"NO! Not the blue cropped pants! Everyone will see how high you cinch them up on your waist so they'll fit!"
They grappled for about three minutes -- it was a short battle, by Rotunda standards -- until Status Quoman wrenched the blue pants from Rotunda's chubby hands and pulled them up and over her Super Hips. With a final flourish, she zipped, with Rotunda grasping at her shouting "DON'T! DON'T!"
The pants zipped without much trouble. Rotunda looked perplexed.
"I could have sworn those were smaller. No matter. I'll get you next time you try on the pink pleated skirt, Status Quoman!" Rotunda disappeared into the closet, and Status Quoman could hear her rifling through her clothes, giggling quietly and maniacally with each clack of a hanger.
Now, Status Quoman relishes the fruits of her latest Super Initiative: Bringing Lunch to the Hall of Paperclips Every Day. Today's super lunch includes a delicious, healthy sandwich -- an original Gardenburger on high-fiber flax bread, a slice of locally-grown organic tomato, chunks of ripe avocado, locally-grown organic lettuce, locally-grown organic red peppers that she'd roasted last night in a fit of Super Domesticity, and a shmear of spicy chipotle hummus. (Part of Status Quoman's ongoing mission to maintain a happy status quo involves supporting local agriculture, and her Super CSA has saved her from the clutches of Rotunda's processed-food attacks on multiple occasions.)
Even superheros need breaks every now and then. Oh look, Status Quoman thought, Dick Cavett's put out a new article in his column! Actually, Status Quoman has been so busy counting paperclips that she has regrettably missed some of the previous columns; this particular personality has always written with exceeding wit and clarity. Our heroine eagerly devours the article while devouring her Super Lunch.
Oh no, thinks Status Quoman. Rotunda must have escaped my closet and infiltrated the halls of the Grey Lady. How is it possible that Dick Cavett, friend of Groucho Marx and John Lennon, recently revealed to have been persecuted personally by Nixon, teller of ghost stories and stories of awkward rites of childhood passage, could call obese women "a herd of heifers"? Status Quoman had to read further.
It was only a few years ago that I first noticed an obese person in a commercial. Then there were more. Now, like obesity itself, it has gotten out of hand.
This disturbs me in ways I haven’t fully figured out, and in a few that I have. The obese man on the orange bench, the fat pharmacist in the drug store commercial and all of the other heavily larded folks being used to sell products distresses me. Mostly because the message in all this is that its O.K. to be fat.
As we know, it isn’t.
...Fat people, the commercial-makers may feel, are entitled to representation. What’s wrong with that?
Everything.
Status Quoman nearly chokes on her locally-grown, organic red peppers. Cavett goes on to discuss the health problems associated with obesity -- the usual parade of "several cancers, crippling damage to joints, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and sleep apnea," touches briefly on the racial and socioeconomical connections to obesity, confirms that it is becoming a worldwide "revolution," and reminisces about the day of his childhood in which the Fat Lady in the circus, a true human rarity, deserved her place among the freaks.
Status Quoman also detects more than a hint of sexism -- though Cavett does not say so explicitly, women seem more regularly identified as the objects of his disgust: the Fat Lady of his youth, the "herd of heifers," the "fat, sassy black lady" of sitcoms, qualified only slightly by his added parenthetical -- and possibly editorially-mandated -- "(or man)."
Cavett briefly mentions the fast food nationalism sweeping the world, but otherwise does not bother to consider the reasons behind growing rates of obesity. Status Quoman scratches her head; and why would he? The subject is already talked to death and speculated upon and studied and mourned every time a new statistic arrives. Cavett's point is clear: he wants to shed political correctness and point a solid finger at a potato he thinks does not belong in the melting pot. The big, fat, lumpy potato.
