So, tonight I was going to sit around the apartment drinking hot chocolate and feeling sorry for myself, I mean, feeling TRULY FANTASTIC, but then I found out that Leonard Nimoy and Natalie Angier were speaking at the Hammer. Yes, that Leonard Nimoy. And yes, that Natalie Angier, whose name has been butchered by many a HooHah Monogloguist at Wilfrid Laurier University in my day. And I decided that I couldn’t sit around and let this even pass by without me, no, it was time for some feminist field work.

So, Leonard’s been keeping himself busy these days taking pictures of naked fat ladies. Which is pretty cool, I guess, because really, the world needs more naked ladies. And some of the pictures, interestingly, are re-stagings of famous artworks, only with fat girls, which is a concept I can get behind. He seems to be pretty enthusiastic about it, although I really wish he would just say the word fat instead of pussy-footing around and saying awkward things like “larger bodies than we are used to seeing.” And Natalie Angier had some pretty good things to say about how Nimoy allows the women in the pictures to possess a gaze, rather than just being passive subjects, and also some good stuff about how fat isn’t necessarily unhealthy and how maybe some evolutionary biology about beauty standards is stupid crap. Although I wish she would have gone further with it. Oh well.

My inner Women’s Studies grad would have liked more analysis and maybe some discussion of the complicated implications of a man producing pictures of fat women (and issues of surveillance, appropriation, speaking for vs. speaking with, etc.) and less “look! fat people can have fun too! fat people can be sexy too! fat people exist!” but all in all, Nimoy and Angier were pretty good.

As for the Q&A:

Dear Lady Who Insisted that Fat People are Unhealthy,

You’re dumb. And wrong.

Dear Dude who was like, “So, there’s a Venus of Willendorf, but is there are Mars of Willendorf? What about fat prehistoric men?”

Ok, we don’t get to talk about women’s bodies in public very often so it would be nice if you could respect the fact that at this time, we are not talking about you, sorry, we get to talk about you all the time. So please put your penis back in your pants.

Dear Dude who was like, “Hey! William Shatner gained some weight! I’m funny.”

You’re . . . an idiot.