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Co-hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (NYT-bestselling author of FAT TALK) and Corinne Fay (author of the popular plus size fashion newsletter Big Undies).
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You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting withEmma Copley Eisenberg.Emma is the author of the hybrid nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, which was named a New York Times notable book and Editor’s Choice of 2020. She also writesFrump Feelings by Emma Copley Eisenberg. And Emma’s new novel, Housemates, just came out on Tuesday!Today we are going to talk about Emma’s new book, but we’re also going to talk a lot about my favorite new trend invented by Emma (so says me): Frump Fashion.Both of Emma’s, including Housemates, are available in the Burnt Toast Bookshop!Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)This transcript may contain affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 146 TranscriptVirginiaFull disclosure: We should let the folks at home know that we do share a literary agent. EmmaTrue. VirginiaNothing about this interview was compromised by that fact, I don’t think. We just both love and admire our agent and have that in common.EmmaIt’s true. Good conflict of interest disclosure, but I think I found you totally independently of her! I think just from Burnt Toast. So it was a fun coincidence. VirginiaSuch a small world. Okay, so tell folks a little bit about yourself!EmmaI am a writer and a fat person living in Philadelphia. I write across the genre spectrum. I write long, rambling books. My first book is called The Third Rainbow Girl. I’m a novelist at heart and a fiction writer, and my book is coming out called Housemates. I’ve also written journalism and articles about the intersection of crime and queerness, about the intersection of fatness and queerness, and about fat liberation in general.VirginiaLet’s talk a little bit about Housemates! I just finished it at 5am because a child woke me up in the middle of the night. And I was like, well, I’m up, at least I get to read Emma’s amazing novel. It has one of the best fat protagonists I’ve read in a long time. Tell us a little bit about Leah and about Bernie, who is the other protagonist.EmmaHousemates is about Bernie and Leah who are two queer housemates in a big chaotic, messy group house in West Philly, which is close to my heart. That’s where I live. I was interested in writing a story about two people who are not just lovers, not just friends, not just making art together, but are doing all three of those things at the same time. Leah is the fat one—which is only one part of her personality, which was important to me. I’m really interested in the ways that fatness shows up in fiction, the lack of fat characters in fiction as we know. I did an analysis of the New York Times notable books over the past five years adn found that less than one percent of the Times notable books—100 each year over the past 5 years—have had a fat person in them.VirginiaOut of 500 books?EmmaLess than one percent. And that’s not just the Times, right? That’s a systemic issue in our culture and in our books landscape. So that was something that was definitely on my mind. As I said, I’m also a fat person. It’s part of my life and my experience, but I wanted to write a character who was in an interesting place with her fatness. I think there’s all this pressure if you’re fat to be unequivocally joyful and positive in your embodiment. Leah is, I would say, definitely still struggling and grappling with how her body exists in the world and how it’s treated. Particularly in queer spaces. Queer spaces can be super white and super fatphobic, as we know, as well. Leah’s moving through this queer strange bubble of West Philly, having all these experiences and thinking a lot about how she wants to leave and explore and see what else is out there and make art that is doing something that she’s not seeing in her life, in her neighborhood. She’s also tall and masc and nonbinary. She uses she and they—I’m going to use she for her in this interview because the pronouns kind of change over the course of the book. But both are fine, according to her. She’s really thinking a lot about joy and pleasure with fatness. She loves sex. She’s good at sex, which I think is rarely offered to fat people, especially fat people in fiction. She’s in love with Bernie and this exciting new relationship.At the same time, she’s thinking about how to navigate her body in spaces that are not always really safe. They’re road tripping across Pennsylvania and there are lots of things that happen that put her masc and nonbinary body in situations that are dangerous or unknown. I wanted to write a fat person who is smart, inquiring, and searching. Not fully arrived at liberation, but not deeply entrenched in shame either. Sort of in the middle, and really coming of age and coming to figure out her own body, as many of us are. Then Bernie is a kind of thin, squirrel-y, little lady who is also struggling with her embodiment. Even though she’s a thin person, we know fatphobia affects all the people. She’s someone who is really thinking about how to not be so alienated from her body. She is trying to think about how to be more at home inside herself. Rather than looking at herself from the outside, rather than feeling sort of dissociated from her own experience. She is someone who really struggles to feel pleasure, to enjoy sex, to enjoy connection. I wanted to also show that Leah is actually someone who can sort of mentor and encourage Bernie along on her body journey. It’s almost like the fat person is teaching the thin person how to be in a body which is something I wanted to play with and see. Because as fat people we think about embodiment all the time. And our friends and loved ones are sort of like what, who, where? I have a body? We can be at the forefront. Not that we must teach everyone how to have a body, but that’s a joyful gift we can give if we want to.VirginiaWell and you give her that power and authority, when fat people are so often not allowed to be authorities on our own bodies.I don’t want to include any spoilers in this episode because everyone’s going to go read the book, but there’s a really, really powerful scene at the end where Leah does something very physical. It’s a very cool, embodied powerful moment and subverts a lot of expectations about how fat people move and exist in our bodies. EmmaI wanted to show Leah getting to go on a journey and a trajectory with her body that wasn’t really easy and tied up in a bow, like she starts off the book hating her body and feeling shame about fatness and by the end she’s fixed or cured or done. I do think that there are ways that we’re constantly shifting and unlearning shame over the course of our lives. My therapist always says people heal in relation, we don’t heal in isolation. And I think there’s something powerful in the connection between these two people who are thinking a lot about art and morality and travel and America under Trump. They’re both teaching each other and growing. VirginiaI also applaud you, though, because while she is really struggling with a lot of this, she’s not actively dieting. I appreciated that you left dieting out of the book altogether because I think the struggle of embodiment is so much more than that. It too often gets reduced down to just that one piece.EmmaFor sure. Leah doesn’t diet. She’s in this place of essentially intuitive eating, where she’s like, I’m going to sort of perk up my ears and listen to what I want and what sounds delicious and what I want to consume. Especially, like, they’re on a cross country road trip. So they’re eating like delicious things like Waffle House and Dairy Queen and whatever you may find on the road. I think that’s part of the pleasure of a road trip is the eating and the consuming and seeing what you encounter. At the same time, she’s ambivalent or has questions about what does it mean to eat what I’m what I’m wanting or what I’m listening to. All those intuitive eating nuances that you discuss a lot in your work. That’s very much also true to my community and my experiences here in Philly. I did this really great fat embodied healing workshop where a bunch of us were asking: What does it mean to be eating what we want to eat, to be listening to our bodies, and also to be thinking about ways of not wanting to react against. Because I think it’s true that we don’t necessarily want to just be reacting against diet culture all the time. And it’s really hard to stop that reaction. So Leah’s thinking a lot about how can I actually be free and liberated. It’s not just reacting against, it’s finding some easiness in the middle. She’s looking for that ease, I think. And I think she finds a little more of it by the end of the book.VirginiaThe book also features this somewhat omniscient narrator, an older woman who’s watching Leah and Bernie’s lives play out. She’s a really interesting character in her own right, but there’s one paragraph of hers in particular that I underlined and bookmarked and was like, “Well, this just summed up my life to me.” EmmaShe’s an older queer woman, a lesbian of an older generation than Bernie and Leah, is I guess what I’ll say. She is speaking here. The he in this paragraph is this character Daniel Dunn, who was Bernie’s mentor and college professor, and he’s complicated, to say the least.Okay, here is the paragraph: He was one of those men who asked no questions, who just talked. He talked at me rather than to me, as if I could have been anyone which it seemed I was. This was not necessarily an uncommon experience for me when it came to men of Dunn’s demographics. There’s a thing that happens when you are either a lesbian or you become more comfortable with yourself in your late 30s and early 40s, or both, and men start to pick up on the fact that you are no longer sexually available to them. So they ignore you, treat you as a nondescript piece of furniture, you are no longer dressing for their eye, and they know it. And so they do not rest their eye upon you.VirginiaYeah, I mean, all of this. EmmaSay more. VirginiaThis is a thing that I’ve been noticing over the last several years—I mean, I’m 43. So I’m the demographic she’s talking about there. And I haven’t quite known how to verbalize because I both notice it and resent it, and also love it at the same time. Because there’s a lot of freedom to this invisibility? I don’t know, I’m curious how you feel about it.EmmaYeah, that’s really interesting. It makes me think, too, I recently listened to the Modesty episode ofArticles Of Interest.VirginiaOoh, I haven’t heard that yet. EmmaIt’s a little bit different, but modesty connects maybe to what we’re going to get into a little bit later, in the sense that if you’re slightly covered up, you have a little more control over who’s looking at you and how they’re looking at you, and especially how you get sexualized or not by men. I’m also really interested in the way that men’s misogyny and sexualization gets troubled or interrupted by queerness, by queer women.So this is Bernie’s problematic professor and he’s interacting with queer women of various ages and getting tripped up almost by the fact that they’re not sexually available to him, which is interesting.Like you said, it creates a certain amount of freedom. But I think there’s also a way that there’s just a sense of invisibility that—I’m in my later 30s, but I’m fat, so I feel like that’s sort of also part of it. Like, I’ve been starting to experience that. And like you said, I am ambivalent about it. It means you have less aliveness or electricity in a room sometimes, but you also have more freedom to just be a subject rather than an object. It’s complicated. VirginiaYes. I’m aware that there are rooms I’m in where I am not going to be listened to. Where I’m not going to be considered worth listening to because of being fat, because of being in my 40s, because of being a person on the internet who men like to hate. All these different identities. And sometimes it’s just like, what a fucking relief. Let me just not engage with that. Of course, it gets complicated if you’re remotely interested in men ever. Because it’s like, what do we do with that? EmmaYeah, for this narrator, she’s not like, “I need men to fall in love with me.” But she is like, “I need men to respect me.” Because in this situation, she’s an artist and he’s an artist, and they both have work in a show together, but he doesn’t see her. Doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t care. I definitely encounter some of this. I’m not nearly as public a person as you are, but being a writer, being an audio artist, we are in the public eye to some extent and there is all kinds of weird stuff that come from that invisibility, where people are like, oh, yeah, we’re not as interested in you in this meeting. We don’t care as much about what you have to say because you’re not beautiful anymore or maybe you’re just not beautiful in general. That’s really interesting to me. I think this older artist is really thinking through what it means to have beauty or not and what that means for men in particular and just the way she moves through the world.VirginiaThere’s just so much there. Because it’s also like, who’s defining beautiful?EmmaYes and ageism and all the things.VirginiaMy solution to this a lot of the time has been to choose communities that don’t center straight men. I think you probably feel similarly? And that is extremely liberating until you realize, oh I have to go into this other context and they’re still out there. EmmaYes. I want to be writing for fat people, for sure. Like, I really hope that fat people and people interested in body liberation read this novel. But I also want to be writing for whoever’s interested in hopefully compelling literary fiction. And whenever this book goes out into the world and I’m talking about it, like I’m lucky enough to do here with you, there are all these notions that I kind of hate facing, but are absolutely going to be put upon all of us. You know, of like you’re just not as shiny or not as interesting or not as smart. I can’t tell you how many times people have made assumptions that I’m not the author of my first book because I’m fat. Like, walking into a bookstore where people assumed I was like, a friend or something, you know? And I’m like, no, I wrote this book.VirginiaWait, wait. We have to stop on that for a second. Tell people about your first book and then why could a fat person not have written that? I don’t understand. EmmaMy first book was a reported memoir. And there were at least two times, I think, where either I walked into a bookstore or I showed up to a press thing and people were like, “Oh, like, hi?” And I was like, no, I’m, Emma. I’m the author. And they were like, oh! And then one bookseller actually said, “I saw a huge person out of the corner of my eye and I thought that can’t be the author.” Someone said that out loud.VirginiaThose words were said out loud. People do not hear themselves. EmmaNo, they do not. I think there’s a deeply entrenched belief that we need to keep examining, which is that fat people can’t have excellence or can’t be innovators, can’t be visionaries, can’t have exciting, strange, culturally relevant ideas. Like, I know people wouldn’t mostly say that out loud. But I think there is a truth to that. We know that fat people are discriminated against for job opportunities.So yeah, it was wild. And I definitely had people reach out to me in the process of publishing my book being like, what happened? Like, you gained so much weight. What happened to you? The sense that since my book was about a murder…
Full show notes at the publisherWe are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your May Indulgence Gospel. And because it is Fat Swim Week, we are doing an entire swim-themed episode for you!
