From "Let Them Eat … Everything/In the age of Ozempic, the “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith is inspiring and infuriating her followers" (NYT).
"Sole-Smith separated from her husband Dan Upham last June, and in that upheaval has had to reconsider many family rituals, including dinner. Sole-Smith and Upham attempted a regular dinner hour — Upham said he considered it 'sacrosanct' — but when they split, neither child wanted to come to the table at all. And then Sole-Smith hit on a fix: She released her kids from the pressure to politely converse by allowing them to read at the table. At dinner on this cool night, each girl grabs a brownie and then, after a few bites of broccoli or chicken, wanders off to play.... Just as Sole-Smith progressed from trying to wrestle her body into thinness in her 20s to accepting herself at 42, she is also trying to relinquish the notion that marriage — 'especially to this thin, attractive man who finds me sexy' — is a marker of success. 'We would all do a lot better to be less afraid of divorce, just as we would do a lot better to be less afraid of being fat,' she said. 'What if you just let go?'"
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53 comments:
The only expectation that's valid is for them to make me a sammich.
Will this be the next "fat activist" to die of a heart attack before age 40 due to morbid obesity?
She is headed for a great fall.
It seems she's philosophical enough to consider the tragedy of the human condition - that we have the ability to imagine perfection, but not to achieve it - but not philosophical enough to come up with a way to process that knowledge. Or, I suppose, she's just reinvented libertinism.
Look, I'm woefully self-indulgent compared with my parents. We have more money than we need and it's easy for me to be, frankly, lazy. But when I allow myself to take full advantage of our plenty, freely indulge my desire for pleasure in the moment, reject any modicum of self-discipline, everything except the transient trappings of my life gets worse - my health, my friendships, my inner life, even my hygiene (remember that period some years back when the young Hollywoodians all stopped washing their hair for months on end?).
This approach sounds a lot like what I was talking about yesterday - you've made choices in your life that have led to some, at minimum, questionable outcomes, so you want to get others to duplicate your choices so you can feel they were valid.
Like it or not when you become a parent you are a de facto leader. The first rule of leadership is that you must put the team in front of your own wants and needs. A leader always eats last and least. At least that's what they taught us at MCRD.
This poor woman when confronted with the end of her childhood has elected to remain a child. It's not a sign of the times it's not a new trend that we should all be concerned about because the world is going to hell in a Whirlpool of shit via a gigantic sewer pipe. This type of behavior has been going on since before Moses was in diapers.
The one difference is that popular culture presents it as a legitimate choice rather than a pathological aberration.
What Sole-Smith hopes to model, she said in a five-hour interview at her home in Cold Spring, N.Y., is “that you can be a mom who doesn’t live solely in service of other people.” That “you deserve time to yourself and that you’re a person with needs, that those needs matter.”
Looking at her pictures she has a serious Jonah Hill vibe.
Howard at MCRD?? The DI’s must have spun their covers to see him in the squad bay. Semper orgasmic!
- Krumhorn
The liberating realization of age: you cannot control things and you can stop trying, and nothing bad happens. I read this to see that Sole-Smith is still trying to exercise control. Stop that!
I do think it's unfortunate that Sole-Smith's kids aren't learning the useful skill of dinner conversation. Wonder what happens when they're having an interview for a job over food.
so?
she quit dieting, and became a fat slob that feeds her daughters brownies for dinner?
HOW AWESOME!
Me. And by the way, me again.
she's forty now? and obese?
What will she be like, in another ten years? assuming that she's still alive?
What will her daughters be like, in another ten years? Twenty?
Serious Question (from a lard ass that currently weights 257lbs)..
IF you gain ONLY one pound a month.. How much will you weigh in 10 more years?
HINT: you WON'T only gain one pound a month..
There are tons (no pun intended) of overweight American women >45 on dating apps. Face only pics mean overweight. I don't see the men, but I'm sure there are plenty as well.
