When Minami Gessel isn't taking notes during lecture as a political science student in Los Angeles, she's busy posing for fashion and beauty
“I hope people just see a happy Asian girl who is doing her best with what she’s got. It can be difficult, as a half Asian girl, to feel like you aren’t being represented in the creative field. Growing up, I didn’t see a lot of women or girls in the media who looked like me. If I saw them on TV, I would hear they got their eyes done so they would be bigger. And that’s no shame to them — I think people have their right to their own bodies. But as a little girl hearing those things, it made me feel that the only way for me to be considered beautiful was to look more Eurocentric.”
I don’t know how y’all keep surprising me. You make me feel heard and accepted when you listen to me talk about fat positivity and my work toward fat liberation. You tell stories about how fat hatred has harmed you. You “used to wear a size 16”. You “get it”. But that’s when we’re alone.
Ten minutes later you sit directly behind me and rant about how “fat and unhappy” you used to be. You gasp at old photos of your “embarrassing” size 16 body, “flabby” arms, and “gross” belly. You bond with other women by promising to keep each other from gaining weight. You promise to help each other lose weight. You form sisterhood around the shared battle to never look like me. I cough loudly and look right in your eyes, silently begging you to stop. You turn away perhaps ashamed of your hypocrisy or annoyed by my quiet rebellion.
Please, please, please- stop pretending to be fat allies. If you’re not down with fat liberation then own that. Don’t get my hopes up only to humiliate me later. We deserve better than your cowardice.
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?
We need to make major changes in how our society views weight, fatness, and fat people. We demand that people be treated with respect and dignity regardless of their size...
If the fat-positive movement wants to be a serious voice of opposition to the current scientific consensus, it needs to stop denying reality. It needs to stop with the circular reasoning, the cherry-picking of data, the "all or nothing" thinking, the taking of good ideas to ridiculous and repugnant extremes, the logical absurdities, the elaborate rationalizations, the insularity, the flat denial of simple facts that are staring them in the face. It needs to be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads... even if where it leads is unpleasant or upsetting. It needs to stop with the true believerism. It needs to treat the principles of fat positivity as hypotheses that can be debated -- not as articles of faith.
This is a long read, but it’s definitely a good one.
It touches on the point that by telling people that they can’t lose weight you’re essentially telling them that the only reason to accept their fatness is because they can’t change it.
It also talks about how true empowerment comes from realizing that weight loss is possible and that you, and only you, gets to choose what weight you want to be.
In general, it talks about how the current fat acceptance movement needs to change if it wants to be taken seriously at all, because while there are some very good ideas in there, they’re often hidden under piles and piles of straight up denial.
Do any other fat folk wonder if they’re “performing” their fatness? Do you ever feel as if there are certain behaviors and actions and personality characteristics we subconsciously (or consciously) embody as a result of the way our bodies are perceived?
I feel like it’s difficult to describe “performing fat” because few people actually recognize “Fat” as a legitimate, socially constructed identity. We endure all of the stereotypes imposed upon our bodies without the space in academia or other sites of discourse to unpack the ways we have internalized the world’s reactions to our bodies.