We’ll get into:
Can we reclaim the swim dress? (But do we want to?)
Why is the Lands End swimsuit website SO bad?
How to get sunscreen in impossible-to-reach spots?
Why does Corinne hate flip flops?
Even more thoughts on visible pubic hair.
And so much more about how to show up fat at the pool or beach this summer and have an absolute blast.
This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
It’s time for your May Extra Butter! Today we are talking about the bodies of Bridgerton.
If you’re listening to this the day it drops, season three is out! We love the show. We love Nicola Coughlan. And we do not love the way the Internet talks about her body!
To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter.
Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! Yes, even though it’s Tuesday!We’ve got a podcast episode for you today, even though it is not our normal Thursday podcast day, because I was so excited to be able to add this particular conversation to our May lineup. And it had to be in May because today we are talking about Your Fat Friend, the documentary about our beloved Aubrey Gordon, which I know so many of you have been dying to see.Your Fat Friend is streaming online at Jolt.Film until June 17!I know Aubrey needs no introduction to most of you. But she is the author of What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and You Just Need To Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. She’s also co-host of Maintenance Phase and you can catch her Burnt Toast episodes here and here.And today, I am so thrilled because I’m chatting with Jeanie Finlay, the director of Your Fat Friend, who followed Aubrey for six years to make this film.Jeanie Finlayis one of Britain’s most distinctive documentary makers, and has made films for HBO, IFC and the BBC. Whether she’s inviting audiences to share the extraordinary journey of a British transgender man pregnant with his child in her filmSeahorse, or onto the set of the world’s biggest television show for her Emmy-nominated filmGame of Thrones: The Last Watch, all of Jeanie’s documentaries are made with the same steel and heart, sharing an empathetic approach to bringing overlooked and untold stories to the screen.She is also just an absolute delight of a human.RELATED CALL TO ACTION: The Campaign for Size Freedom is working to get laws against weight discrimination passed in New York and Massachusetts — and they need us to contact our reps TODAY.For legislation pending in both places to move forward. Here’s a script and contact info. And here’s more info on NAAFA and the Campaign.Contact your reps for fat rights!PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 143 TranscriptVirginiaLook, here’s Aubrey right up behind me on the wall. JeanieOh my goodness!VirginiaThis was the postcard you all handed out at the Tribeca premiere and I just loved it so much, so I just like having it up there. It was a really moving experience to watch it in the theater with everyone at the premiere. I still get teary thinking about it and I’m so excited that more people are getting to see it this month.JeanieThanks so much, that really means a lot. Showing the film in cinemas has been really phenomenal. I think about the spaces where fat people come together and it’s usually Weight Watchers. It’s been amazing to take over cinemas.And then there’s a collective experience when people see it online, too. If you’re on the other side of the Instagram or the social accounts when the reactions are coming in, it’s very overwhelming and moving for me as the filmmaker. VirginiaI can imagine.JeanieI always knew that Aubrey was amazing. But when I think back to that world premiere that you were at, at Tribeca almost a year ago, I was very apprehensive. I made this film completely independently, because it was something I wanted to make. And obviously, you don’t spend six years making a film, if you don’t want it to reach an audience. But I wasn’t sure how it would be received at all.This is my ninth feature film and I sort of thought, you know what, I’m making this and I don’t care what people think. I’ve got to make it, I need to make it. And then the fact that people have been connecting with the soft and tender bits that I felt when I was making it? It makes me feel very emotional even just thinking about it.VirginiaI think a lot of people are seeing themselves in it, both in Aubrey, but also in her parents, in the comments other people make in the movie. I think you’re seeing yourself in a lot of different ways that can be challenging and uncomfortable but also profoundly moving. I think that the experience of that representation is so missing in any other films, TV shows. We don’t see fat life portrayed on screen like that, pretty much ever. I’ve been thinking about your film in contrast to projects like The Whale. Or even Baby Reindeer, which just came out here—and there’s a big conversation happening about the portrayal of fatness there.But there are also so many documentaries that are “health” focused, from Supersize Me all the way through Forks Over Knives. And that whole genre feels really problematic to me because people so often view them as objective fact. I get emails all the time —from trolls but also from well-meaning people—saying, “If you would only watch this documentary, you would understand that everything you write is wrong.”What do you wish people understood about how those kinds of films get made? JeanieIt’s a big old subject. And partly, it has to do with the way that documentaries are perceived. So it’s worth giving a bit of context. In the last 20 years, documentaries have exploded. They didn’t used to be seen in cinemas. Netflix wasn’t a thing. There wasn’t a mass audience for documentary outside of PBS in the US. There are a lot of myths about documentary making. One of them is that this is “fly on the wall” filmmaking and you know, I’m not a fly. I’m take up too much space to be a fly.VirginiaYou’re wearing a beautiful rainbow caftan, you can’t be a fly.JeanieWhat I’m trying to show you is a relationship. I’m showing you my lens. This is authored work. This is the view that I found as this filmmaker—at this point in my career, as a parent, as somebody who lives outside of London, who’s British making this film about an American person, someone who didn’t go to a private fee paying school, all of those intersectional things. As a white lady, as someone who is fat but who is also a small fat person, a problematic mid size queen—all of those things are things that I’m bringing to this. I want to be fair to the people that I make my films about, but the idea that documentary is fact is kind of silly. Supersize Me is as much about Morgan Spurlock and his bias and ideas about what makes a funny film. His perceptions of what eating McDonald’s is, about his perceptions of food poverty, or his access to food. All of those things play into him making that film at that time. And I don’t know how many people are prepared to examine the paradigm shift of the work that Aubrey has been doing, but also the work that fat activists have been doing for decades, the work that you’re doing. How much of that work is being brought into play when people are making these documentaries? Or are they just reinforcing the ideas that they already had? I know the power of an interview. And I also know the power of an edit. Documentary is an unregulated industry, so it’s almost like you have to make your own guidelines for proceeding. Now, as an independent maker, it means that there are choices I make in the finance that I raise for my films, but also in the ways that I make film.I use non-binary consent in my filmmaking practice, which means that consent is never taken for granted. It’s something that we discuss at all stages of the process because the traditional way of making films is you deliver someone a contract that is the length of War and Peace and just ask them to sign their name to the end and then whatever. That means anything you say can be used in perpetuity in all media known now or in the future. And that just sort of doesn’t feel okay to me. Let’s just have a more sophisticated conversation about this or a more open conversation about what it means to tell your story on screen. It also means that there’s mental health supervision on my films. But these things are in my gift, because I wrote the budget and I’m a producer on the film. But these documentaries which have informed our ideas about “health” have been made under these old models of documentary filmmaking. Which are: You get the biggest characters to give you the broadest brushstroke facts. You never acknowledged that you’re leaning into the bias or the views that you may hold as a maker. Stuff gets fact-checked, but it’s only as good as the fact checker. In something like Supersize Me, is there a responsibility to actually think about the stories or the myths that have been perpetuated as part of that media?VirginiaTo be somewhat fair to Supersize Me, it was made at a very different time in the discourse. It is a much older film. But even the more recent ones, it does not feel like anyone in any production meeting said, should we think about how much anti-fat bias is informing this conversation? Should we name that or give it a passing reference as a concept? I mean, it doesn’t feel like it’s anywhere in the room. JeanieIt’s worth questioning that power. We showed this one with Sheffield Documentary Festival last year, which is the big documentary film festival in the United Kingdom. And we won the audience award, which was astonishing and amazing. But I did have a lot of encounters the night after the premiere, which were with thin male documentary directors.VirginiaI bet those were fun.JeanieThey were drunk and crying because they have to be absolved for the terrible things that they’ve all said or done. It was like, Oh babes, no. No, don’t come to me for this.VirginiaI’m not going to do this for you.JeanieWe’ve had a lot of fat audiences flock to watch the film. And later on in the year, when the film broadcasts wider, it’s going to encounter a more general population. And I’m deeply fascinated to see how that works. I made a film in 2019 called Seahorse which was about a trans guy getting pregnant and having a baby. I followed him—Freddy McConnell—and I was there when the baby was conceived and I was there when the baby was born. But it’s really about the stuff of life, about what it means to live in a body that’s changing, and about his family relationships. I would say that that film is definitely a sibling to Your Fat Friend.And the experience of that broadcasting at a primetime slot on BBC Two, nine o’clock was extraordinary. Because for a lot of people watching, it was the first time they’d heard the experience of a trans guy articulating his experience giving birth. For some people, it was the first time they’d knowingly heard a trans man explaining what gender dysphoria. The cosmic toothache of dysphoria—what does that mean? I’m very interested when you take these very personal, particular experiences of one person that can hold a mirror to a wider experience and then you put them in places where millions of people see them.VirginiaI’m getting nervous just thinking about it, as someone who has had smaller tastes of taking my personal story into the mainstream here and there. It can be rough. