No comments (unless you want to)

I started writing this as a response to a comment from my last thread where I asked people not to comment. Yeah, I didn't mean that I'd be angry if someone commented, just that I wasn't trying to ask for comments or backslapping, because I'm not. Anyway, as usual, my response started getting much longer than was reasonable so I figure I'll just post a new post for it...

My frustration may have finally reached the boiling point from an incident at a specific blog, but it's been simmering all week from a series of attacks against me from literally all sides saying that I don't have a right to discuss size acceptance. If anything, the final incident was the least problematic and wasn't really what I was going on about in my last post. Its just getting to be too much. The institutions of Size Acceptance have long proven their uselessness. There is no support system for people who believe in this. I go out and try to speak up for it, but all I get are catty slams or dismissive condemnations. I know everyone has to deal with trolls and criticism online, but most people get support for their views. I look at other progressive causes and I want to know why fat issues can't get that same kind of cheerleading and community support. Instead, my "allies" are always looking to throw me under the bus and my critics just keep hyperventilating at having to endure someone who disagrees with them. I'm sick of it.

Refering to the specific incident that Sharon had witness, my feeling is that when some people express fat bigotry, it needs to be responded to. This stuff goes unanswered in our culture all of the time. In a thread about looking for answers for the casual acceptance of fat negativity, how is it wrong to demonstration the necessity of confronting fat hatred? I don't buy into the cliqueish attitudes of those who demand we just ignore trolls and that responding to them makes you a troll to. Fuck that! What if someone new comes to that thread and didn't get the memo and sees all of that fat hatred? What about them?

But what bothered me the most was the acqusation that if I was commenting on body issues and feminism, I wasn't listening. That by wanting to speak up and be a part of a solution, I'm just proving that I'm some kind of sexist jack-ass. I do listen. I respect the need for women's only spaces, but no where had that been suggested as one. The site is run by a man, for goodness sake. But for wanting to participate, I get smeared as some kind of mysognist. That's frustrating and hurtful and I don't know how I'm supposed to respond with out my defense being mutilated into proving her point that I'm a self-important and/or wanna-be hero. Being accused of those things should bother me, but defending myself will just be used to prove that I'm those things. So why bother?

Why bother caring? I'm not supposed to care about feminism because I'm a man. I'm not supposed to care about fat issues, because I'm fat. Or because I'm not fat enough. Or because I'm not supposed to care about other people. What am I supposed to do when all I get told is that I shouldn't care. That I don't have any right to care. That the problems are the domain of other people and I should just sit down and shut up and let other people deal with them. I don't want to do that. I don't want to speak out against gender equality to be a hero to women. I want to do it because its the right thing to do. I don't want to spread fat liberation to get laid. I do it because I feel its right. I've always felt the problem in our culture is that too many people look at the structural problems of our society as someone else's problem. Too many people don't want to care. They want to shrug off responsibility and retreat into their own lives. I don't like that. But I never expected that everyone would just be telling me to do that. Telling me not to care. Telling me to shut up. "Allies" and critics alike. What's the point in trying to change the world if no one seems to want you to try?

Again, I know this is all rhetorical whining. I'm not asking for validation or vindication. I'm just frustrated and wondering why I should even bother. I've got mine, after all. So why should I care?