This was the phrase written in big white block letters on the back window of a car I saw in Portland the other day.
I was surprised that anyone would put something like that on their car.
If I had been able to, I wanted to ask the driver (almost certainly a guy), how he thought “Fat Chicks” might feel about his sign.
But I am confident that if I had asked him, he would have laughed and dismissed my question with some sort of derision.
His proclamation is just another example of the ways that people do things that hurt others. It poses a real problem for anyone who wants to foster nurturing in every corner of life. What do we do with such behavior?
Typically we try to punish it. I am sure that more than one person has angrily accosted this guy about his sign. I am equally sure that such attacks are highly reinforcing for the guy. But even if our criticism of him were aversive to him, I doubt that it would bring about the kind of change in his behavior that we would love to see–more caring and respectful toward all women, sorry about the hurt he had caused to women who might feel sensitive about their weight.
I have to believe that for this guy, “No Fat Chicks” was a statement about how he was superior to at least someone on this planet. He was so “cool” that he could reject “fat chicks.”
I am convinced that underneath virtually every hostile act toward another, there is fear. Fear that we aren’t good enough. The function of this guy’s sign was to proclaim that he was better than someone.
The problem we have is that if we want more and more people to become nurturing, we have to be nurturing enough to them that they can let go of their fear, feel cared for, and in that context, make contact with the pain and needs of others.
The ACT work suggests a way out of this problem. It shows that getting people to look at their thoughts and feelings as thoughts and feelings–not as facts and helping them get clear about their values helps people to become more caring. If we could get close to that guy–or if he came to us for help because, say, another woman had left him, we might be able to get him to notice his fears about not being good enough, defuse from them, such that they became less powerful for him. In the context of becoming more caring toward himself, he might begin to feel more empathy for others.
But of course, we aren’t likely to have access to him. And, since beginning this piece I searched the internet and discovered there is a website called NoFatchicks.
There appears to be a network of folks who are getting their social support by banding together around this theme.
This is guaranteed to get them the kind of mutual support from other members of the club, and constant anger from those who are offended by it.
Here is another place where ACT seems relevant. Suppose, instead of attacking this guy OR getting angry about his statement, we simply defuse from the thoughts and feelings we have about it. Notice how angry it makes you. If you are a “fat chick” notice the hurt the phrase evokes. Can we make room for the hurt, anger, frustration, or depression we feel when we see something like this and do what will work to move people in a more caring direction?
The hard part is that attacking people is unlikely to work. We hesitate, of course to do anything that might remotely be seen as accepting such talk. In fact, in writing this, I hesitated to use the term “Fat Chicks” because I feared that people would say I shouldn’t even use the term. It is like the “N word.”
But does it work to give words such power? Does it reduce their power to have words be so powerful that we can’t even say them? Over time do they become less powerful? I don’t think so.
My history professor at the University of Rochester went down to Alabama to witness the marches in Selma. He reported that civil rights workers had started to call Martin Luther King, “The Nigger’s Jesus.” It was nonviolence in action. They did it because they knew that embracing this derision took the power out of it.
What would Gandhi do?
So if we want someone like the young man with the “No Fat Chicks” sign to become more nurturing, we have to deflate the power of hostile or hurtful words by recognizing that they are words.
What would happen to this guy if every time he stopped anywhere an overweight woman came up to him and smiled and showed genuine interest in him?
I don’t want anyone reading this to think that I feel callous toward women who are overweight. It was my own feelings of hurt for anyone who would feel hurt in reading this that made me write this post. (And feel free to comment, especially if you have other views of it.)
There is a recent ACT study, by the way, that found that helping people to simply defuse from negative thoughts about their weight (that is, got so they noticed the thoughts, but just accepted that they were thoughts and didn’t get caught up in them). Not only did these negative views become less hurtful to them, they lost some weight as well (though weight loss was not the purpose of the program).
This issue goes well beyond “fat chicks” (don’t you just love ‘em!). Every controversy is fed by two warring factions shouting epithets at each other from secure bastions of their own. Fox vs. MSNBC, Republicans vs. Democrats, Conservationists vs. Resource Extraction Industries.