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But the thing is, is no matter how much control you have over the project—which of course in your case, you had so much control. You’re the filmmaker. But you don’t have any control over what the audience does with the work. And that is always terrifying.There’s a lot of good that comes out of it, and there’s a lot of darkness. I think it can even be hard to talk about the darkness. There’s this perception that this is the cost of doing business. This is what you have to expect if you’re going to tell challenging stories in public, which almost makes it sound like we asked for it or something.JeanieI mean, I think it’s enormously challenging. I believe in the power of film to help us articulate ideas or thoughts that we may not have had the language to express before. It sounds very grand, like I’m applying that to my own work.But like when I’m thinking about the experience of Seahorse, I was quite scared. When we showed the film at a festival in Russia, it was shut down because there was a bomb threat. It was enormously scary. And Freddy was fighting in the courts to be named as a parent on the birth ticket, instead of mother. And this had been done in private, it’s not included in my film because it would legally prejudice the case. But a journalist outed Freddy and he ended up on every cover of every single newspaper in the United Kingdom. VirginiaAnd the British press happen to be so kind and nuanced in their coverage.JeanieOh they’re so lovely. So we had a screening in London and we had this ridiculous situation where we had the paparazzi lining up outside the cinema and we had to escape out of the back door.But on the other hand, what I would say is, that stuff flares very white hot, it’s like a firework. It happens very quickly. But on the flip side of that, the lasting, the lingering stuff from a film can last a long time.I’ve been at lots of screenings of Your Fat Friend and I took it to Leeds Film Festival in Yorkshire in the north of England. And two parents stood up in the Q&A, two moms, and said, “My child is trans and I’m here today to say thank you for Seahorse because it helped me understand what my child was going through.” And that was just like oh, my goodness, this is why we do it. Or getting a phone call from my 94-year-old Gran who said she’d never heard of a man having a baby but now she understood it. VirginiaOh, good job, Gran. JeanieRoger Ebert, the American critic used to say that documentary films had the capacity to be an empathy machine. And not to sound like Pollyanna, but I do believe in that. I want to make films where you fall in love with the people that you’ve spent time with on screen. I think the reason why I wanted to make a film with Aubrey—I went off on a mission. I wanted to make a film about fatness because I could see that the conversations were changing. So I set myself this ridiculous task. I’m going to make an essay film, I’m just going to try and survey the way that people are talking about fat now. And it was rubbish. It wasn’t interesting. It was just like a Wikipedia article set to music. Whatever I did with it, it wasn’t quite right. I kept sort of straying into body positivity. And it’s just like, this isn’t about ooh, I can’t wear a bikini. I’m interested in what other structural things that are in place affect the literal lens that we’re viewing other people in the world. How does that contribute to bias? And how do you make a film that swims in all that messy stuff? How does that show up with your mom? And your relationships? As soon as I read Aubrey’s piece, I knew I wanted to meet this person, the person who had written her first blog post. And then when I met her family and realized they’re in a really, really different position of where they are with their politics or just their view of the world. And that’s something that anyone can relate to. It’s something I relate to on a personal level. I was like, well, this is totally fascinating. This is where the film can live, this space.That’s what I’m always looking for. What’s the where’s the space where the film can live? Because someone being interesting or dynamic on screen is not enough to tell a story. It’s just the beginning. Where are we going to go? And that was a year of trying stuff out, filming loads of things, meeting a lot of people. And then when I found Aubrey it was like, Oh. Here she is. VirginiaThere she is. And then you spent six years with her! I would love to hear what is it like to work on a project for so long and to follow your subject for so long and so intensively?JeanieI mean, this is something that I’ve done before. I love making films. This is the only thing I do. This is my living. And the way to make it work as a filmmaker is to work on more than one project at a time. So sometimes I set a project going and then I’ll go and do another thing. So I started on Your Fat Friend and wasn’t sure what direction it was going to take. And then I put it on hold, because partly because I was very intensively working on Seahorse. Freddy was pregnant, I ha…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith, Corinne Fay and Dacy Gillespie, and it’s time to wrap up the #UnflatteringToast Style Challenge!ICYMI: Dacy is an anti-diet, weight-inclusive personal stylist, who also writesunflattering. She helps clients examine the fashion rules they’ve been told to follow and unpack the origins of those messages, to let them go. She also helps folks find their style, edit their wardrobes, and shop mindfully. You can catch our first conversation about the Style Challenge here.PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Rule breaking ftw! Episode 142 TranscriptThis transcript contains affiliate links for items we bought with our own money. We never run ads or take sponsors, but shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast!Week 1: Break The RulesCorinneSo we’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks texting in a group chat about our outfits and our general ups and downs. And now you can join us.VirginiaIt’s like a text thread made live with voices. DacyLet’s jump in and start with week one. This is where we were all thinking of style rules that we could break. I have to say, some of y’all had some weird ones. Mostly Virginia. Just kidding. No, I definitely had weird ones, too. VirginiaI’m still not thoroughly over the Birkenstocks and skinny jeans rule. I mean, I broke it, but I think it’s still a rule for me. I was affirmed by—I’m not going to say an overwhelming number of people agreeing with that. But I think I heard from three people who were like, “I also have that rule.” It’s not just me.DacyTo clarify, the rule is Birkenstocks are too clunky of a sandal to put with a skinny pant?VirginiaIf the skinny jean covers your ankle. DacySo if it’s cropped, it’s okay. I didn’t know this aspect. CorinneIt’s very specific. VirginiaWell, that was the big rule I broke. CorinneThe place that I’m wanting to start is how actually hard it was to get dressed the first day. I had a pile of discarded clothes that I still haven’t fully put away. Because I wasn’t just picking up the clothes off the chair that I wore yesterday, I was trying to find stuff that felt like it was stretching my capacity.I think I’m more comfortable wearing a fancier shirt with basic pants. So it felt like it ended up being some fancier pants with more comfortable shirts. Also I wanted to try wearing a dress and I kind of failed and also was like, “If I were going to wear a dress, it wouldn’t be one of these ones that I have in my closet, which I do not like.”DacyGood to know. VirginiaThat’s good intel to gather. Because you’ve been buying dresses that you actually don’t want to wear at all. CorinneWell, a lot of them are from pre-pandemic life that I just haven’t gotten rid of. I was like, maybe I can like, style these? And then I was like, no. I can’t and I don’t want to.VirginiaYou also did the mesh shirt that week. DacyWhich everyone loved including us.CorinneI now have that outfit in my back pocket if I ever have somewhere fancy to go. VirginiaOr even just the grocery store, whatever. That felt very versatile to me. And that was a very different look than what I typically think of as a Corinne Outfit. DacyI agree this all took a ton of energy. Not going to lie, halfway through that week I was like, I want to quit. I’m done. I was starting to get resentful of this thing that I had part in creating. Same as you, Corinne, when I was trying to push myself or stretch myself—I like how you said stretch yourself—it just took a ton of thought. It took trying on multiple things and trying different combinations. And you know, I hadn’t really done that in succession very often recently to remember what that effort was like. I mean, maybe back when I was working in office job, but that was pre-kids, pre-pandemic, all of the things. So yeah, it was draining. VirginiaAnd I want to say too, the fact that we were also trying to share and document our process was an added layer of labor because sometimes I would put an outfit on and then I would be like, “I don’t think this will make an interesting reel.” I was aware that was not part of the challenge, but it was hard to turn off that part of my brain. To be like, “This feels rule breaking but I’m not getting a good photo of it, so forget it.” And I hope other people doing the challenge or if you’re going to do the challenge in the future, maybe you don’t share it on the Internet. That’s fine. DacyYeah, that was hard.CorinneI found that part of it to be very gratifying! I was really enjoying the sharing and chatting on Instagram and TikTok about it. I think also just because we all in some capacity work from home, so it was nice to actually have people noticing what I was wearing.VirginiaWell, yeah, that’s the thing. If I just wear it in my house, it’s a tree falling in the forest. Did this outfit happen? It’s like suddenly we had clothing colleagues which was nice. CorinnePart of what also was so interesting about this week was the creativity and effort that I was putting towards trying to find outfits—like, I didn’t buy anything the first week. I was just not feeling the temptation to browse. I was feeling like whoa, there’s so much stuff in my closet that I’m not wearing. How can I like be creative with that? And then week two and three, that totally disappeared for me.VirginiaYou and I both pushed ourselves, like you maybe with the mesh top, and me with the bare legs dress. We both pushed ourselves to wear things that were a little more visible than our day to day look. And it was nerve wracking to decide to wear it but then actually when I was out in the world wearing it, I was like, I like wearing a more visible outfit. That was kind of cool to realize. I do feel like I had a real personal growth moment about my bare legs hang up and I’m really I’m proud of that. I mean, obviously, it was cold because it was 50 degrees. I did identify the need for a coat, which I’m still shopping for, that works with a dress with bare legs. But it was really liberating. I really realized how much that rule was a voice in my own head and that actually nobody cares if you are seasonally appropriate in your aesthetic. It still doesn’t sound true when I say it out loud! But nobody was like “I’m wearing a sweater and you’re wearing a dress with bare legs, how inappropriate.”DacyBecause you were wearing boots, right? So you were wearing a full coverage shoe. It would have been different if you’ve been wearing a dress with bare legs and an open toe shoe and everyone else was wearing a jacket and freezing. Then you’d feel like you were on vacation in the tropics and everyone else is in New York state.VirginiaThe backstory on why I’m so hung up on bare legs is because earlier in my career, I had a brief stint as a celebrity ghostwriter. I cannot say who the celebrities were, but I can tell you that during one of these projects, I was out in LA with one celebrity who was wearing head to toe black, even though it was May in Los Angeles and like, 78 degrees. I was wearing a really cute layered cream and tan sort of sheath dress with brown Frye boots and bare legs.Our picture was taken by the paparazzi because that happens to this person all the time. This was a very new experience to me, and it will never happen again. And when the paparazzi ran the photo of us, I was described as her gal pal, which