Yesterday evening Nathan and i attended an event called Can’t Stop the Serenity. (Here’s the page for the Des Moines Chapter.) Basically, it was a showing of the cult movie Serenity down at the Fleur, but it was so much more than that.
The first time i saw this movie was about three years ago and I pretty much hated it. I was told that without the context of the Syfy show Firefly on which it’s based, it probably wasn’t as good. So this spring when Nathan started watching episodes of Firefly on Netflix Instant Play, i wasn’t very interested at first. However, unlike Stargate which failed to interest me even after several chances, the show soon drew me in and Nathan and i finished up the one and only season together in no time. Afterward we watched Serenity, which was SO MUCH BETTER the second time.
So then a couple weeks ago i heard via twitter about this event called Can’t Stop the Serenity. There are a lot of Firefly fans out there (called “browncoats”) whose love for the series has only been fueled by the fact that it was canceled so early on and by their hopes that it might be revived again some day. These fans get together once a year in quite a few different cities around the world to watch Serenity on the big screen. I figured the event would probably be a nerdfest and thus a pretty awesome time. I had no idea.
First there was a costume contest which we missed and which we realized once we got there that we probably could have won if we’d dressed up. There were door prizes which included Anime box sets, chopsticks-and-pocky combinations and Firefly fanclub memorabilia. We won some fake Firefly universe currency – w00t! There was a showing of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which we discovered is a short musical starring Neil Patrick Harris that was directed by Joss Whedon, the same guy who did Firefly (and a lot of other stuff, it turns out). That was pretty enjoyable. And then, of course, there was Serenity. (Which was STILL BETTER the third time around.)
But besides all of the delightful nerdery, there was a really good cause for all of this. I knew that the proceeds were going to be donated to a charity, but i was excited to learn that Equality Now is an organization that essentially fights against the things i hate the most in this world: rape, domestic violence, reproductive rights violations, trafficking, female genital mutilation, and gender discrimination. Unfortunately, i didn’t learn about this until after the silent auction had ended or i probably would have ponied up at least fifty bucks for a graphic novel to benefit this organization right then and there. (I can still donate, of course, but i won’t get a sweet comic book out of it.)
The main aim of Equality Now is to facilitate awareness about the atrocities being committed against women every day all over the world. It upsets me enough that i find it hard to write about, but this is something i think is really important so please check out their website and be sure to like them on facebook!
So nerdy sci-fi love + proceeds going to a great cause = a really awesome event that i’m already planning to attend again next year. And with that, i’ve just destroyed whatever “cool points” i may have gained with my big bro by drinking IPAs with him over the past couple of weeks. 
The top story on CNN.com today is entitled “As nation gains, ‘overweight’ is relative.” And the title pretty much explains the gist of the article – Americans today perceive themselves as being less overweight than they did a decade or so ago, despite the fact that the average person has gotten a little larger. We see our body size as it compares to the people around us, and heavy is becoming normal.
They start off the article with a discussion of “vanity sizing.” They say size 10 is the new 14, and retailers are enlarging their sizes to make us feel as though we were shrinking, when in reality our waistlines are expanding. Case in point: i’ve been shopping at Express for jeans since high school. Back then, i wore a size 3/4. Toward the end of high school, i’d moved up to a size 5/6. But then in college, the 5/6es in the store started to seem baggy, and although my body hadn’t changed i moved back down to the size 4. By the end of college, again although my body hadn’t really changed, i was wearing a size 2 at Express, as i am today.
Now, i saw a photograph of myself that someone had taken from behind me a few weeks ago, and i said to myself “that is not a size two butt!!”
So, i launched into a Google search for the history of dress sizes and what my actual measurements would have translated to in the days of size-fourteen-Marilyn-Monroe. Alas, i could find no such size chart, but feeling incensed that Express had so misled me, i researched vanity sizing and found that it isn’t some manipulation of our collective psychosis, but a practical measure that the fashion industry has no choice but to take.
This article i came across on Fashion Incubator explains that each retailer has number or relative (S/M/L) designations which range across its garments from smallest to largest, and each retailer has a different range depending on who buys the garments. For example, if you make tutus, your “large” is still going to seem tiny to the average person, because ballerinas are necessarily tiny people. It would be impractical to have standardized sizing across all garments and retailers, because then ballerinas would have to choose among XS, XXS, XXXS. Makes sense, right?
So, the retailers aren’t just stroking our egos by making their size twos as big as sixes used to be. People are getting bigger. If you’re Express and people stop buying your size zero because nobody is that small anymore, and you start getting harassed by people for not carrying size fourteen (discriminating!), doesn’t it make sense to make all the garments bigger, but keep the old number scale?
Maybe we’re pointing the finger at the wrong industry. Maybe we should take exercise and nutrition into our own hands and stop claiming to be victimized by pop culture and the fashion industry that is supposedly slave to it. Or, just maybe, we could stop judging one another and ourselves and start to just be comfortable with the bodies that our culture produces. I think there are a lot of forces at work in this problem, but i’ve come to realize that perhaps the least of them is so-called vanity sizing.