The Sun-Herald

Friday, September 11, 2009

Fat's only funny if you're a bloke

What do Kyle Sandilands and a room full of brides-to-be have in common?

Nothing, except the tragic story of a girl who longed to be thin for her wedding.

As Sandilands outraged the nation with his cretinous fat jokes directed at Magda Szubanski, I was at a wedding planner party filled with hundreds of young women determined to look perfect for their nuptials.

On my mind was another bride-to-be, Samantha Clowe, from Leeds in the UK. Samantha is no longer looking forward to her wedding. She died of a heart attack last year, quite possibly due to existing on 530 calories of soup, snack bars and shakes a day on a crash diet she was following because she didn't want to be a 'fat bride.'

The 34-year-old had already lost 20 kilos by living for 11 weeks on almost a quarter of the recommended daily calorie intake for women.

Samantha had hoped a slimmer silhouette would also bring her more respect at work, which is perhaps the saddest part of all, considering she was a metallurgist, a demanding role requiring statistical skills and a sharp, analytical mind. At the time of her death she was working for a major steel company so we can assume she was no slouch at her job. But, like so many smart women in these supposedly enlightened times, Samantha felt compelled to seek approval by being thin.

Despite all our hard-won gains, I wonder whether women will ever be free from the tyranny of aesthetics. Disturbingly, the emphasis on female appearance over achievement is on the rise again, as UK commentator Janice Turner recently pointed out in her searing article When Feminism Went Nuts.

Australian statistics tell an equally dispiriting story. In 2003 the Victorian State Government, concerned by rising numbers of eating disorder sufferers, launched a parliamentary inquiry into body image and young people, consulting children and teenagers state-wide.
When the inquiry's results were tabled in February 2006, they painted a stark picture of a self-doubt. Troubling accounts, such as that of a girl who developed an eating disorder in grade one because someone said her packed lunch would make her fat, abounded. The report found that one in almost every 200 adolescent girls develops anorexia nervosa, which is the Australia's third most common chronic illness for teenage girls. Up to three in 100 develop bulimia.

We hear that men are now sharing the pressure to look perfect - and I'll concede there are certainly more images of six-packs and pecs in the media - but when I watched the crowds of holidaymakers around the pool on vacation recently, I saw no coyness among the men parading their hefty paunches or skinny ribcages while their wives and girlfriends anxiously swathed their bodies - whatever their shape - in sarongs.

The gender imbalance runs so deeply through society and permeates popular culture so comprehensively that it's hard to believe it will ever change. But I believe the way to begin is with the mundane, not the media; the everyday attitudes and the commonplace cruelties that can slowly erode even the most resilient woman's confidence. The media's exaggerated images of perfection have become so extreme that it's actually easier to dismiss them and to see the joins between airbrush and reality, scalpel and skeleton. But it's much harder to ignore the casual cruelty of friends and colleagues.

After her death, Samantha Clowe's brother ruefully admitted he used to tease her about her weight. "I was the typical younger brother, being cheeky and telling her she was fat. I didn't realise how much it affected her," he said. But he was brought up in a world where men routinely make fat jokes about women. Many of them make a decent living from it. Kyle Sandilands had been doing it for years before he finally crossed the line.

Interestingly, it's often fat men making the fat jokes. They'll defend their misogynist routines by telling you that you're welcome to take the piss out of their weight in return. But fat jokes don't hurt men the way they hurt women, because men are not required to measure the sum of their achievements in centimetres of flesh. Fat men can have beautiful mistresses, dazzling careers, public recognition. Fat men can win respect. It's not kind or right to make fun of anyone's appearance, but for women the jibes can be so much more devastating.

When weight is a matter of life or death, as it was for Samantha Clowe and still is for so many other women, then the jokes aren't funny. They're lethal.

• by Amy Cooper at 06:10 PM
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Saturday, September 5, 2009

Flying : the height of misery

At 40,000 feet the other day, I finally fathomed why I'm driven to watch so much Aircrash Investigation. It's a reminder that air travel could be worse than the ordeal it already is.

Flying, no matter how good the airline, comes with its unique, universal indignities: everyone emerges from a long haul flight looking and feeling as if they've spent 10 hours in a vulture's colon; even the quietest child feels compelled to scream non-stop from take-off to landing, and then there's the soul-sapping ordeal of security screening, during which you are now required to remove so many clothes the spectacle seems incomplete without accompanying music, choreography and a neon sign.

Some airlines try to compensate for these hardships by hiring pleasant staff and treating the passengers kindly. Others seem to operate under the philosophy that if something's already crap, then you must strive to make it completely, outstandingly crap.

I don't know why, but things seem to go particularly pear-shaped when Qantas and BA get together for a mid-air party. Their code-sharing services seem to exist solely to prove that two wrongs don't make a right. I've suffered at their hands so much of late, that I feel like writing to Richard Branson just to thank him for existing. Both carriers used to give great service, but now you're likely to find better on the red-eye out of Kinshasa. As a Pom living in Australia, I feel twofold national shame.

