Howdy Everyone!

By the time I finished reading these two readings I noticed some differences about these readings than from the previous readings that we have done, 1) I understood the readings much more than the previous ones and, 2) I personally didn’t find much to disagree with these articles than I usually would.

In my blog I going to do it on the concept of content (number 4 on the list), I’m doing this one because there are so many different aspects in these two articles and I see that at one point there’s a little confusion. I tried to keep this relatively short while trying to answer the question to the best of my ability.

My first point is the time they were written in. “Fat is a feminist issue” was written in the late 1970’s, while “Having it his way” is a more modern piece, less than 10 years old. *As a side note I’ll be referring to the former as ‘Fat is” and the latter as ‘Having it” from this point on* Even as Orbach says “…the job is never ending, for the image [of a woman] changes from year to year”. These two articles are written during two different times where people lived different lifestyles where today we have social media and greater exposure to TV and advertisements than they did in the 70’s. It’s because of this difference “Having it” has more references to advertisements and media more than “Fat is”.

I thought that these two readings had pretty straightforward points. In “fat is”, Orbach said that women being fat is challenging women stereotypes and in its own way saying “screw you world, I’m fat, what are you going to do about it.” While in “Having it” the authors have many points like men eat meat to be manly men, most meat is sold through fast food and these fast food advertisements want to make meat a big deal that it is filling and good if you want to be a man. These ads also downplay the role of women as holding back the man or being a buzzkill when there’s an attractive waitress in front of you.

Lastly there’s this part where if you overlap and look at the two stories, something doesn’t really make much sense. In “Fat is” Orbach doesn’t say what women eat, she’s just saying that being fat is empowering and not necessarily how they get fat, while in “Having it” men are eating lots of meat and women are eating “plants”, and they say this is common throughout history. So what I wonder is, if women are eating “wimpy plant food” in “Having it”, and they are fat in “Fat is”, how does that happen, it doesn’t correlate to me on how that works out. Yet again, these two pieces were written at different times, and that might well be the case why that doesn’t make much sense.