A project is undertaken:

Years of “working through” one’s state of heftiness obviously being preferable to actual, you know, weight loss. Which, one suspects, might have taken less time. But hey, we mustn’t reach for the stars.

Fearlessly, heroically, said garment was duly rocked. The result, needless to say, is “cool-girl style vibes” – a “body-baring sheer look,” complete with what I’m assured are a corset and “strappy, rhinestone heels.”

Other perspectives are available.

When not “pushing boundaries” and invoking the feminism of taking up space “unapologetically,” the author, Ms Margie Plus, is a “confidence activist” and a musician. Those with a taste for pitch correction and overstretched PVC can behold her creativity here.

Via Mr Worstall.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

From academia’s Clown Quarter, rumblings of radical import:

Gender and Women’s Studies Professor Sami Schalk suggested she may cease wearing a bra to work, citing, among other things, male “policing” of women’s bodies. “I don’t want to wear a bra to work,” Schalk said on Twitter. “It’s harder on my body & expensive AF.”

Nothing signals gravitas quite like a juvenile abbreviation for the words as fuck.

“All so [sic] some students think my tits don’t sag or don’t know I have nipples? Why?! As person with large breasts my body has always been heavily policed bc of how other people, mostly men, respond to it.”

An educator, remember. A shaper of young minds.

Schalk has gained notoriety on the UW-Madison campus for her outspoken opinions ranging from twerking to anti-police rioting. In 2019, wearing a cape that declared “I AM 100% THAT BITCH,” Schalk twerked with rapper Lizzo at a Madison show. In a column at Vox, she declared it “an act of political defiance.”

And a grown woman.

The event in question, this act of political defiance, and preparations for it, can be witnessed here. 

“When Lizzo joined in, booty to booty — my butt blessed — it was pure Black Girl Magic,” she recalled.

When not exulting in her blessed buttocks and their magic blackness, or sharing boudoir photoshoots, or referring to the police as “fucking pigs,” Dr Schalk offers snacks and advice to rioters and arsonists, including reminders not to video each other while indulging in said rioting and acts of arson, as this may be incriminating and result in consequences, and subsequently harsh the buzz of being so terribly radical.

Recently, Schalk has focused on her right to be freed from the constraints of clothing and undergarments. When one Twitter [user] counselled that it was okay to occasionally “show some ass,” Schalk heartily agreed. “My ass is great,” she responded. “Sometimes I like to share it with the world.”

American readers will doubtless find comfort in this use of their tax dollars. $102,000 per year, or thereabouts.

But hey, bras are expensive as fuck.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Artists For Gaia. 

Our betters sail north at taxpayer expense. Gas is released courageously.

Such was the level of inspiration, some of the assembled artists began to work their creative magic immediately: “Tracy Rowledge constructed three series of ‘automated’ physical drawings, mapping the movement of the boat during the expedition.” For readers of a technical inclination, these ‘automated’ drawings involved suspending a felt-tip pen from the underside of a chair, resulting in random scribble on numerous sheets of paper positioned underneath. This feat was “REALLY exciting,” we learn, as it “explored movement, time, place and permanence.” The radical innovation also freed the artist to leave the dangling pen and do something more interesting. According to her two brief blog entries, the sum total of her commentary, Ms Rowledge spent much of this liberated time struggling with Greenlandic place names and making sure her fellow passengers knew how “overwhelmed” she was. 

I Don’t Deserve This Shabby Treatment. 

On the routine vainglory of the academic left.

Professor Surber’s self-regard continues to tumesce. He has fathomed all of history and it validates him. Liberal-arts professors tend to be leftwing, we’re told, “because we liberal-arts professors… have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways.” In short, if you haven’t reached a similarly leftwing conclusion, then you haven’t achieved sufficient complexity and nuance in your thinking, you peasant. Luckily, we can count on Professor Surber and his peers to guide us to the light, such is their benign magnificence. They may be cruelly underappreciated, but by God they’re better than us and they will save us from ourselves.

You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.

The unhappy sights at San Francisco’s 2012 radical nude-in:

For those who missed it in the comments:

While fat activism has disrupted many dominant discourses that causally contribute to negative judgments about fat bodies, it has not yet penetrated the realm of competitive bodybuilding. 

Savour that sentence. Let it roll around your mind.

According to its author, Richard Baldwin, fat bodybuilding should be a thing that exists. Specifically, “a fat-inclusive politicised performance… embedded within bodybuilding,” in which the “assumptions” and standards of the sport would be “destabilised,” with the result that “everyone” can be “taken seriously,” regardless of their girth and athleticism. Competitors, we’re told, would “showcase fat through poses… that display fat in a body-positive way,” while wearing whatever commodious garments are deemed to enhance the, um, aesthetics of their gyrations. And hey, showcasing fat is what sport’s all about. 

It takes time to make a fat body. It takes even more time to make a politicised fat body. This is precisely the message fat bodybuilding should convey: the fat body is a body built by time and work and deserves to be respected.

These are the dizzy heights of Fat Studies scholarship.  

Unlike Mr Baldwin, I make no claim to being “dedicated to fighting oppression and promoting social justice,” but actually, it occurs to me that a fat body, by which the author seems to mean an ostentatiously obese one, is quite easy to arrive at, as it generally involves the abandonment of self-denial, succumbing to temptation by default, and a tendency to shun any avoidable exertion. Basically, torpidity and a lack of care. A point somewhat underlined by the unremarkable fact that the number of fat people exceeds by orders of magnitude the number of bodybuilders.

Via Darleen. 

Lifted from the comments, another visit to academia’s Clown Quarter, where issues of deep and pressing import are probed good and hard:

In turning attention to this understudied and overdetermining space — the black anus — “Black Anality” considers the racial meanings produced in pornographic texts that insistently return to the black female anus as a critical site of pleasure, peril, and curiosity.

Hey, I’m just reading what it says here. 

And in other, entirely unrelated news: 

82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once. Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read. Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

A mystery, it really is.