Its like CNN is basing stories around the fevered conspiracy theories of undernourished, 14 year old Weight Watchers wash-outs.
Shakesville called it "the worst thing you're going to read all day" and pretty much gets it right. CNN, by way of Oprah.com, is warning us of how our loved ones are making us fat! Because emotions are like the flu. Or athlete's foot. You can catch them after they linger a month in your shower.
Wait, what?!?
The whole story is alarmingly bullshitty. It keeps asserting things in the way some utterly convinced teenager would when the pieced together unrelated trivia and think they've figured out stuff. I would have rejected this story in my high school newspaper as poorly written and even more poorly sourced. It gets published because its author is an "expert". In what you ask?
She's a psychic. Oh, I'm sorry. An "intuitive". Wikipedia says she prefers that. She's gotten a few celebrities to buy into her nonsense, so she gets an even bigger platform with which to offer her delusional rants to the world. Honestly, it makes me want to scream sometimes the way utterly unqualified people get huge audiences to pontificate about fat, a subject they have no professional or personal experience with.
Its bad enough when people presume fat people are all "self-medicating" with food because they are so depressed, no its that OTHERS are making them depressed so they are, I guess, proxy self-medicating. She sort of seems to blame FAs for fat partners by using fat/thin couplings as "proof" of her point. Just by pointing it out, of course. It doesn't actual prove anything, she just says it did. No word on what fat/fat couples are doing wrong. I guess we have other thin friends forcing their fatness into us. I am an empathic sort. That must be why I'm fat! Oh noes!
Honestly, I'm just sitting her stunned that this incoherent nonsense was published. I'm just mentioning it as a reminder of the frighteningly low bar people need to clear in order to blather on about teh fatness in major media venues. I almost want to be relieved its not another stupid article about catching teh fatness from your fat friends. This time its your thin friends psychically projecting their potential plumpness onto you. The press just loves finding new things to blame for fat people. Themselves! Other fat people! TV! Thin people! Birds! Corporations!
I don't want anything blamed for fatness. I don't want my fatness treated as a source of blame at all. I don't care if you're making excuses for me to "let me off the hook" for my fatness. This garbage stigmatizes my body and I have no tolerance for that. Stop looking for someone to hold responsible for my belly and just accept it.
7 comments:
Oh my god. I'm enraged, but at least the author came off looking *cough* less than coherent which mitigates my anger somewhat. Is the world going crazy?
I refuse to give drivel like you describe here any page hits.
But just going from your synopsis...if I have a thin partner, I'm obviously eating for two? I wonder, then, when it was I snarfed all those cookies that my skinny partner says he ate. He must be covering up for me and my denial, and it's causing him pain, which in turn is making me EAT IN MY SLEEP!
Or maybe his secret pain is making this author ingest mescaline and type at the same time. I don't know which.
I stopped reading CNN for that reason (fluff articles and fat-phobia), not too mention some of the nasty, holier-than-thou comments that appear every time they run a "medical" story that incorporates obesity (or their lovely "look-how-much weight-so-and-so-lost" stories. Really? That's news? What about the fact that our states are bankrupt?!).
Now I do tend to vote Democrat, but for a "liberal" new outlet, the authors and readers at the CNN site seem to be pretty bigotted toward people of size. Just sayin'.
Um. What?
Shakes head.
Does it ever strike you that people, as a species, are weird? It does me.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The sentiment makes me want to rage, but the writing itself makes me laugh uncontrollably. I have no ill will toward the author of that article, but I do wish she'd have gotten a proofreader or something.
Be right back, still can't stop laughing at the badbad writing.
Well, of COURSE! Not.
So, let me see if I've got this straight. Some psych- Oops,'Intuitive' (is that anything like divination?) read about the infamous Framingham Study postulating that fat friends you haven't seen or talked to in YEARS can make YOU fat just by calling you. On the telephone. Presumably collect. This Con Person- 'intuitive' saw an... Angle in all of this somewhere but, seeing how quickly the 'experts' got laughed out of town, decided to tweak the theory a bit. She then fed it to few of her high profile sucker- 'clients' who went straight to the rooftops like it was the Fourth of July.
Oh, and lest I forget, the Fortune Tel- 'Intuitive' also manages to raps this whole hot mess up in Fat=Food Addiction with a side order of Addictive Co-dependancy.
Wow! It's like she's a real psychologist or something. And by 'or something', I mean riding the Grift for all it's worth and damn any consequences. Long as there's some eventual coin in the venture.
" Food is a drug."
Blech. I think Kate Harding wrote some good stuff about how dangerous an assertion this is to make, because *you need food to live.*
And god, that thing about the fat partner and the skinny one just gets me down. Because it could never be about someone accepting or desiring other types of bodies than the "mainstream" vision of hot, could it?
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