We have been trying to shout the other side down ever since this great experiment in free speech began in America. It hasn’t worked.
Maybe the only way we will ever come together is for some group of us to start a movement that is about defusing from all the “loaded words.” We might call it “The [blank] word! Movement.” It would start with chanting all of the words that are used to revile and arouse people.
Comments?
“Speaking as a card carrying FAT OLD BITCH, not to mention an old bag and interfering old biddy, I heartily endorse your approach.
Over the last 4 decades I’ve have the opportunity to work as a Youth Worker in an interracial neighborhood; as a telephone resource operator in a rural poverty program; as director of a group home for adolescent boys with autism and other intellectual disabilities; as a clerk in a “New Age” store dispensing various “positivity” products and finally, as a city transit bus driver. I also spent a few months backpacking and hitchhiking around the Pacific NW.
I met a lot of people who were scary and abusive. But I met more people who were generous, who were frightened, who were dealing with enormous hardships, who were humorous and enormously courageous. From them I learned to stand up to bullies without starting a war.
When someone called (calls) me a bitch and I look them in the eye, smile and say, “Right on, best bitch in town.” or “That would be me,” the whole interaction changes. They are generally at a loss for words. So I can ask them why they thought I was a bitch. Or how they would feel if someone said that to their mother. Occasionally, these interactions have led to real fellowship. None of them has led to further hostility. (And I was always shaking in my number 10’s when I started these conversations.)
For a while when I was a city bus driver, it was the fashion for teenage boys to board the bus wearing tee shirts that proclaimed, in the largest type: “SHUT UP BITCH!”. It’s hard to describe the jolt a female driver experiences, imprisoned in the driver’s seat with a job that can’t be lost, when confronted with this . The first time I saw it, I was cowed, made no eye contact and slunk (insofar as it’s possible to slink in a driver’s seat) away from the encounter. By the time it happened again I was prepared. I took the fare and asked the boy what the shirt meant to him. He was nonplussed and didn’t want to talk about it. But I persevered, assuring him I was interested in what it meant to him. He told me he thought it was cool. I asked him if he wore it around his mother. He admitted that he didn’t. Then we talked about a bunch of other things, in quite a friendly way. He never wore the shirt again in my presence and we were friendly whenever he was aboard. Happily, the fashion was short-lived.
During the Vietnam war, a comedian whose name I forget, said: “If you want to end war and shit, you gotta sing loud!” I took that to mean that if you wanted to change things, you needed to have the courage to do scary things, even when it might cost you something. I think it’s still true. So come all you fat bitches and dirty antiwar cowards and liberal country spoilers and lift up your voices. Let’s sing a new song and sing it loud!
Hekate”
PS. Tony, I’ve been thinking about my aversion to “holding thoughts lightly.” That phrase continues to be aversive to me. I realize it is a reaction to a lifetime of people telling me I take myself too seriously–people who were intent on keeping me coughing up way more than I received or who depended on keeping me subordinate to their desires. (The experience of far too many women.) So when someone tells me to hold my thoughts likely, there is not a snowball’s chance that I will take that advice.
Also, I realize that I believe and experience the exact opposite to be the most effective way for me to deal w/ life. (Lots of pathways to glory, maybe…) I experience that taking my thoughts and feeling seriously as signals of underlying, misunderstood or forgotten experiences and looking to discover where they come from and what they mean to me results in my increased understanding, freedom from pain and enlargement of empathy to myself and others. It’s a bit in the way of your thesis that the “no fat chicks” guys, for example, feel one down and crappy. Many roads lead to Rome, and, if Rome is where you want to go, following the road that gives you the best experience is perhaps, the best way to proceed.
