Might be just me, but I did not expect that the general SDMB response would be so negative.
Personally, I don’t get any attention walking down the street as I’m fairly bland-looking. But I can imagine that someone looking like her gets a lot of shit to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Of course, the persons who act like assholes are unlikely to see this or learn from it, but I think it’s a valid message.
The thing is we don’t have context for these pictures. If it was a video, we might hear the cops going “har har, fattie’s had too many donuts” or we might hear “Ah come on, you even look good in the hat, and it makes me look ridiculous!”. But we don’t know what happened immediately before and immediately after. If the accomplice is being obvious about training a camera on her, it would be blind stupid for the cop to make fun on her on camera. Not that there are no stupid cops out there, but I find it much more likely they were just being friendly with a member of the community, in the same way that you put bunny ears on your cousin in the family photo.
That’s the problem with all these photos. There is no context, and we know the woman deliberately selected only photos where people appear to be looking at her with disgust. For all we know, they could be looking at her and thinking “damn, that is an ugly fat person”, or they could be thinking “holy shit, has that woman bathed in the last week”, or “did that woman just rip ass in public” or “dammit, I just remembered I left the oven on”.
The woman went out of her way to find photos that matched an agenda and called attention to it. As others have pointed out, if she had tried to appear mildly attractive she probably could have done so, but it seems she went out of her way to not be attractive. Which kinda ruins her point, even if people are actually looking at her.
How do you figure this is true? She looks pretty unremarkable to me.
Don’t you think it might be just a little fucked up that there are people who like to take gross little jabs at passersby whose only crime is apparently not being attractive enough for their tastes? I’m pretty sure that’s her point.
But the entire point being made above is that neither we nor the photographer actually knows if any of these people were making “gross little jabs” at anyone.
I have a friend that is about her size. She’s not a sharp dresser either and pretty much runs around in t-shirts and capris. I don’t think she ever spends more than $15 on a haircut and, due to some health issues, doesn’t have the best posture either. But that all said, she’s always clean when she goes out in public, where’s the appropriate sized clothes, and is extremely friends and smiling. And although I’m sure she’s endured some glances of dislike, she’s never once mentioned them and I’ve known her my entire life.
Anyway, most of the pictures don’t really seem to have anyone looking at anything, much less with disgust. Sure, there might be three that could be interpreted that way, but like others have said, without context the setup doesn’t translate well. Also, I agree that a person of her size probably wouldn’t even garner much attention in even a health conscience local. She’s just pretty unremarkable in that regard.
However, if I came across her, I might spare a slightly negative look. Why? She comes across as absolutely miserable, and in several photos, appears to actually sort of be in the way of what others are doing. So, yes, I may very well react to those things, but not at all to her weight. I’d say for her intended purpose with viewers, this experiment was a fail.
Randomly freeze frame any tv show a 100 times. You’ll be surprised at how many odd expressions or awkward body positions you’ll see.
Most of the people in that woman’s shots were just zoning out and thinking about whatever. Their crabby boss, shopping lists, kids or that ache in their back.
It takes a real narcissist to assume anyone gazing in your direction is thinking about you.
At least she’s not pissed with the Pope.
Regarding the girl in the half shirt touching her stomach:
To me that just seems like a semi automatic reaction. She saw a camera or an obese woman and immediately checked on the status of her own exposed stomach because she probably works to have it in a shape where she can expose it like that and is constantly mindful of it. Like how if you saw someone with messed up hair you might subconsciously fix your own hair, or if you saw someone with bad posture you might suddenly be aware of your own.
Also maybe she saw the camera and is covering up out of fear others will think she’s fat.
I cosign all of this.
I came into the thread expecting to be on her side, but nope. Can’t do it.
I’m all for calling out injustice when I see it, but proof is important. She doesn’t have proof of being “mocked”. She has proof of people making less-than-pleasant faces in her general vicinity.
What’s really assholish is that she publishes some of these pictures online, without allowing the people she’s captured to defend themselves. The camera gives her a voice, but what about them? Does it even register to her that she’s taken away theirs, for her own benefit?