Last year, despite layers of sophisticated security procedures, Qantas/BA put me on the wrong flight at Heathrow. The ground staff actually directed me away from the right one, and onto another one going to the same place, but a different way. Only when I was aboard it, with my bedsocks already on, and a man came along and claimed my seat did it emerge that despite my boarding pass being checked twice by humans and once by a machine, it was for another flight entirely. The one sitting two gates along.

How could it happen? "I've no idea," said the befuddled BA man who was summoned to move me discreetly to the right aircraft. "It just doesn't."

I must be uncommonly unfortunate, because when I took out the boarding pass for the second leg of my Qantas/BA Sydney-Frankfurt flight last week, it bore a long, complicated German name that wasn't mine (although it perhaps could have been an anagram of it). I showed it to the ground staff at Singapore and they examined it with similar bewilderment. After lots of supervisors came to stare at me and my passport, a new seat was found, I was declared safe and allowed to be myself again.

No harm done, but it does make you wonder why we must shuffle like abattoir-bound cattle through the endless ignominies of increasingly invasive security screening when you could turn out to be flying under Osama Bin Laden's name quite by accident.

As it turned out, I was one of the lucky passengers. The woman in the seat next to me boarded in tears. "I got held up in the security queue," she said. 'Then when I got through, an airline woman shouted at me for being late. No-one's ever spoken to me like that."

I tried to console her by saying everything would be all right now she was on board, but I was fibbing and we both knew it.

The cabin crew, who wore the expressions of inmates in the early stages of a long sentence, were bovine at best, belligerent at worst. They urged us to walk around in-flight to avoid DVTs but when I got up (seatbelt lights were off) to visit the bathroom, a male hostie with a ravaged face that had probably seen too many dawns from inside Arq snapped: 'where are you going?"

The sink was blocked and the toilet was fragranced with Ogre's Armpit. I held my breath the whole time I was in there. I would have closed my eyes, too, but didn't want to fall off. The floor hosted too many nameless fluids.

Then it was time for Chicken or Lamb. 'Lamb, please," I said. No, said the hostie, (female this time, a bit wide for the aisles, wearing a resentful glare). "We only had enough for those people." She jabbed an elbow at the 10 passengers between me and the front.

A moot point, I suppose, as it would have been lamb by name only, but the illusion of choice might have been comforting.

The man on our left gazed disconsolately at the wretched little landscape of his food tray, which had just been delivered like an insult. He was tall, and his knees were close to his ears. "Flying," he said with a heavy sigh, "has become an exercise in humility."

I know, I know. When you fly economy you're not booking into Chateau Marmont. But is decent, basic service - even the level you'd find in a greasy spoon - too much to ask? And as my mum always said, smiles cost nothing.

As it turned out, there was worse to come. For the last leg of my return flight from the US to Sydney I was booked on Jetstar, Qantas' cheap little sister.

You don't expect much from a budget airline of course, so I'd brought my own food, entertainment and painkillers. But for a while it didn't look as if I'd get to use them, because the computer belched at the check-in desk and refused to let the lady find me a seat. While she pleaded with it and went off to find help, the queue filed past and I waited. For 20 minutes.

Eventually, tired and dispirited, I made it just in time and sank into my window seat. Just as I did, a male hostie who'd clearly been made in the same factory as the check-in computer materialised and appraised me as if I was grime. He looked very angry, perhaps because his uniform was orange. But his wrath was directed at me.

'Can I see your boarding pass?" he said. "You shouldn't be here.' Seat and boarding pass matched. 56A. The seat was normal. There were other ones just like it all around, with passengers in them. 'This is where I'm supposed to rest," he said. "I'm going to have to move you. This is a 10 hour flight, you know."

And I kid you not, he pouted.

The flight was packed. The only spare seat I could see was between two wriggling toddlers. I was tired. I just wanted to be left alone. Like most people, I work 10-hour days too - and without the luxury of a snooze on a seat in my tea break.

I'd had enough of Jetstar already and we hadn't even taken off. "No thanks, actually," I said. "I'll just stay here."

For a moment I thought he was going to swear at me. And then whatever training he'd had kicked in just enough for him to stop himself, ram my bag into the overhead locker and flounce off down the aisle.

Credit where it's due; the meanie's colleague apologised afterwards and told me there was no need to move. He offered me another, nicer seat and tried very hard to make up for his budget airline's budget manners. But I won't be flying with them again unless I'm forced to by someone holding my loved ones hostage.

It takes a lot to deter me from flying. I need to do it for work. And I've also always quite enjoyed air travel's unique vicissitudes; it's amusing devising yoga positions to sleep in, playing guess the meat and marvelling at the flight attendants' ways with a hair scrunchie. These are all part of the aircraft cabin's idiosyncratic world and you can make it go away with a sleeping pill.

But now I wish there was a kinder way to get where you need to be. I went on a cruise recently and learned that it is possible to arrive at your destination rested and happy, rather than traumatised and persecuted. It just takes weeks instead of hours.

Perhaps in this day and age we must accept that the romance of air travel is all but gone and the best you can hope for is to arrive at your destination in one piece.

• by Amy Cooper at 01:57 PM
• Comments (3)