many friends will never let me forget. But more crucially—next to this very tiny, famous, beautiful woman wearing all black, my legs appeared to be Twilight vampire sparkling white. It was just one of those moments. I was like, Ohhhh, that’s why she wears all black. That’s a smart thing that celebrities do because you have a lot more protection in how you come off in a photo. They’re very careful about when they show their skin because of the scrutiny they’re under, which is a terrible way to live and a whole comment on our society. But meanwhile, my calves were illuminated.CorinneI mean, I once had someone say “I like your white tights,” when I was wearing bare legs. VirginiaWe’re a pasty people. DacyMaybe it’s changing with younger generations, but growing up in the 80s and 90s and the whole requirement of being tan anytime your skin showed. I mean, people were risking their lives for that. So that is a tough one to let go of, if you’ve lived through that. VirginiaBut I did! I broke through! And I felt like oh, this was not a big deal.DacyVirginia, just as you’re telling that story, it’s interesting to me that actually in the situation, you were the one that was dressed more appropriately for the season and the weather. VirginiaNot according to like LA celebrity standards.CorinneBecause the LA celebrity standard is to ignore the weather.VirginiaCorrect. It’s hard to be with a famous person, period. And it’s a stressful event to dress to go and be around famous people, and you’re going to just be this fly on the wall in their life. I was stressed about it and thought I’d really figured out a cute outfit. Then when we met up I was like, “This doesn’t feel like the thing I should have worn.” So I was sort of already self conscious about it and then I see the photos and I am a neon sign of calves.DacyI hear this a lot. It can be really traumatizing when you show up wherever it is wearing what you feel like is the wrong thing. VirginiaAnyway, I feel like I did a lot of healing and growth. I agree with Corinne, it felt like a very creative week. When I found an outfit I really liked, I felt energized by it. I didn’t feel like I needed to shop. It was hard, but those were some of the real positives for me.DacyThat’s so funny that you felt energized by it because I felt not energized. I felt very self conscious. It felt like it took more energy just to exist in the outfits that I was wearing.VirginiaIs this because you were wearing red? Dacy hates color. DacyI’ve been trying to figure out exactly why. I am very high on the spectrum of introvert and so I don’t love a lot of attention. I do not want to be that person walking into a room creating some sort of attention getting spectacle or something. It just feels very uncomfortable emotionally. Then I discovered through this process that I have some sort of inner rebel—which is not my personality! My personality is very people pleasing. But I have some sort of inner rebel around the issue of style and particularly color. I said in one of my posts, I feel like a little girl stomping her foot saying, “I’m not going to wear red just because you want me to.” When I was growing up, I have brown hair, brown eyes. Everyone was always like, you should wear red. And I tried it a few times. And it didn’t feel great. So this is my first time trying red after probably 25 years to be honest. I didn’t die.I wore a red shirt twice and I wore a chartreuse green shirt once as well. Some of it I didn’t mind and it definitely was a bit of immersion therapy, where you start to get a little bit more comfortable. So I think I could now wear a red shirt and feel better.VirginiaBut you might not because it’s just not your favorite?DacyWell, I would say some of the outfits with the red I did really end up liking. I would love them if I saw them on someone else. The only reason why I did actually stretch myself to wear those colors is because I really am enjoying the look of that on other people and in images. And so, I did feel a desire to try it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have done it at all. Week 2: Honor Your ComfortCorinneAll right, let’s get into week two. Week two is where we honored our comfort and tried to find a safe outfit. Virginia, and I immediately got bored and started shopping.VirginiaAnd Dacy was so happy.DacyI was so happy. Oh my God. It was like sliding into a warm bath. VirginiaAgain, I do think some of this was the pressure to make content around the outfits and then being like, “My safe comfy clothes just don’t feel that interesting to share with the world.”DacyThat makes sense. VirginiaThat was part of it. But Dacy and I are polar opposites on this color conversation. If I wear comfy baggy neutrals, I feel like I have erased my personality. I feel so blah and bored by what I’m wearing. That was clarifying to realize because I thought Week One was going to be the really hard week and that Week Two would be so easy. It was fascinating that it was the opposite for me.DacyAnd of course, it was the reverse for me, as well. Week One was so hard and then Week Two, I could literally go to my closet, grab two things, put them on and just move on with my day. I never had to change an outfit. I never had to figure out, “Does this work together?”It’s interesting what you just said, Virginia, about feeling like you erased your personality. Think about the Vogue editors, right? The people who are creating these fantastical spreads and amazingly creative photoshoots and photography. They’re usually wearing all black.VirginiaJust like the Hollywood celebrities who don’t want to be photographed that day. DacyExactly. Or fashion designers. I mean, think of Michael Kors. Think of, we don’t want to bring his memory up, but Karl Lagerfeld. Any of these people, they had uniforms. Not to align myself in any way on their level, but I did start to feel this week like maybe that is what I’m doing. This is easy for me to put on and then do my work, which is actually helping other people with this and being creative in that way. CorinneI imagine that if I had your job, Dacy, I would feel a lot of pressure to look a certain type of way to try and sell people on myself.DacyI’m glad you mentioned that, actually, because, I’ve been running this business for 11 years now. In the first six or seven years, I did feel that way. I felt like I had to show up perfectly every time. And it was exhausting. It was basically like Week One every week. So now I am just so so grateful. I mean, I have a ton of privilege in many, many ways. But I also have the privilege of working with the type of people who I know are not going to judge me because I’m not wearing the latest trends, or I don’t have perfect makeup or any makeup. I am constantly grateful for that.VirginiaThat’s really freeing. I like that. Corinne, what were your Week Two feelings?CorinneI was getting caught up on the duality of comfort versus liking how something looks. Like, Is this comfortable? And do I like how it looks? I don’t know, I couldn’t find the sweet spot there. I think it was on Wednesday of that week that we were texting and Dacy suggested, why don’t you try putting 50 percent as much effort as you put in last week. And then I was like, okay, I can see where this could work. I was kind of thinking of it as I’m just going to be wearing my most schlumpy outfits, but that’s not very fun. DacyI definitely thought of it differently. Comfort for me encapsulates not just that physical comfort but do I like it? I do feel like myself. VirginiaWe talked in the first episode about how there is comfort in terms of physical comfort, which might be your sweat pants. But I think both Corinne and I would struggle to wear sweat pants out into the world. There’s the whole visible fat person thing. And so safe and comfortable outfits for those situations might not always be physically comfortable. So I think that tension was something I was thinking through a lot. Like, am I trying to dress for social comfort? Or purely physical comfort? Or can I do both?As I’m saying that I’m realizing what I was missing from that is what you just said Dacy, which is: Comfort also means I like how it looks. Not, it will meet with the arbitrary approval of whatever bias I’m expecting to encounter.DacyThis idea of liking what you’re wearing does provide a real sense of security when you do go out in the world. It’s not alw…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today I’m chatting with Annie Nardolilli and Louisa Hall, of the band Griefcat.Annie and Louisa are a duo that you can’t easily categorize or file into a neat little genre. They wear matching outfits, they create beautifully blended harmonies and write brilliant lyrics. Their new album Late Stage Capitalism, dropped April 19 and explores how unbridled capitalism has invaded every facet of modern life, from workplace politics to interpersonal relationships, and even our most private moments. We’re also going to talk perhaps an unprecedented amount about poop today. You’ve been warned.And if you usually read the transcripts—this is an episode to put in your ears, because we’re playing clips of Annie and Louisa’s awesome and hilarious music throughout!PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 141 TranscriptLouisaMy name is Louisa. I’ve been part of Griefcat for five years now—becaue Griefcat has only been around for five years—but I’ve been a singer songwriter for about ten years, based in Washington, DC. And I’m just just a ball of laughs. AnnieI’m Annie. I have also been in Griefcat for five years. I was also a singer/songwriter solo, and now we work together. It’s great. LouisaIt’s the best! You’re also a ball? a bundle? Of laughs.AnnieI’m a bundle of joy. LouisaYou are a human baby.VirginiaYou are both a delight. So we are going to chat about your new album, Late Stage Capitalism.LouisaLate Stage Capitalism is our second studio album, and our first theme album. The theme is—surprise!—late stage capitalism. It’s about how capitalism has invaded every single facet of our lives, and our reaction to it. The songs are all really funny, but I think they’re also very relatable. One of my favorite things about the album is that every single song has a different genre. We’ve got a punk song. We’ve got an old time-y 1920s style song. We have a 90s love song. A lot of different variety. So if you hate one of those, you might like something else. VirginiaDo you have favorite genres to write in? Were there some songs that you were like, “this is a real slog that I have to do a punk song,” or was it all kind of fun to experiment with? AnnieThe punk song was definitely our favorite.LouisaIt was a delight. AnnieThat’s definitely my favorite song on the album. We also have an 80’s style “We Are The World” kind of song. That’s the first song on the album, called “Benevolent Billionaire.” That one is also one of my favorites, because it was more of a collaborative thing. There’s really nothing on the album that was a slog to try and figure out. Definitely some songs were harder than others to get the genre niche right. But I mean, it’s fun. It’s like playing dress up. Just playing around.LouisaI would say that what we do with songwriting—we’re not writing in a specific genre. We write with a guitar or ukulele, so it has a folk type of base. But then from there when we go into the studio we start to hone the song a little bit, that’s when we start to be like, this is the genre. The genre is almost a surprise to us. We don’t start off intending on a genre. VirginiaLet’s talk about “Benevolent Billionaire.” I am obsessed with it and I love that it is a takeoff of “We Are The World.”AnnieI remember talking with my brother one day and he used the phrase, “there’s no such thing as a benevolent billionaire.” And then we were having a rehearsal one day, I was struggling with some chords and that sentence somehow fit the particular