Status Quoman's Super Big Bones begin to shake and her Super Such-A-Pretty-Face flashes red, ever so briefly. Cavett accuses the potatoes of being contributors to the "epidemic" that's seizing the world, and accuses advertisers of exploitation in admitting that, for once in the history of popular media, overweight and obese people do exist, and might exist as normal people and not just as butts of fat jokes. What he does not include, for reasons that most likely mean that he does not want to dilute his diatribe with any modicum of compassion or thought-outside-his-healthy-BMI-box, is that overweight and obese people do not benefit from only seeing Concavia and her henchwo/men on TV. In fact, the era preceding popular media's (still completely marginal at present) inclusion of those of above-average body size was the era that shepherded in the rise of obesity in America. Does Mr. Cavett think that showing acceptance -- no, not acceptance, admission of existence! -- of overweight people encourages obesity when their non-acceptance ushered in their growing numbers?
Does Cavett not realize that looking at obese people on television does NOT make Status Quoman wish she were fatter?
Status Quoman realizes with a start that Cavett is engaging in the classic game of blaming the fat people for being fat, as if fat is something that people strive to be. As if, in a Western society dripping with Concavian celebrities and oblique sex, it's preferable to be a fat person: socially reviled as sexually unappealing (or worse, easy), professionally unambitious (because clearly a person who let his/herself go cannot possibly be a go-getter), and physically underperforming (and here Status Quoman flexes her Super Somewhat-Pudgy-But-Still-Muscular Biceps menacingly). As if the rare advertisement that includes an overweight person encourages viewers to chase the American dream of social pariahism!
As if being fat is a choice we make.
All of a sudden, Status Quoman freezes. Concavia's thin, bony fingers are closing around her shoulders. POW! Status Quoman's evil archnemesis sharply tips our heroine's chair, throwing her flat on her back. Status Quoman feels the back of her head and touches warm liquid -- she withdraws a finger and sees that it is sticky, dark; Concavia's attack has hit hard, and she is now lying in a pool of her own hypocrisy.
"Now I have you, Status Quoman," Concavia cackles. "How many times have you bemoaned 'how easy it must be' for those overweight people whose diet consists mainly of fast food and prepackaged, processed food items to lose weight? 'All they have to do is change the quality of food,' you've complained, when you actually have to work for it? When your body is genetically programmed to gain weight even on a diet of vegetables and whole grains?"
Concavia pins Status Quoman to the ground with a bony, knobby knee. Our heroine struggles to free herself, but Concavia's accusation prevents her from rising. Status Quoman knows this is true; she knows that in her moments of self-pity, the moments in which the kryptonite (rather, "Quoptonite") breaks her down, when she reads about someone who lost 100 lbs simply by realizing that a diet of burgers wasn't working, or when the scale creeps up even when she feels as if she isn't having enough fun to be gaining weight, that her self-pity and judgment does not, in fact, help her along her quest. And when she compares herself to other overweight people at all, fully knowing that there is no clear, silver-bullet solution to general obesity.
Concavia cackles louder. "You thought it was Rotunda holding Dick Cavett captive, when it really was ME!" Status Quoman feels her strength fail; then she rallies. Her Super Big Bones expand to their full Big Size, and she throws Concavia and rises.
"Concavia!" Status Quoman shouts. "My arch-nemesis, you have unknowingly helped me in my ongoing pursuit! You have identified a weak point in my Super Armor, the point in which judgment of others for personal benefit seeps through.Now that I see it, I will mend it, and will be that much stronger against your attacks."
Status Quoman's Super Such-A-Pretty-Face flashes blue, then pink, then settles on polka dots. "I would advise you to move aside before my Super Big-Boned hand finishes forming a Fist of New Intentions."
Fearing the threat of Status Quoman's Intentionally Vague Attack, Concavia laughs maniacally as she slips through the door and out of sight.
"You haven't seen the last of me, Status Quoman!" our heroine hears, echoing down the hall.
Status Quoman's Super Big Bones shrink down to their normal size, and her Super Such-A-Pretty-Face settles into its normal hue. Concavia's attack has made her stronger by temporarily allying her with a hostile force in the Opinion section. And really, what is Opinion other than one [thin] man's personal perception?
Status Quoman sits down to mend her super armor. Maybe she should get someone to help her with that. Even Batman has Alfred...
Wait a minute, thinks our heroine. Did Concavia say she was holding Dick Cavett captive? Maybe I should hire new writers.