It's something with the processed American food supply. And also the gov't published food pyramid that says you need 7 servings of grains (bread, pasta, rice etc...) per day.
Shop the edges of your grocery store. That's where the dairy, meat, seafood, and vegetables are located. Everything else in the middle is bullshit...
Part of being an adult human being and parent is learning about and exercising self control. Don't eat so much that you get fat, don't spend more money than you have, don't let your children do things that are unhealthy for them. It's your job to teach them.
For once I agree with Howard wholeheartedly. That was well put.
"Crushing expectations".
Try being a woman in Afghanistan. Or any random Muslim country. Try being a woman in some parts of Africa. Or at UC Berkeley.
She makes $200,000 a year just writing on line:
"The most fervent 10 percent of Burnt Toast adherents pay $50 or more per year for extra content, which provides Sole-Smith an annual salary of about $200,000, twice as much as she ever made as a freelance writer. Her fans love her for giving them permission to stay off the scale at the doctor’s office and for teaching them how to talk to their kids about bodies and food. "
If one can’t control a dinner fork, how can one have any control over their life?
Why don't I write "extra content" and charge $50 a year? Only 4,000 paying readers needed to collect a "salary" of $200,000.
(In case it's not obvious: I don't want to live like that. But good for her.)
She ain’t heavy
She’s my anchor
I'm spending hours reading about Milton, a great English poet and reading Milton's poetry. In the poetry there are lines like these from Lycidas (an elegy on friend who was drowned):
"Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold:
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth;
And in the poetry, there's this (from Paradise Lost on Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as formed by God):
... in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,...
Whence true authority in men; though both
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he [Adam] and valor formed,
For softness she [Eve] and sweet attractive Grace,
He for God only, she for God in him:
That's the poetry. Then in prose, Milton issued a great call for liberty, Areopagitica, when the Puritans, his own side in the English Civil War, began prepublication censoring of books and pamphlets. Our own freedom from censorship dates back to that pamphlet. That's one thing Milton did in prose.
Here's another thing Milton did in prosaic daily life. When he was about 37-years-old, he married a 17-year-old girl whom he had known for a month. After a month of married life, she went went back to her family on a visit from which she never returned until several years later when her family was ruined and impoverished in the Civil War. She then intercepted Milton on the street and, on her knees, begged him to forgive her. He did and took in her and her entire family, and supported them all. This, although during his month of married life with his bride, he had begun composing a treatise on the necessity of allowing divorce for incompatibility of temperament. It was after these experiences that Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, "He for God only, she for God in him." Evidently, he hadn't learned much.
Now I don't know exactly how reading about Milton informs my attitude toward our present culture and its figures and situations - toward women like Sole-Smith and her sulky, unhappy children and toward the censorship attempts of Our Betters. It's something about how life is a lot harder and a lot more unexpected than NYT people now publicly acknowledge. It's something about a wider vision coming from history, i.e., Who was more idiotic - Sole-Smith or John Milton?
It's something about hearing poetry, not reading texts. People will be reading Lycidas when we are as forgotten as the Byzantines.
W9ildswan, thanks for your Milton musings. I struggle with Milton on some issues and will admit that in my distracted middle age have a hard time with getting into his works. But there was a time in my early 20s that Paradise Lost saved, awakened, and ignited my faith, and the memory of reading it has saved me again on occasion from falling off the cliff.
Jamie is right. Sole-Smith is like the fox who lost its tail and now tries to convince all the other animals to do the same.
Her fans love her for giving them permission to stay off the scale at the doctor’s office
I had a colleague back in the '80's.. His customers LOVED him, for giving* them cocaine.
They had NO PROBLEMS with the scales at the doctor's office.
I guess what i'm saying is that "love" is NOT always as good as it sounds
giving* i mean that figuratively.. He made MUCH MORE than $200,000 a year
She's also now decided that the nuclear family and even sex differences are oppressive (which seems like imposing a lot of stuff on her kids, not the opposite) and spends a lot of time mocking other mommy bloggers who encourage their kids to eat fruit and vegetables and get exercise - including showing pictures of those children, which is disturbing. And she's an heiress, but she doesn't even buy normal meals made by someone else to feed her kids. Now it's oppressive to order a roasted chicken from door dash?