chords that we were going for. So then we developed this little song around it. Louisa had the idea for the visual aesthetic of the song being this 1980’s “We Are The World” style power ballad. We got a bunch of our friends to sing a chorus on it. They’re acting as all those celebrities.LouisaLike Bono. AnnieYeah, like Bono. That came together really organically.LouisaFor those who haven’t heard the song, Bono is not actually featured. That was just what I wanted in my heart.VirginiaBut you feel his essence, I think, when you listen to the song. It’s such a clever commentary because those celebrity group singalongs are always so cringe-y. I’m thinking of that one that came out at the start of the pandemic.LouisaImagine? It was just so off the mark.VirginiaThey were all like in their beach houses. LouisaEveryone else: We’re in our little one bedrooms. VirginiaWe’re all quarantined. We’re all getting through it. Some of us have an infinity pool. Some of us don’t. LouisaBut together, we’ll get through it.VirginiaBut not that much together, because they live in a compound.LouisaExactly. Stay off my land. VirginiaIt’s really the perfect aesthetic for the benevolent billionaire song. It’s so good. LouisaThank you. VirginiaSo obviously, I love everything you write. But I have to admit I first found you two because people kept DM’ing me your song about how fat people pooping the same as everyone else. AnnieForgot about that!VirginiaI know fatness isn’t the primary focus of the new album, but I we have to spend some time on that song because it’s really, really close to my heart. LouisaI love that. I would say that fatness permeates everything that we do because we’re fat. We’re always going to be fat creators creating art with our fat cells.AnnieWriting what you know. LouisaExactly, exactly. The way that that song came about is that one of the songs on the new album is called Revolution (Poop at Work). It’s just a 90 second poop joke done in a 1920’s style. And the Internet loves this song. It blew up. At this point, I think we have like over 25 million views of our content online. A lot of that is this specific song. With that virality, the trolls came out of the woodwork. We got so many people just commenting like, “these girls must drop warships!!” and “I bet their poop is huge!!!” Everybody kept commenting about how large our poop must be. And like, I think they’re just average? So that song was a response to people that just don’t seem to know science. A little response to the haters out there. VirginiaBigger people don’t necessarily take bigger shits. AnnieI do a lot of pet sitting. I walk small dogs, I walk big dogs. They all poop just about the same. LouisaThat’s surprising to me. AnnieIf you gotta go, you gotta go. What you eat is what you eat. We decided to fight back against our haters and just to enlighten people that actually if you really are curious about our bowel movements, they’re the same as yours. So whatever you imagine yours to be, that’s what ours are like, too.Get 20% off for 1 yearLouisaI will say, I haven’t actually examined any other adults feces, so I might be the one making an assumption here. VirginiaThe science was not rigorous.LouisaWe need to test this. VirginiaBut I think that was an important PSA and valuable education that you are sharing with everyone.LouisaI’m so glad that it resonated. VirginiaI did want to talk about trolls a little bit. Because one thing I know is that, as fat women on the internet, we have trolls. We have our little fans in the gallery. How are you doing with that side of things? Especially with 25 million views? That’s a lot of eyeballs.AnnieSo originally when we started getting hate comments, we were deleting them. We were feeling really bad about them and really focusing on them a little too much. Then I had this shift in perspective by watching a Dolly Parton interview where she was talking about, I don’t really care what people have to say about me because I know what I look like. Like, I’m already in on the joke. I’m very well aware. So if you’re going to make fun of me, either be more creative or don’t.So then I had this mental shift of like, we know what our bodies look like and we’re not ashamed of them. We don’t see it as an insult, therefore why delete the comments? Why feel shameful about the comments? If anything, just use them as fodder to point out how weird people feel about seeing fat women on the internet and how that’s a you problem, not a me problem. And of course, hate comments are still engagement, people! We’d get hate comments and then we’d have our fans respond to the hate comments, and it would just sort of snowball into more engagement for the algorithm. Hey, we’ll take that, baby. It’s show business!LouisaI would really try to jump on and try to absorb the bomb because I didn’t want Annie to feel that. So I was almost like eating all of these hate comments and it was really affecting me. And when Annie had that shift in perspective, we started responding in the affirmative. So somebody would be like, “wow, their crap weighs 37 pounds!!” and we’d just write “38!!!!” So we would just start agreeing with people and be like, “yeah, you’re right.” Once we started doing that, it just became fun. It became like a game almost, how we responded to these things. That being said, we’ve been lucky that we haven’t gotten like a lot of violent messages. Anything that’s violent or scary, I’m not going to engage with any of that. But if someone’s just being a jerk, you might as well. So when somebody did comment, at one point, “these girls must dump warships.” We responded “reporting for duty” with a little salute. And the person was like, okay, that’s pretty good. VirginiaAw, you won them over!LouisaSometimes people do do turn a little bit, which is kind of fun to see.VirginiaI mean, I fervently believe that troll commentary is too high a price. People will often be like, “well, that’s the price you pay for being a public figure.” And I’m like, no, that price is unacceptable. Nobody should be asked to deal with that. But I really believe if you can make treasure from the troll trash, like, by all means. Because it just keeps you from getting dragged down into the muck with them. So it seems like a very healthy approach. And also, again, brings us bangers like “Fat People Poop The Same As You.” AnnieOne thing that we did learn is that not everybody is enlightened about speaking about bodies as we are. Meaning when somebody would comment, like, “all these fat women, blah, blah, blah,” we’d have people respond being like, “well, you’re one to talk,” and we’re like, no.LouisaYeah, we’ve gotten a lot of “look at your wife,” and that’s not helping. AnnieWe’re not here for that. VirginiaIt’s in the same vein as “you’re not fat, you’re beautiful” sort of comments.LouisaNot mutually exclusive.VirginiaOkay, let’s talk about fashion. Listeners need to know that Louisa and Annie are here wearing matching rainbow sequined kaftans? Dresses? LouisaThese are kaftans. We’re in our kaftan era. VirginiaI’m a little mad I didn’t know about this ahead of time, although there are no sequins in my house. We could have worked it out is all I’m saying. But they look amazing. And they both deliberately put these on before we started recording, they were like, “We have to get into costume.” So in all of your videos you have amazing outfits. Sequins are a frequent theme. I need to know where you’re getting these. I need to know how this idea came. Is there a vision board? Tell me everything.LouisaWe didn’t used to match—well, we would slightly match when we first became a band. We had outfit themes, like one was dinosaurs because I had a dinosaur dress and Annie had a dinosaur shirt. Or autumn leaves—I had a dress with leaves on it and Annie had a dress with leaves on it. A couple years ago for our first album release (which ended up getting canceled because of COVID) I bought two dresses on sale. They were these black and silver star sequined dresses from Eloquii and I got them for us to wear and we wore them to an outdoor show that we ended up doing later in 2020. And it was just so much fun to match that we can’t go back. This is our lifestyle now. We must always twin.So from then on we just keep an eye out for just the most fun or outlandish things that want to wear. I mean, we are adults just playing dress up all the time. It’s the best. So Eloquii is a big spot where we get things. Fringe and Company. Lauren of Palm Springs also has a lot of kaftans that we love. Wild Gardenia Boutique gave us these incredible jean jackets in the Benevolent Billionaire video. LouisaWith the rhinestones. I’m always scouting and looking for different pieces that would be Griefcat-wear. VirginiaEspecially because plus size amazing sequins is a niche market. It’s not like you can just go into every mall and find this.LouisaOh, yeah. All the Internet. VirginiaI’m just admiring the amount of work that goes into that. We talk a lot about plus size fashion accessibility on Burnt Toast, and to be fair most people are asking questions like “how do I get jeans that fit” not “where do I get a rainbow sequined kaftan,” but I’m very excited we have sources for that now, when the question comes up. Get 20% off for 1 yearLouisaI will say that one of the reasons that I’m really enjoying our kaftan era is because we also love a jumpsuit and we’ve had all sorts of fun dresses, but our weights tend to cycle. We’ve both gone up and down quite a bit since starting Griefcat. I joke that we go up and down quite a bit, but it’s like the stock market, it just evens out at about 10% trend increase every year. So what’s nice about kaftans is that these are the same size and we’ll just throw a belt on them if you want a little bit more of like a fashion moment, but they always fit, which is really nice. AnnieEspecially because we’re still a DIY band, so we can’t be spending money every time something doesn’t fit anymore on brand new sequined outfit. Having something that moves with us wherever our bodies decide to go is really, really nice just to stay fabulous all the time. VirginiaWe also talk a lot about fashion rules you can challenge and I often feel like fat folks are told not to wear the big and the bright colors. I remember years where I was like, I love a maxi dress, but I can’t wear maxi dresses because I’ll look too big in them. And then I was like, actually fuck that. I will just wear a big dress. But so often the way it’s presented in mainstream fashion is like, tiny little girl in a big dress. So you’re really subverting that norm, which I love.LouisaThat’s been definitely a journey. I mean, these are some horizontal stripes, you know? We’ve learned to break fashion rules as we’ve gotten older. I like to dress now like I’m a five-year-old picking out what I want to wear and I want the shiniest, boldest thing that I can do because I haven’t been able to do that in my life. Growing up as a fat person was like I can get like khakis and a peplum top. AnnieI was shopping with my mom when I was in fifth grade in her section. VirginiaThe trauma of the JC Penney. LouisaUgh, JC Penney’s, always. VirginiaBut I love that you’re like, “Now we take up space with our music and with our stage presence.”LouisaThat’s right. But our poop takes the same amount of space as everybody else’s. VirginiaRight. Bigger dresses, regular size poop. Average poop. LouisaYes, exactly. It’s our next t shirt? VirginiaSo what’s your process? Are you taking a break from writing while you promote the album? Are you always writing? What comes next?LouisaI’d say we’re always writing. AnnieI think we’re always writing.LouisaWe’ve got a couple of music videos that we’re planning, so there are two more that we’re hoping to make at least for this album with some different themes. One of them is for a song “Sponsor Us” which is entirely made up of corporate slogans. We’ve got some