writing I'm doing offline, but it is so very hard and so painfully slow.

So let's see what I can say.

That there are some people who believe they own their children and that they should be able to to whatever they want to them. 

That physical punishment is humiliating.

That knowing you are basically on your own at a young age is very alienating.

That being constantly physically punished and yelled at caused a feeling of being completely alone and that no one will ever help you, which is a devastating feeling for a child to have. 

I don't know, y'all.  

I read that Rainbow Rowell had written Eleanor and Park after hearing the Mountain Goats album, The Sunset Tree.  And since I loved that book so much and found it devastating in the ways that I could recognize myself in it, I bought the album.

This song and its lyrics completely destroy me, because again- I recognize myself and my life in a way that I think I had always assumed in my child/teen logic and shame that these things had only ever happened to me.  And we are never meant to speak of them anyway, so who would ever know.

"And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face,

Hoping you don't break my stereo,

Because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without.

And so I think about that,

And then I sort of black out."

Lyrics like being punched directly in the chest.

I don't know, y'all.  I really don't.  I'm glad people are talking about it, because god knows it needs to be talked about, but it is so very hard to listen to sometimes.

Which is why you got 2 recipe blog posts before I could really bring myself to even do this.  And why I may nope out of the news for a bit.  I seriously need a break.  My heart hurts. 

Make your own veggie broth

It's really easy!  

And like almost all of my- This is super easy, I swear- recipes, it involves the crockpot.  And it's cheap!

Step 1- The Saving Part

Save all the bits of veggies you would normally throw out.  

The ends of onions.  The kale stems. The fresh carrots that you were going to use but they got too bendy.  The wilty celery and the celery leaves.  Beet stems and leaves.

Make sure they are washed off and not gritty.  And then you're gonna pop them into a gallon ziplock bag or another container that fits in your freezer.  So when you cook, you save these bits up.  After a couple of weeks or a month, you'll have enough to fill the crockpot.

Don't use anything that's moldy or that smells weird or has really gone bad.  Bendy and wilted = ok.  Black spots or mold = not ok.

Don't use the seeds from hot peppers.  Those seeds will make the broth too spicy. You just have to toss these.  Also-- be smarter than me, and use gloves when cutting hot peppers.

Step 2- The Crockpot!

Put enough veggie bits in the crockpot to fill it up to about an inch below the top.  A gallon bag of bits will usually do it.  Fill with water.  

Add spices.  Salt, pepper, a bay leaf, and garlic are a must.  I also use parsley, basil, oregano, Italian seasoning, Cajun seasoning, chili powder, garlic and onion powder, sriracha, tamari soy sauce, and nutritional yeast.

Why so much seasoning?  I want this broth to have a full and big flavor because it's going to be the base for a lot of the other cooking Josh and I do.  You can always adjust the seasoning to your taste and over time you'll figure out what works for you.

Put the crockpot on low and leave it overnight.

Step 3- Freezing!

Turn the crockpot off in the morning and leave it for a few hours to cool down.

You have to strain out the bits and throw them away.  I don't love the idea of pouring a whole crockpot's worth of stuff thru a strainer (also, I don't have a strainer). So I use tongs to pull out the big pieces and then use a slotted spoon to get the smaller bits out.

Wooooo!  That's a whole crockpot full of broth that you've made!  

Now you take 2 or 3 ice cube trays and spoon broth into the trays and then freeze them.  Once they're frozen, you stick the broth cubes in a bag in the freezer.  Then you can use as little or much as you want.  

You can add the frozen broth cubes directly to dishes you are making on the stove, without having to wait for it to melt before you can use it.  Which is what I do when I'm making gravy.

And that's it.  EASY!