What's fascinating (to me) is what a marketing tool these blogs are. I never saw a mommy blog before, but they have no content beyond declaring they're being oppressed or realize they're oppressing minorities. They just link repeatedly to each other while promoting product brands and sniping.
I'm very slow to catch a tech trend. I hasn't realized they monetized junior high. Score a point for rhhardin.
Why don't we all stay in bed and live on Slurm?
Revenue for telling people what they want to hear. I’m okay with that…
We were at dinner last night, a brewery restaurant, near closing time (only 9pm as it was a Sunday night), sitting on the patio. A woman older than we were appeared to be wrangling three kids of 7-9 years or so. Eventually a younger woman came outside; the older woman said something to her, referring to her as "Mother." So - grandmother, mother, kids. The older woman was near the exit of the patio, the younger - now with the kids - near the door to go inside.
The mother and kids went back inside. The grandmother gave QUITE the Gusty, exasperated sigh and settled in at a table near the patio exit. We groomed at one another - "Grandma's done!" A few minutes later, mother, kids, and apparently dad can't put again, now headed for the exit.
The oldest-looking kid was excitedly telling at the other two, "I will actually scream if I don't get mine! Give me mine! I will actually scream!"
The group just continued toward Grandma and the exit, no attempts at admonishment. Suddenly our sympathies were all with Grandma.
And that's what you get when you teach through example that your own "needs" are paramount. Yay.
The most amazing thing about the interview is the interview. Five hours with this entitled, self-satisfied, rationalizing, separated, obese heiress airhead b#*^h! The horror, the horror. On the other hand, a good and useful illustration of the regular NYT reader, the people they are writing for and the Dems are counting on.
OVER WEIGHT!!!
obese.
FAT!!!
There is no freedom or compassion possible if one cannot countenance FAT!!!
Anyone thinking "gardening only with native plants" is dieting is not worth listening to.
The road is long
With many a chocolate eclair
That leads us to you know where?
YOU know where
Am I strong?
Strong enough to carry her
Wildswan: I tend to agree with T.S. Eliot that Milton was the ultimate cultural ingrate and trust fund nut, and also as incontinent a political philosopher as ever lived.
His great works on freedom are marred by much freedom for me but not for thee, but perhaps worse, openly fudged from other people's work.
As a former lecturer in British poetry, I discourage making too much of equating fringy marriage and sex roles now and then: the marked danger of pregnancy, starvation, abandonment, and difficulties for a fleeing or abandoned mother to find subsistence work to feed a child (things Milton quite approved of, including excluding women and many men from his muddled thesis on freedom) has nothing to do with fat or skinny women mommy blogging today. Life was too different for both women and men -- add impoverished men to the list of people whose lives bore no relevance to Milton's daddy-funded political ink. He just wanted to replace one political-religious hierarchy with another, political religion's original sin.
His poetry, however, is virtually second to none. It's as if there were two Miltons: verse ennobled him and prose befouled him. Mommy blogging monetizes while infantilizing. Very weird.
From that short excerpt, it appears to me that she is the exact opposite of what she claims to be. I pity her daughters.
"People will be reading Lycidas when we are as forgotten as the Byzantines."
Very funny. But at this rate, who are these people who will be reading?
Heh. The NYT commenters aren't having it.
"I don't care what size she is, I take her as she is: a neglectful mother serving her children poison and calling it love."