Lots of love, not to mention admiration and respect. Hekate
I am deeply touched by this post and Hekate’s response. I have two thoughts immediately. First, I have a different reaction to ‘holding thoughts lightly’. When I was an undergraduate student I fell into a passionate love affair with biology. Not my bio prof, or my peer, but the laws and theories that comprised biology. I loved the predictability of the patterns I witnessed, I loved the stability of laws and theories, I felt like I had come home. Then, one day, near the end of my three course series my professor pushed me right over the edge. In a terrific lecture he reminded us that we must ‘hold our laws lightly’. That laws, theorems, and theories WOULD change. That we would need, in our lifetimes, to accept new laws and approaches to problems. That in holding our laws lightly we became empowered to think outside the box, to become revolutionaries in science, to take what we had learned and push to new limits. This of course frightened me, but also was inspiring beyond measure. Suddenly it was clear that by holding my laws ‘lightly’ I could not only become empowered to seek new truth, but I could also let good things come and ‘bad’ things go with far less difficulty. While I decided to pursue social sciences instead of biology or medicine, I continue to hold my laws loosely. I think this is one of the metaphors to live my life by. I want to be open to the new things that come, and yet I want to hold on to those things that are beneficial to me and those around me…but only for as long as they are useful. This is interesting however in the context of the ‘no fat chicks’ post.
I have been teaching women’s studies for the past few years and the feminist in me has a visceral and negative reaction to such bumpers stickers and signs as the one that inspired this post. And, yet, if I am to ‘hold my laws loosely’ and maintain my commitment to acts of kindness and love for humanity, I want to, and must, find a ‘positive’ way to react to misogynistic, negative, hateful speech. This makes me think of some the recent hate crime committed against the U of O Pride Center. Awful, ugly, hateful speech was used to hurt the Pride Organization and to send a message to all people who affiliate with that organization (gay or straight). The Pride Center’s response was to first contact the necessary ‘powers’ that be, but then they organized positive, empowering rallies and marches. They did not hold on to their anger (at least so it seemed from media reports, newspaper interviews and facebook posts), but acknowledged its presence and turned the energy into an opportunity to spread positive opportunity for the community. It is possible that a rally to celebrate ‘fat chicks’ might be difficult to orchestrate, but this positive act would certainly fly in the face of the person (I will resist my bias and urge to assume that the person driving that vehicle in Portland was male) who responds to his or her own emptiness with hurtful bumper sticker messages against women. But it would be a way to spread nurturing environments in response to this hateful message.
I like the “hold my laws loosely” post. It made me think about something I have been doing too much of, namely reacting to people on the basis of what I suppose their beliefs are, rather than asking and finding out. I perhaps have been infected by the contentious political atmosphere we have in this country (which goes back through all of my living memory). I react strongly when I am tagged with a label about my politics, since I don’t fit any known category. I should practice what I preach (or at least feel).
How interesting to have this discussion about “holding thoughts/feelings/laws lightly.” It reminds me of the difficulties faced by a speaker who wants to be absolutely unequivocal–not so easy as you’d think. I have found it most useful to deal with my thoughts and feeling as if they were an odor that I’d just noticed. Let’s say I come home to a find sweet smell permeating my house. If I take it seriously, I will investigate the possibilities. It could be that someone has placed a bowl of hyacinths in the room They are beautiful and I love the aroma, but if I’m exposed too long, I get asthma. What to do? How about putting them outside where I can see them and catch a whiff when I pass by. Or I could give them to a neighbor w/o allergies. Or that smell could be the overripe oranges in the fruit bowl. Eek! Fruit flies. Better deal with that. Or it could be that modest and pleasant aroma from the new furniture polish. Enjoy, enjoy!
Perhaps the hyper-vigilance occasioned by PTSD propelled me to dealing with things this way. And I can see, as this discussion continues, that what one person calls “holding lightly” may, strangely, resemble what another person calls “taking seriously.” Vive la difference de la meme chose!”
Hekate
In many ways, the thing that motivates me in pursuing this issue is the tendency for people to view each other through their assumptions about the other person. One of the ACT workshop activities is to have someone stand in front of the group and ask everyone to just notice the thoughts that they have about that person. Then they ask the person to answer a series of questions, like, “When is the last time you cried?” “What is the thing that gave you the most joy in the last month?”
The point is to notice how much more complex and human a real person is than the initial thoughts we have about them. This is one version of being in the moment–just noticing everything about a person without judgment.