Why I hate the fat sex therapist
Look, I don’t hate the body positivity movement as a whole. I agree that people shouldn’t be ridiculed and abused for their weight. I agree that thinness isn’t the be-all end-all of health and beauty. But what I do disagree with is people who make bullshit claims like that weight has no effects on a person’s health whatsoever, or that type 2 diabetes and blood pressure issues are caused by “weight stigma” rather than obesity itself, or that dieting is Nazi eugenic pseudoscience. Sonalee Rashatwar’s body positivity isn’t just body positivity, it’s dangerous. Her statements like “you can’t call it feminist art if there aren’t fat people in your body of work” just don’t make sense. She isn’t referring to people who have a few extra pounds of body weight, or even someone who carries 50 or more pounds of excess fat. She’s referring to “infinifat” people, as in the kind of fat bodies that might appear on My 600-lb Life. News flash: if somebody is so fat that they’re bedridden, their obesity is negatively affecting their health and almost all aspects of their life, and frankly, just because I may be Indigenous, bisexual and female, I am not in any way obliged to depict imagery of people in my art who have no choice but to shit their pants and soil their bedding because they carry so much extra weight that it’s too much effort for them to walk a few metres to their bathroom.
Which brings me to my next point. Sonalee Rashatwar often begins their lectures with an Indigenous treaty recognition, which also is illogical: she claims that fatphobia is a result of white settler colonialism, but I certainly don’t think that obesity was an issue amongst my ancestors hundreds of years ago when food was attained by hunting, harvesting edible plants, and trading with groups of people from other parts of the Americas. However, now, after the effects of European imperialism have set in, it’s basically a fucking epidemic amongst my community and my own family. Type 2 diabetes just wasn’t really a problem until recent years. But what do I know? I’m just a lady with thin priviledge. Sonalee Rashatwar has to make issues of race or religion all about fatphobia, which was painfully evident when shortly after the events of the Christchurch shooting, she talked about how unsurprised she was that the shooter was a fitness instructor, because white supremacy types also tend to be fatphobic. She absolutely lacked sympathy for the victims of the shooting, and why? Because she had to insert and centre herself and her issues into an issue that had nothing to do with fatphobia. That man didn’t shoot up a mosque because of his intense hatred for fat people, how ingnorant and uncaring does one have to be to genuinely think like that? Sonalee refers to any kind of diet, even a “diet” as unrestrictive as “eat less junk food and exercise a little bit more” as disordered eating. This does literally nothing for people who actually have EDs like Anorexia and if anything, further alienates and tries to demonize them. And the cherry on top of this disgusting sundae is that, time and time again, Sonalee has said things that people view as anti-Semitic that she claims is just pro-Palestine, and when called out on this, she tells Jewish people what they should and shouldn’t find anti-Semitic and blocks anyone who even slightly disagrees with her.
Rant over, reminder that being over or under weight both take a terrible toll on your health, your yoga instructor probably isn’t a Nazi, nutritionists aren’t all eugenicists and trying to lose weight isn’t a criminal offense.