2148 recommend
This is one of the more pernicious aspects of modern Feminism. I say Feminism but it isn't an expressly stated position but seems to be a common motivation for much of Feminism in the past 20 years or so. It is this idea that no one should feel badly about their actions, choices, or how their lives (or bodies) turned out. I think this is most commonly seen in the fat-acceptance and Healthy-at-any-size movement, but it is also present in the effort to destigmatize 'sex-work', or to make middle-aged women feel like it is fine if they are unmarried and have loads of sexual partners. Whereas earlier declarations of, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," were at least in part about awakening women to the idea that they have capability and agency on their own and can accomplish or change things if they put in the effort, now screeds against marriage or diet are about not feeling badly. It is meant to convince women that their current condition is just how they were meant to be and if they feel badly about it it is because society has imposed unfair cultural norms on them and they haven't done anything wrong and have no real control over the situation. This aspect of modern feminism is all about convincing women to be happy with their live's status quos. If anything this is disempowering. If a person realizes that they are overweight, the good news should be that that person, more than any other being on the planet, has the power to change that condition. The main strategy of life shouldn't be to avoid negative emotions at any cost. If you feel badly about being fat, use that as a signal and motivator to change your behavior.
Blogger Krumhorn said: "Howard at MCRD?? The DI’s must have spun their covers to see him in the squad bay. Semper orgasmic!"
I don't believe it. On the other hand, if it's true, he must have been one of them "surfer" boots at San Diego. No way ol' Howie would have made it through Parris Island.
No one has ever sent me a link to a "mommyblogger" post, nor have I ever encountered such a link on social media. Who reads this? Did they verify 4,000 subscribers?
No one on the left ever denounces someone for eating more than their fair share of food, thereby starving little brown babies and contributing to global warming.
Words from my father; Eat to live, don't live to eat.
He is a healthy, mobile, sharp-as-a-tack 95 year old...
She released her kids from the pressure to politely converse by allowing them to read at the table.
A common sight these days is to be in a restaurant and see a family of six around a table with each one buried in their smart phone. It leaves me incredibly sad
Its an age old trope that the 'rich' are portrayed as fat - consuming everything - and the poor proletariat on a forced diet, as thin. It's called consumption for a reason.
Wow. Howard is right.
""The most fervent 10 percent of Burnt Toast adherents pay $50 or more per year for extra content, which provides Sole-Smith an annual salary of about $200,000, twice as much as she ever made as a freelance writer. Her fans love her for giving them permission to stay off the scale at the doctor’s office and for teaching them how to talk to their kids about bodies and food. ""
Her career is incompatible with her health. Given that eating unwisely and being sedentary is easier than their opposites, I predict she will choose the paycheck over being poor and healthy.
Semantic appropriation.
A diet is the sum of your consumption through your top hole.
Everyone knows Parris Island is for pussies. All you pukes do is cry about the sand fleas.
Diet culture = self-restraint. It sounds like she could use a large dose of it.
Ann Althouse said...
Why don't I write "extra content" and charge $50 a year?
S-S's fans love her for giving them permission to indulge. For that $50, AA would have to devise ways to permit indulgences unique to the requester. Example: "Yes, you deserve another bourbon. You work hard and you are the rare man who appreciates the complexities of the spirit. Pour another!" Or "Put it off until tomorrow. There's plenty of time, and it's not that important anyway. Norms against procrastination were created by anal-retentive anxiety-ridden freaks with OCD. Relax and enjoy your life."
Easy money.
Geez, apologies for all the typos! I was foolishly trying to comment as a passenger in a car on winding roads.
On the plus side, the Charlottesville area is lovely this time of year.
Howard said: "Everyone knows Parris Island is for pussies. All you pukes do is cry about the sand fleas."
I guarantee Howie's never been near P.I., or probably MCRD San Diego, for that matter.
Does the media advertise for these nuts, or are they friends of the reporters?
And please don't tell me how hard it is to not get fat. Oh, look I cant put food in my mouth. Oh, the humanity.
Thats the amazing thing about losing weight. You can accomplish it by not doing something. No action required!
Fat Activist is shorthand for dying soon.
Both Howard and Madionman get thumbs up from me.
The source of most of our problems can be found in the nearest mirror.
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