#fat hatred

[iamatinyowl]

YOUR HEALTH IS NOT A REFLECTION ON YOUR MORALITY

YOUR BODY IS NOT A REFLECTION ON YOUR MORALITY

YOUR WEIGHT IS NOT A REFLECTION ON YOUR MORALITY

[osmanthusoolong]

Having been brutalized, berated and denied food by my ex mother when I was young (and very underweight) for “being fat”, I can say that being hit by misdirected fat hatred was sincerely traumatic. I can also say that despite this, I am very aware that I don’t face institutional fat hatred, and was aware even then that this treatment functioned as a threat, dispensed for eating food, dressing in ways that showed my body or otherwise suggested that I would not be joining her in what she proudly called body fascism. Any sign of possible sympathy, collaboration or closeness with as well as outright membership in groups facing institutional violence will get threats that you will be treated as such if you don’t join in the violence and act normatively. This is…pretty simple? That these oppressions are maintained by carrot-and-stick stuff? But instead of using these experiences and similarities as points for growing solidarity, some brain geniuses instead decide it’s proof that they’re actually the Most Oppressed, including by the people they’re threatened by being compared to.

[smitethestate]

I really need to start flipping around the fatphobic language used by my thin, fatphobic relatives whenever they bring up dieting. Get strangely concerned about their health all of a sudden. 

“Just be careful, yo-yo dieting is so bad for you.”

“Have you tried listening to what your body wants?”

Seriously if they get to pretend that what they really care about is my health then I’m going to do the same.

[kittyit]

hello! do you mind elaborating more on why you dislike the term thin/slim privilege? Or direct me to some sources? Genuinely curious about this topic; as a thin person I’m aware of how i am treated differently from fat people but i’ve also received my own share of body shaming. Thanks!

i just generally think the privilege/disprivilege framework is useful for three main things: race, sex & class. i don’t think the absence of a particular experience of an oppressive force is necessarily a privilege. in a feminist context, being a fat woman & thin women both have conditional “advantages” that are accompanied by disadvantages. i also believe strongly that fat hatred hurts all women (and men as well, but that’s not my focus)

it is absolutely a specific experience to be a fat woman in a fat-hating world. i used to have a lot of misogynistic anger & hatred at thin women for “having it easier”. i spent a lot of time purposefully facing the reality that just because a thin women’s experience of fat hatred is different, it doesn’t mean things are better for her. however, it does really fuck me up on the daily how i don’t feel most thin women are interested in doing the same kind of consciousness raising about fat women, even within the radical feminist community.

fat activism is a radical feminist & lesbian feminist tradition. critism of the diet, beauty & food industry are also essential feminist values. i would suggest reading the books shadow on a tightrope, which is an 80s anthology of radfem fat activist writing, and also the more recent dietland (especially if you find yourself resistant to the idea of criticizing fat hatred as an essential feminist practice)

i really hate talking about this subject because i know for a fact many women who are interested in my ideas & writing would lose a measure of respect for me upon meeting in person because of my size. i’ve watched it happen. women i like & respect say fat-hating things fairly often. i know that part of the reason i’m able to have this platform is because i exist as words on the screen instead of a body that people react reflexively to with dehumanization, so i’ll keep taking advantage of that for as long as i can

[fatpussyenergy]

I am soooooo tired of thin or “average” sized people speaking over my experiences as a fat person. Yes, fat hatred fucks us all up. But... could y’all just let us have one discussion where you just listen? And you just care about my suffering because I am a living human being instead of caring about fatphobia because it affects you? How much more pain must I endure before you recognize that living in a fat body in the Western world makes me a target for constant hatred, cruelty, and dehumanization by others?And that that suffering is fundamentally different than the way fatphobia affects you?

[fatphobiabusters]

something I was sent that I am in no way qualified to answer

This person really has some kind of awful caricature of fat people in their head. And the 9/11 thing is just awful...as if fat people personally killed others just by existing.  As if fat people weren’t part of the group of victims that didn’t deserve to die in that attack. It makes me sick to read a lot of this. 

They also don’t seem to think much of people in general. If whether you get to exist boils down to whether you’re good for the economy and the usefulness of your organs, you’ve gone wrong somewhere in your thinking. 

This is basically just every justification I’ve heard for hating fat people (plus a couple of new ones) put together in one place. It’s basically a Gish Gallop, and would take a lot of work to refute this all. And the thing is, I’m not even likely to be able to find things that refute some of these things, since they’re not actually based in any kind of real data...

Here’s a few though.

As for the medical worker injury thing, the technologies exist to help with this. It’s rich people not being willing to pay for things that help other people and then blaming it on fat people.

Climate change - most of that is systemic and perpetuated by wealthy corporations not individuals. Transport in total (which is what they’re talking about, I think) only accounts for about 15% (this is easy to google, but I couldn’t find a good, simple link) of greenhouse gas emissions.  And we weren’t the ones who manipulated the housing situation in at least the USA to increase dependence on cars (you can blame Henry Ford for that)

The set point thing is real, but I am just going to link you to @bigfatscience here. Fat people feel like they’re starving (cold, depressed, etc) when they’re eating less than they need. It’s true this is at a higher intake than thin people, generally, but it’s not worth being miserable to satisfy some internet troll. 

The thing is, even if all of this were true (it’s not), fat people are still people, we still deserve respect and medical care. We’re not bad people for being fat. Unhealthy fat people are not bad people for being unhealthy and fat.  

We’re more important than money. 

People are always more important than money.

-Mod Siarl

[thatbadadvice]

Help! My Partner is Healthy and Fat!

It’s Bad Advice Tuesday over at The Establishment, and this letter-writer wants to know how they can super covertly force their partner to lose weight in order to satisfy their own sexual desires, a really cool thing to do!

Read the Bad Advisor’s response to this and two other assbags here.

[thisisthinprivilege]

Thin privilege is better pay, particularly if you're a woman.

Thin women are paid more than fat women -- tens of thousands more by some estimates. This means thin women are valued as if they had more years of education and experience than fat women. To be at parity wages with thin women, fat women need to be much more educated (almost two years more education than thin women) and experienced (about three years more experience than thin women).

Researchers trying to determine why, have discovered that fat women are more likely to work in physical jobs and less likely to work in public-facing jobs than thin women. Public-facing jobs are generally better paid. Discrimination against fat women in public-facing jobs, like upper management and performance and waitressing and modeling and sales, could be the reason fat women on average make so much less than thinner women.

The most pay on average nets to relatively thinner women--about a 22 on the outmoded BMI scale.

Finally, take a gander at this absolutely devastating graph that shows a significant negative relationship between BMI/body fat and income for women from the St Louis Fed (2011):

This is thin privilege---massive, obvious, thin privilege.

-ATL