(I wonder if her camera has caught fat people frowning at her. If so, how does she interpret these pictures?)
I have a movement disorder that makes me grimace for no reason at all. Sometimes I’ll catch a glimpse at my mug in a window’s reflection and flinch because I look so mean and angry. So I can easily see myself being one of her villains.
Instead of looking for the worst and drawing potentially erroneous explanations from it, she should try an experiment. Smile at people and see what they do. I don’t care if you look like Chewbacca; if you smile (and you’re a woman), you will get plenty of smiles back. I know this from first-hand experience too, since one way I try to combat the grimacing is by actively smiling. This experiment might make her final assessment of society a little less gritty and maybe a little less publishable. But smiling in the face of the enemy is definitely more empowering than boo-hooing about the stank faces of what appears to be mostly teenagers, who wear stank faces all the damn time.
The images of children seem downright cruel to me. She has no right to do that (and in fact, where I live, those pictures would be illegal to display unless she had signed consent from the parents, which I doubt she had).
The image on the swing is particularly misguided. She is an adult, sitting on a swing in a children’s playground, staring vacantly at nothing whatever as if something is wrong with her. Of course a kid is going to stare, that’s freaking weird. What she looks like has nothing to do with it.
In fact, after all her rhetoric about vengeance, “getting back at” etc. coupled with the images of children makes me question her sanity. Any adult who wants revenge on a child needs her head examined.
Some of them sure as fuck are. Why is that cool?
Looks like she’s possibly pigeon toed. In the picture with the police, it looks like she’s exaggerating it a little, but probably not on purpose. I’m pigeon toed, myself, and I think I did that a bit when I was younger. For me, it’s mostly self-corrected as I got older and most people don’t notice unless I either point it out to them or walk up/down stairs. For some reason, I naturally turn my foot inward when I go to walk up or down stairs.
I’m not understanding all those depressing, I’m-eating-all-alone pictures. Does anyone else get them?
Which ones, specifically? Where is the proof that these people were actively mocking her, as opposed to just being caught having a weird facial expression and randomly looking in her general direction at the nanosecond the image was captured?
Could a mod please fix my link? It has an extra “http://From here:” at the beginning that is screwing it up. Plus a “/?fark” tag on the end.
Thanks!
I don’t see anyone with a particularly mocking tone. All I see are people looking at someone getting their picture taken in a weird pose. I’m pissed I gave her a hit on her site.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that, for example, the police officer just happened to be coincidentally holding his hat over her head? Don’t be stupid. Obviously, at least some of these people are deliberately taking the piss. So, I again ask you: is that okay? Are you, on balance, still more angry about the fact that this woman has the balls to complain about people fucking with her for no good reason than the fact that people are, in fact, fucking with her for no good reason?
Because that just makes you seem like kind of a cruddy person. No offense, of course.
I will give her the cop. He’s clearly a bad guy.
But she seriously dilutes the poignancy of this example with all the random shots of A Whole Lotta Nothing. Like the picture of her at the park with the little girl on the scooter nearby. Who is fucking with her in that picture, for real? Or her standing next to the shop window looking like a zombie. Just like in the swing picture, she just looks weird like that. Why shouldn’t someone give her a side-long glance?
And even if they are truly frowning at her, most of them are teenagers. Teenagers are immature and given to inappropriate behavior. We already know this. And they could be laughing at her because she’s fat, because she’s dressed like a dork, or because she’s standing in the middle of the sidewalk doing weird-ass things with her feet with a camera trained on her. Or all of the above. I don’t know and neither does she.
When she gets back home to Memphis she probably doesn’t get the same reaction. We have plenty of overweight people here. It ain’t no big thang. In 2007 we were the fattest city in
America.
For the people who are mocking her, I doubt it’s due to her weight. In the U.S. if you gawked at every fat person you ran across you’d never get to your destination. I think it’s more about the fact that she’s dumpy as all get out. I’m surprised she isn’t wearing crocs.