So Rachel went up to Toronto for the wedding a day before me. We were staying at the Royal York, and when I called to say when I was heading in she warned me, “I think there's some kind of developmentally challenged convention here; there are a lot of people with various problems and wearing weird outfits here… I feel guilty saying it, but it's really annoying to be here.”
When I got there I discovered she was partially right; almost everyone at the hotel was massively overweight, truly bizarrely socially inept (constantly shouting out really corny jokes and puns and so on), and many were dressed as bards, middle-ages — and middle-aged — damsels, as well as people with their faces painted all green and in checkerboards… and a lot of older, fatter, balding wizards with a little too much makeup on (who all did plenty of glaring at me). Turns out we were in the hotel for TORCON, one of the largest and oldest science fiction conventions in the world.
Riding the elevator was not fun. It was the first time in my life that I've been on an elevator that's lurched over and over and then refused to move and forced people to get off due to weight restrictions — and they all refused to get off, not believing that could possibly be true so it took forever until they eventually decided “oh it must be malfunctioning”… Even though it had a warning right on the display and a posted maximum weight (hint: if you're at TORCON, read the “maximum weight” part, not the “maximum number of people” part). Seriously, it happened several times to me; every time there was a TORCON crowd. Now, don't get me wrong — not only do I love sci-fi, but I've played Dungeons and Dragons for most of my life… but this was messed up and in a lot of ways really sad.
And before you say the PC line, “oh but Shannon it's not fair to pick on fat people” — which I agree with — let me point out the obvious which is that fat kills. It's one thing if it happens to you for reasons you can't control… But it's another thing when an entire subculture collectively commits suicide — after all they are shaving ten to twenty years off their lives voluntarily… and yes, I believe the same thing about cigarettes.
Anyway, it made me wonder; were these people attracted to science fiction because it offered an escape, or was this all just a coincidence? That is, was the love for science fiction (which I do believe is a valid literary artform) a symptom of a larger problem — we've certainly all seen people who are attracted to body modification for that reason, and in so doing, have often tarnished the mainstream's opinion of body modification in general.
Thanks to Jody I've also had a chance to read over the article from the Vancouver Sun that everyone's pissed off about (understandably). I'm not sure if it's quite as bad as everyone thinks, but I have to admit it's shockingly poor journalism and a very thinly veiled personal attack on this community that would definitely not be supported by any research had she bothered to do it.
One of the things about a print newspaper is one assumes that unlike some cheap *cough* drudge *cough* websites, they have fact checkers and quality control mechanisms… This article is just littered with really basic factual errors; stuff like saying Fakir Musafar is the author of Modern Primitives and other lame errors that just shouldn't be there.
Then of course there's the author's clear bias and shallow stereotyping of this community. I'm going to read it over again, but I may rip it to shreds — show what a poor piece of journalism it is — in a new editorial called “Karen Romell is a Liar and a Poor Reporter”… And since BME gets millions of times more hits than anything she writes for, any time anyone types in the name of that reporter, they'll find out what kind of “quality” she produces.
Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea in general… a wall of shame for all the bigotted reporters. Might be a good way to use BME's google-power to our advantage!
So get this through your head, reporters: If you slag body modification, body modification may just slag you back. And there are more of us now than there are of you so this is not a mistake you want to make!
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