One thing I gotta say is: self-love doesn’t solve the oppression fat people face
There’s this kind of a belief going on where people think the correct way of dealing with being oppressed is by becoming so confident that you don’t care about your oppression anymore. I see this in especially how we treat fat people.
A confident fat person who partakes in body positivity but doesn’t speak loud on the discrimination fat people face (or if they do, they call fat people experiences’ bullying), will get more respect from thin people than a fat person who might or might not be confident, who speaks loud on fat activism.
Some thin people will also water down fat activists’ messages by making them about bullying instead of discrimination, saying stuff like ”you’re not fat you’re beautiful” to fat activists, and by just overall ignoring what fat activists say and making the message about self-love instead of changing the system that harms everyone but especially fat people.
A lot of fat celebrities speak on self-love, not on fat liberation. They make the messages more easily swallowable by not trying to change the status quo upright. And like, being body-positive alone is better than nothing, but if what we’re doing is just constantly trying to appease to thin people and their beliefs, we’re not going to change the system that puts down fat people.
A fat person who talks about self-love is easier to love, easier to be respected, easier to be defended and protected against hate. But messages of pure self-love still do nothing to not discriminate fat people.
We shouldn’t cobble thin people by making our messages easier to accept by thin people. Messages of self-love are important but will only get you so far if the additional message is ”you can love yourself but only if your goal is to lose weight”.
That’s not self-love, that’s not revolutionary, that’s literally just another form of saying that fat people should only accept ourselves if our goal is to change our bodies drastically.
A good fatty is a confident fatty who loves themselves but only with the condition of weight-loss. Who doesn’t try to label what fat people experience as oppression.
But the messages are still harmful if the same old oppression is wrapped into a beautiful pink gift box.