other ideas, one involving a pirate ship. So I need to find somebody with a boat.LouisaDM us if you have a boat. It’s going to be great. I’m actually going to start working on our next album, too. We’ve got we already have enough material for a second album, or third album, I guess. Jus…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today is the one year anniversary of my book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.It both feels like yesterday and an entire lifetime ago. I am so, so beyond proud of the ride this book has had so far. Fat Talk was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, it was on Good Morning America, I was profiled in The Cut, and went on dozens of different podcasts. The book made the New York Times bestseller list in it’s first week. And it was shouted out by Lucy Wainright Roche at an Indigo Girls concert, which will forever be known as the moment my career definitively peaked.But much more crucially than all of that, I continue to hear every single week from new readers who have connected with the book and found it helpful in navigating some small piece of diet culture or some experience of anti-fat bias. Sometimes that’s for themselves, sometimes that’s in support of a child in their life—their own children, kids they teach, kids they coach, kids they see in their health care practice.I’m not sure I’m ever going to have words for what it feels like to know that something I wrote helps people have better conversations with doctors, helps kids feel like they do belong on the sports team because their parents know how to advocate for them, helps us all find clothes that fit. These are the small—but not at all small—moments where diet culture and anti-fatness show up and you can feel overwhelmed.Instead, we’re starting to figure out a different way through. We’re helping make kids safer in their bodies. I just can’t imagine anything that feels more valuable to me.Last year to celebrate the launch of Fat Talk, we released Chapter One of the audiobook on the podcast. That continues to be our most downloaded episode ever.Over 20,000 of you have listened to that episode. And tens of thousands more have read the transcript and circulated it. So, thank you so much for supporting that episode, which of course supported the book.Today, to mark this one year milestone, we decided to share another audiobook excerpt with you. And I decided to share Chapter 11, because it’s spring, and we’re on the cusp of spring sports—soccer games and baseball games, and dance competitions and recitals and all of the things. Spring is big time for kids to be playing sports, dancing, and doing stuff with their bodies, which is so great. But it can also be really complicated.So this is Chapter 11, entitled “I Got Taller and Gymnastics Got Scarier.” That’s a quote from Camille, a 13-year-old former gymnast in Boise, Idaho, who you’ll hear from shortly. Camille and so many other kids talked to me about how youth sports and dance—these activities that should be entirely body positive and health promoting—can often end up being wildly unsafe environments for kids. Especially kids in bigger bodies.You’re also going to hear from researchers who are very aware of this problem and studying how messages around exercise in general and youth sports in particular, create these dangerous environments by teaching kids the mentality of “no pain, no gain,” of your body existing only in service of winning and the greater good, no matter how that feels to you. This leaves kids vulnerable to a lot of complicated feelings about their body, and even experiences of abuse.I want to be clear that I wrote this chapter not because I think we should all pull our kids out of gymnastics and soccer, but because I want to see those spaces become more inclusive, safer, and more welcoming for kids in all bodies.If you like what you hear in this chapter, you can of course check Fat Talk out from your library or purchase the audiobook, ebook, or hardcover editions anywhere books are sold. I will be the most delighted if you get the hardcover from Split Rock Books, my local independent bookstore, which hosts the Burnt Toast Bookshop. You can also support independent bookstores by getting the audiobook from Libro.FM and the ebook from Kobo.And stay tuned—the paperback edition of Fat Talk will be out later this year and we have a bunch of new material going into it, including a new foreword by Kate Manne!So here’s Chapter 11. And however you read or share this book—thank you so much for being here and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism.Chapter 11: “I Got Taller and Gymnastics Got Scarier.”“I started running when I was sixteen, because a girl called me Fatalie,” says Natalie, now twenty-nine. “But I kept running because I loved it.” She still does. These days, Natalie lives with her husband in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and works full-time in impact finance but also volunteers as an assistant coach for a local high school running team and runs on an elite team in Washington, D.C. Altogether, she spends at least thirteen hours a week running, cross-training, or coaching. Running is her main passion in life. And it’s complicated. Throughout Natalie’s running career, she has had to contend with the underlying anti-fat bias that motivated her into the sport in the first place.I should clarify here that Natalie is, and always has been, straight-sized. As we’re going to see repeatedly in this chapter, “fat” is defined much more broadly in running, and many other athletic pursuits, and “thin” much more narrowly. If the rest of the world is Old Navy, running is Prada. For years, Natalie wanted running to make her thinner, but it also seemed like she wasn’t ever thin enough to be a runner. Intentional weight loss and disordered eating behaviors were common on her college running team. “My thing was bulimia,” Natalie says. But she didn’t lose much weight doing it. And that meant that Natalie didn’t take her eating disorder seriously for years, and neither did anyone else.But during her senior year, Natalie and her teammates did get worried about one runner whose eating disorder manifested in far more classic symptoms—namely, extreme thinness. “We knew she was having breakdowns in the middle of the night about how hungry she was and bringing her own food to restaurants and skipping meals,” Natalie recalls. “And she looked sick. You could see it in the hair all over her body, and how thin she was.” Natalie spoke to an athletic department administrator about her concerns, who relayed them to one of the team’s coaches—who gathered the whole team for a lecture. “He thought she had the ideal runner’s body, and so there was no problem,” Natalie recalls. “He said, ‘Maybe if more of you ate like Steph, you would be national champions, too.’”By 2015, Natalie’s running had been derailed twice by stress fractures. “I had a little bit of a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment of realizing that running and eating the way I was would not be sustainable,” she says. She found a therapist who took her disordered behaviors seriously and explained that eating disorders don’t have to result in emaciation to be severe. Two years later, Natalie had recovered enough to join her current running team, which she describes as an outlier in the running community. “They have a zero-tolerance policy toward eating disorders because they know how highly transmissible those behaviors are on a team,” she explains. “The messaging I get from this coach and the other runners is: Your body composition doesn’t matter. We have short, tall, big, small runners, and we’re all world-class athletes.”But that is not the message that the high school runners she coaches are getting from most of the adults around them. And the farther Natalie gets in her recovery, the more this disconnect frustrates her. “Our head coach writes off any kid who isn’t what he calls ‘long and lean,’” Natalie says. Last season, Natalie was concerned by how often one runner demonized food around her teammates. “There was a lot of ‘Ugh, I ate chips, I’m so gross!’” Natalie says. “She was a kind of a toxic presence on the team in lots of ways.” But the girl was also “long and lean,” and so the head coach treated her as the team’s star. “He would say, ‘We need to develop this girl, she looks the part!’”Meanwhile a talented member of another team, who Natalie sees often at meets, came back a few pounds heavier than she’d been the previous season and Natalie says the head coach’s disappointment was palpable. “She ran four seconds slower at a meet this season, and it was still the second-fastest time ever run at that meet. But he’s like, ‘Well, she’s in her head now,’” Natalie says. “It’s almost like, ‘We can’t be as proud of you, if you can’t perform at 110 pounds the same way you did at 105.’”Until a few years ago, I didn’t think of running as a sport with a ton of body pressure attached. Or rather, my own anti-fat bias led me to assume that most elite runners were naturally, effortlessly that thin. But in 2019, runner Mary Cain went public about her experiences on the Nike Oregon Project, which she joined at age seventeen, making her the youngest American track and field athlete to make a World Championships team. At the Oregon Project, Cain says she was coached to lose so much weight, she lost her period for three years and broke five bones. Cain had developed a disorder originally called female athlete triad, and now known as relative energy deficiency in sport or RED-S to acknowledge that it happens in athletes of all genders. In addition to lack of periods for menstruating athletes, the hallmarks of RED-S are low bone mineral density, which increases an athlete’s risk of injuries and future osteoporosis, and what doctors term “low energy availability,” meaning athletes aren’t eating enough to support their caloric output. Not eating enough can happen intentionally or unintentionally, but RED-S is often diagnosed alongside eating disorders, to capture their physiological impact. And both can have long-term impacts on health. “I joined Nike because I wanted to be the best female athlete ever,” Cain says in a video on the New York Times website. “Instead, I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto [Salazar, the team’s coach] and endorsed by Nike.” Cain quit the team after finally telling her parents that she had become suicidal.For decades, coaches and athletes alike have accepted the loss of periods and other RED-S symptoms as necessary prices for their sport, but Cain’s story exposed the lie in that “naturally thin athlete” narrative. In fact, dangerous body ideals and training goals are common in many physical activities, especially those involving women and girls. And it happens at every level. Camille, now thirteen, fell in love with gymnastics at age five and joined a team that had her on track for a Division 1 college team. But she quit just before the start of eighth grade because, as she puts it: “I got taller, and gymnastics got scarier.”At five foot one, Camille, who lives in Boise, Idaho, isn’t particularly tall to the rest of the world, but the standards in gymnastics are different. “I always wanted to be four foot seven in gymnastics and stop growing and never get bigger at all,” she says. Her coaches began to comment on her growth spurt, though mostly in a friendly way. And Camille knew exactly how she compared to her teammates. Then, she started to fall more often or hit her feet on the bars. She was sure her changing body was to blame. A month before Camille quit, one of those falls resulted in a concussion. And while she was home recovering, she realized something: “I was kind of happy about it.” Not going to practice for a few weeks gave Camille a chance to notice how different she felt without gymnastics looming over her. “It had gotten to the point where, whenever I had practice, I spent the whole day feeling stressed and anxious about how it would go,” she says.In addition to worrying about their height, Camille and her teammates often talked about how their stomachs used to be smaller before they hit their sixth-grade growth spurts. “You’re in a leotard, and it’s just very uncomfortable,” Camille notes. How kids’ bodies look in uniforms turns out to be one of the most common ways that anti-fat bias manifests in kid sports. “We’re auditioning for summer ballet sessions, and one studio’s application asked for height and weight on a program for eight-to fourteen-year-olds,” says Helen, mom to thirteen-year-old Edith in the San Francisco Bay Area. Edith is in a larger body and has been dancing since she was three years old. “I just wrote ‘This is concerning’ on the application, so I don’t think we’ll get in,” Helen says. “Honestly, without a long, lean body type, I doubt she’d get in there anyway.”Helen also grew up in a larger body and played fullback and goalkeeper on her high school soccer team even though those uniforms didn’t come in her size. “I remember having to shop in the men’s section to find a goalie shirt that kind of fit,” she says. She’s determined that Edith be spared the same stigma, so she pays to have custom leotards and dance skirts made for Edith because the standard options don’t come in her size, and she recently started designing her own line of plus-size kids’ athletic clothes. But she knows it’s a privilege to have that option; the added expense of custom uniforms keeps many more kids from participating.Katie, a mom of three in Pennsylvania, ran into the same issue when shopping for a softball uniform for her then eight-year-old Luna. “Why are they only selling ‘slim-fit’ softball pants for kids?” she asks. “When did softball become a sport that you have to be skinny to play?”The answer lies somewhere between “in the last twenty years” and “maybe it always was.” Many parents think of participation in dance or sports as an essential rite of childhood. We see these activities as a chance to make friends, learn about collaboration, develop healthy habits, and get good and sweaty. And sure, maybe we also hope to discover that our child has what it takes to become the professional dancer or college scholarship–winning athlete we dreamed of becoming ourselves. But pursuing youth sport and dance in our larger culture of fatphobia means you are very much also pursuing thinness. “Weight stigma is normalized and embedded into every part and every thread of youth sport,” says Eva Pila, PhD, an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology at Western University in Ontario.Pila, who directs Western University’s Body Image and Health Research Lab, is one of very few exercise scientists studying the impact of anti-fat bias on kids’ experiences of sports and other physical activity. She says we don’t have good data on the prevalence of weight stigma in these spaces both because “that literature is still almost nonexistent” and because so many sport and exercise researchers don’t identify their own thinking about weight and health as stigmatizing. But Pila has traced how often experiences of weight stigma come up in the past twenty years of qualitative research on athletes and coaches. “We see fatphobia happening constantly, we just weren’t able to recognize it for what it was at the time.” Too often, we still aren’t. “If you want to be a good athlete, the expectation is you will train hard and that means you will maintain or control your weight,” Pila explains. “This is normalized to the point that kids may not even recognize that they are experiencing stigma.”But we need to start to grapple with the reality of anti-fat bias in kids’ sports and the harm it causes. “Sport is one of the most amazing opportunities for kids to have positive, health-promoting, high-quality experiences in their bodies,” says Dana Voelker, PhD, also a kinesiologist and associate professor of sport and exercise psychology at West Virginia University. “But right now, it’s also one of the greatest risks to children’s health and development because of how we have constructed the environment and experience for kids.”Competitive athletes are more likely to engage in excessive exercise and to meet criteria for an eating disorder, according to a 2018 survey conducted b…
Full show notes at the publisherWe are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for your April Indulgence Gospel.
Virginia
Which we are recording in the same room!
Corinne
It’s really weird. I’m really used to looking at my computer screen to see you.
Virginia
I’m not in there.
Corinne
It’s confusing.
Virginia
To paint the picture for everyone: I came to New Mexico. It’s my kids’ spring break from school. They’re on a trip with their dad. So I came to New Mexico so we could have the first official Burnt Toast offsite work retreat. I mean, it’s always offsite because we work out of our houses, but now we’re not in our houses. We are at Ojo Caliente, which is a hot springs spa resort in New Mexico, near Santa Fe. We spent the morning in the hot springs and now we are recording a podcast in my hotel room. We are surrounded by all of the pillows from the bed. You will need to bear with this audio not necessarily being quite as perfect as our normal audio because we are not in our home studios.
Corinne
We will make up for that with in-person chemistry.
Virginia
The banter should be more delightful than ever! Here’s what we’re getting into:
What to say if your tween switches to Diet Coke?
How to embrace “joyful movement” when you hate exercise.
Are electrolyte drinks a fun “end of day” beverage?
Virginia’s most unpopular opinion (yes it’s about skinny jeans).
This is a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith, Corinne Fay and Dacy Gillespie. And we’re here today to launch the Unflattering x Burnt Toast Style Challenge!Dacy is an anti-diet, weight-inclusive personal stylist, who also writes unflattering. She helps clients examine the fashion rules they’ve been told to follow and unpack the origins of those messages, to let them go. She also helps folks find their style, edit their wardrobes, and shop mindfully. Virginia is a longtime client/super-fan, so you can catch Dacy’s last episode of Burnt Toast here, and see her work in action here and here.We asked Dacy to collaborate with us on our first-ever Style Challenge because she gets how fashion dos and don’ts can live rent-free in our brains for decades—and are almost always rooted in anti-fatness.As you’ll see, the Unflattering x Burnt Toast Style Challenge is pretty different from a lot of other style challenges out there.We’re breaking it all down in today’s episode, but here’s the TL/DR:PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 138 TranscriptThis episode may include affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!CorinneSo I think the origin of this idea for us was earlier this year, when we saw some people doing a 75 hard style challenge, started by Mandy of oldloserinBrooklyn. This sparked some curiosity about doing a style challenge. But we also had questions about whether that would feel useful to us, or whether it might feel too restrictive or like a diet.I think we were all wanting to do something similar but wanting it to be more about listening to ourselves, to hear how clothing and style felt on our bodies. Maybe something that felt a little more like style autonomy than a challenge or a diet per se.VirginiaI love that phrase, “style autonomy.” DacyIt feels a little bit diet-y when we talk about a style challenge because there can be so many restrictions. They are restrictions that are imposed on you from some external source that doesn’t know your needs or your preferences or how things will work for you. We want this to be a tool for listening to yourself and not listening to external sources about how to dress. We really want this to be something that you make work for you.VirginiaHave either of you done style challenges in the past that ended up feeling restrictive or even full on diet-y to you?DacyI think the first style challenge I ever did was Courtney Carver’s Project 333, which was a really big thing to do maybe 10 years ago in the minimalist community. It was all over social media. That was 33 items for 3 months. I did not like that challenge. It felt very restrictive. You had to choose your 33 items at the beginning of the 3 months and you couldn’t change any of your choices along the way. It felt like a lot of pressure on choosing those things. Also, the 33 items included shoes and accessories, so it was really tight. And, the three months was no shopping as well. Each of those things individually is a really strict restriction, and then doing all of it together—it just it wasn’t workable for me. It was too long. It was too strict on the rules.VirginiaI did 33 items, but I think I only did it for 30 days. And now I’m trying to decide if that’s because I quit or because I misunderstood? But I know even 30 days was impossible. It was so hard.What about you, Corinne?CorinneI’m actually not sure I ever did one. I remember looking at a bunch that were kind of a capsule edit thing. I feel like it was like 10 or 20 items? And it was for a shorter period of time. And you kind of do that if you’re traveling anyways. Like, how is this different from just packing a suitcase? But I don’t think I ever actually got the organizational and executive function together to do it. DacyYeah, well, actually that’s a really good point. I wonder if you’re talking about the 10x10 challenge?CorinneOh yeah! Probably.DacyThat was Lee Vosburgh of Style Bee. I did that one, too, and that one was much easier because it was shorter. It was 10 items but just for 10 days. I don’t remember if she included shoes.I always felt like with all of those challenges, it was really hard just get the items. How do you figure out what items to use? I did eventually create my own challenge. There were really no rules, it was just five steps to get you to the point where you could curate a selection of clothing. Because no one was really saying, here’s how you do this. Like, how do you figure out what you need?VirginiaThat is actually a lot of labor. CorinneWhat if you live in an apartment where you don’t have a washing machine and the thing you want to use is in the laundry? And you don’t make it to the laundromat?DacyTotally. Lots of logistical challenges.VirginiaI just remember trying to find the 33 items and being aware of not having enough things. It was some blog I was writing—this was so long ago, this was like early 2000s. I remember someone commenting and being like, “A lot of your shirts look really ratty.”DacyHow rude!VirginiaIt was a point where I was on a very tight budget. I didn’t have a lot of new clothes. I needed more clothes. So the idea of winnowing down was not what I needed. I needed a budget to go shopping and replace some really worn out stuff. And I was like, “I don’t want to wear this like super pilled, stretched out shirt for three months.” It brings up a lot. CorinneWell, even with the like the 10x10 thing, it felt like your 10 items all had to be these beautiful, clean, minimalist Elizabeth Suzann tops and bottoms.DacyNot that we don’t love Elizabeth Suzann! CorinneNo, no. No hate at all. But it didn’t feel like most people were doing it and one of the items was the Old Navy shirt I’ve had for three years that I probably wear every week. DacyThat was really the height of the unrealistic Instagram pretty photos. That was what you were supposed to do.VirginiaEverything is going to go with everything and fit together Tetris style. Capsule wardrobes make my brain hurt. Because on a flat lay, these pieces seem to go really well together. When I put them on my body, I don’t like how they go together. It doesn’t feel as comfortable or something. DacyWell, that’s an interesting point because it’s almost like it was more for external consumption than for you actually doing what worked for you, which is the opposite of what we want to try and do. For instance, Virginia, the way that you realized two days in, “actually I need more clothes, not less.” That’s the kind of thing that we want people to be open to. I work with a lot of women and half of the women have too many clothes and half the women have not enough clothes, and they’re both having troubles getting dressed. So you may fall in one camp or the other. VirginiaDo you ever find someone has a ton of clothes but once you really go through it, they actually don’t have enough clothes?DacyOh, 99 percent of the time. They’re holding on to things from a past self or past body, working on that journey to body neutrality or body acceptance, but it takes takes a lot of energy to get there. That is a huge piece of of it. VirginiaI bet. DacyWe were also kind of curious to to chat a little bit about why we are attracted to this concept. I think it’s because it is kind of selling us some sort of lifestyle that’s unattainable or that’s aspirational, I guess. Like we were just saying with with the 10x10, it was like, “Curate this pretty thing and you’ll get a lot of likes.” I think that’s really something that does attract humans to these type of things. What do you guys think? VirginiaIt feels like it’ll reduce decision fatigue because everything in your closet will work together. That is always very attractive to me. Dacy Which is not necessarily the case, obviously. CorinneI think some of the appeal does feel kind of diet-y. It feels like, “If you do this challenge then somehow you’ll have the perfect closet where everything will go together!” And you won’t have too much stuff! You’ll have exactly the right amount! And nothing will be a three-year-old Old Navy shirt that’s ratty!VirginiaYes. I think I always think it’s going to make me shop less, too. Because shopping less is a perpetual thing I think I should be doing. These challenges are often about minimalism and examining consumption. But I feel like they’ve only ever made me shop more, which feels very similar to the dieting cycles that a lot of us have been through. CorinneYes, like you’ll be perfectly satisfied with what you have in your closet for the only time ever.VirginiaAnd how long can that be sustained? Six weeks maybe? DacyI think something that frustrated me about especially those longer challenges was it didn’t allow for being human. It didn’t allow for like, oh, the weather is totally different than I expected. Global warming or my body has changed or I got a new job, you know what I mean? Our wardrobes are constantly evolving and adapting. It doesn’t feel like that’s okay sometimes with these restrictions.CorinneIt doesn’t allow for being a human or living in the world. It doesn’t take into account your body or your environment or capitalism, where we just want to shop all the time.DacyI will say, I think the shorter versions of these things can really bring you a sense of awareness of what you actually wear and what you might need. That’s hard to see when you’re looking at your whole closet of potentially hundreds of items every day. I always viewed it as an exercise. This is an exercise I’m going to go through and see what I get out of it. Maybe things are great. Maybe I actually don’t have the pair of work from home pants, the soft pants, that I need and through these few days I’ve realized I’m really uncomfortable. I should rectify that.CorinneI think what you’re getting at, Dacy, is part of what maybe appealed to all of us was just having a chance to tune in a little bit more to how things are feeling rather than using this as an opportunity to find some type of closet perfection.DacyYeah, absolutely.VirginiaIt’s about collecting data and that is inherently nonjudgmental. The goal isn’t to have a perfect Instagram flat lay at the end of this—or at the beginning of this! The goal is to understand what’s working and not working in your closet and how to make your clothes work for you better than achieving some arbitrary style definition.DacyYeah, for sure. We are all really committed to the idea that this is to be adapted for you. There is not anything you have to do every day. There is not anything that you have to follow necessarily. We have a vague outline and some parameters. I’m in the middle of doing the Body Trust Certification process with Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant from the Center for Body Trust. One of their foundational tenets is to do C work. And I think that that’s what we want anyone listening to do. I know it’s hard for those recovering/current perfectionists out there. CorinneWait, I don’t even understand what “C” work means. Like the letter grades? DacyYeah, like the letter grade C. So do mediocre work like a mediocre white man would do.CorinneThat’s profound.VirginiaI’m working very hard right now on not caring about my children’s grades and not passing on my childhood grade obsessions. So yeah, this is useful.CorinneAlright, so we’re going to try to do C work. VirginiaTo my fellow former A students: It’s going to be okay. We got this.How To Do the ChallengeCorinneShould we get into the logistics?VirginiaDo you want to talk us through it?CorinneThe challenge will last 3 weeks. We’re going to start April 15.And every day, you will get dressed—or most days, you will get dressed—and you will try to lightly document that.Each week will have a prompt to get you thinking and reflecting a little bit on your clothes, on your closet. The overall idea is that it’s less about rules and more about observing and noticing how your clothes feel and how they are or are not serving you. Then on Fridays in our newsletters, and on Instagram, you will get each of us sharing some photos and some reflections on how it’s going for us and then hopefully chatting about it in the comments.VirginiaSo, each week we’ve come up with a prompt or a theme. Dacy, why don’t you explain week one? DacyOur theme for Week 1: Reject style rules.This is just, again, something that you’ll want to think about when you’re getting dressed during that week. Like Corinne said, this does not have to be an everyday kind of thing. Some days you are excited to participate and some days you have a sick kid at home or you’re sick yourself, whatever the case maybe.So we want to think about rejecting style rules. I think we all know what some of those rules are. Virginia’s favorite is the horizontal stripes, because stripes are not supposed to “flatter” you. We can talk about “flattering,” as well. Some other things: We’re not supposed to show our bellies, we’re supposed to potentially wear certain colors or certain pants lengths for different people of different heights. They go on and on and on. Also defining the waist is a huge one.VirginiaThese rules are both universal and everyone has those two or three or ten rules that they really internalize. They’ve been told, “I should not wear X.” So it’s maybe fun/terrifying to think about, what is something you were told you should never wear? And could you wear that this week and see how it felt?And maybe you only wear it in the comfort of your living room, in the privacy of your own home, but that’s fine. Maybe you wear it to parent teacher conferences in front of the whole town. You do you. What is your level of adventurousness with this?I have personally found, and I’m sure you guys can relate, when I do break a style rule it is sometimes very uncomfortable and scary and I often end up discovering something I really like. I didn’t wear horizontal stripes for a long time, but I look adorable in them. This is just a fact! CorinneI was trying to think of what I would like to challenge and one thing I was thinking was like, I feel like I can’t wear like a crop top. But then I was like, also crop tops just don’t feel comfortable to me. I’m just going to be yanking on it. So I feel like that’s not a good one for me. But one that felt a little more doable was, I feel like I have a rule in my head that if I’m wearing a big oversized shirt that I’m wearing more narrow pants. Or a tighter top with bigger pants. And I was like, what if I wear the bigger pants with the bigger shirt? I’m probably going to be comfortable.DacyThat’s a really good one. VirginiaYou’re right that proportions are in our heads and proportions is totally code for makes you look better or you look more like an hourglass.DacyAnd just to even underline it further, there are plenty of influencers and people making style content where they are wearing oversized tops and bottoms, but they are generally very thin. So it’s pushing the boundaries to do that if you’re not in that type of body. VirginiaDacy, talk a little more about the paradox of the defined waist. That feels like a big one.DacyIf we had to trace it all the way back, of course we’d go back to Sabrina Strings and Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and all the history that she relays in that book. But essentially, it was decided that an hourglass silhouette was the ideal shape for people’s bodies. And pretty much since then we’ve been trying to create the illusion of that shape, through clothes and fashion. And, you know, it’s not comfortable. Having a cinched in waist requires a lot of effort. It requires a lot of discomfort. Which is all, to me, related to occupying women with these sorts of things so that they are not able to use their brain space for bigger ideas. I wrote…
Full show notes at the publisherIt’s time for your April Extra Butter! This month we’re answering a thorny mix of listener questions:
Do we ever get tempted to buy back into diet culture?
Is weight-loss surgery (and meds) not “doing it the old-fashioned way?”
And what should you say when your daughter’s pants don’t fit—and she hates all her other clothes?
Both of these letters bring up a lot of complicated issues. CW for discussions of intentional weight loss, anti-fat rhetoric and weight loss surgery.
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I listen to your podcasts, read your essays as well as your book Fat Talk and I feel that I am completely done with diet culture and the way I get lured by the promise of thinness to give you a better life and all the layers and complexities that come along with dieting/body image. I love what Sonya Renee Taylor said about just stepping off of the ladder and removing yourself from this type of social hierarchy we place on each other, ourselves and our lives.
BUT THEN....
I see news reports of Oprah having lost weight and looking skinny and I find myself feeling a panic that 'I need to get back on that ladder (or treadmill).'
Do you ever get tempted to buy into all of this again? And if so, what do you do?
Also, what is your opinion on weight loss surgery? Just today I met two people who have recently had it. I feel all kinds of things. On one hand, I feel sympathetic towards them. I don't want to judge anyone for how they deal with living in an anti-fat world. I know one of them has had health issues as well as body image issues for the majority of her life. I want to feel happy for her that she **will** (?) find some "peace" now. But then there's the bitchy side of me that thinks it is an easy way out
The bitchiest thoughts are using the awful judgements like the concept of 'old money' and 'new money' and seeing her as only a newly thin person (it even hurts to write this out) OR .....if I want to lose weight, I will just do it the old fashioned way not through this magic surgery.
The more loving/mature side of me thinks that the surgery is just another way to give into the type of thing- anti fatness, fat shaming, diet culture- we should all just change.
Thoughts?
Thank you,
Diane.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
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