Clueless

Kate Harding spots a choice quote from Paul Campos in his review of Gina Kolata's "Rethinking Thin" that deserves further quoting:

Remember that particularly clueless right-wing acquaintance of yours? The one who believes that anybody in America can become rich, because he thinks about poverty in a completely unscientific, anecdotal way, which allows him to treat the exceptional case as typical? The one who can’t seem to understand the simplest structural arguments about the nature of social inequality?

The next time you see some fat people and get disgusted by their failure to “take care of themselves,” think about your clueless friend.

Well wishers

As long as I'm ranting about the way the discussion of fat issues is constantly defined in ways to disadvantage fat acceptance, another pet peeve of mine is the expectation that everyone has to congratulate dieters. That politness requires us all to wish them well.

Why the hell should it? Look, I don't wish dieters ill nor do I advocate or approve of that mindset. I don't wish them anything. Withholding my congratulations isn't an act or rudeness. Its intellectual honesty. I believe that dieting has failed fat people. I know that weight loss doesn't make people happier. It doesn't make people healthier. Heck, it doesn't even make them weight loss nearly all of the time. Why should I feel happy about that? Why should I have to support that?

Weight loss promoters don't need my support. They demand it as a means of undercutting my position. As a means of setting boundries of discussion which advantage their position. They might frame it in deeply subjectivist terms: I'll support you if you support me. But this misses the point. Basically, they are suggesting a freeze. They'll tolerate our acceptance if we support their weight stigmatization. This is an easy demand to make when you represent the status quo. Giving in does nothing to help fat acceptance.

I know it feels hard to not applaud weight loss. We are conditioned to see weight loss as an accomplishment. Something achieved. It seems rude not to join in. But its not. Its your right. Just as its anyone's right to attempt weight loss, its your right to have formed your own opinions about weight loss. You don't need to abandon that because someone else wants to lose weight. If you did need to do that, then why bother forming the opinion in the first place.

Contrary to many fat acceptance critics, any fat activist has to encounter people who want to lose weight every day of our lives. They are our friends, our family, perhaps even our loved ones. But we don't have to play along with the implications of approving of weight loss. We can opt-out. Don't berate them for wanting to lose weight. Don't feel like berating them. I understand why people want to lose weight, why they think its the answer. I don't hate people for buying into the system. But I can't buy in. I cannot approve. So I opt-out. I neither condemn nor congratulate. Its a fair and honest response.

The problem is that those who want the congratulations, who want acknowledgement for their achievements, often won't accept that. Opting out isn't an option. They insist that any failure to see their actions as praiseworthy is a slight, an attack. It isn't, though. And I urge people to resist that redefinition. It isn't fair to us and it isn't fair to our beliefs. We should stand for what we believe in. Opt-out of the diet praise. Its your right.

Who's fat now?

So, who is the latest group to be singled out as being too fat and in need of obsessing about their weight? Thin people!

While there continues to be no indication that fat people have an inner thin person, thin people apparently can have an inner fat person as fat sometimes collects around people's organs. While this is a valuable thing to be aware of, it is yet another example of shame reporting over something we may not be able to do anything about (much like the fussing over apples vs. pears as if people could choose their body type). And of course the conclusion is to bring everyone into the weight hysteria fat people are subjected to. Because its worked so well at ridding the world of us fatties.

The most hilarious thing is that the article blames secret fat on focusing on diet rather than excercise but then suggests that just diet could be a solution. Do they even have any idea what they are talking about?

Pardon me, but...

Intentional weight loss is NOT FUCKING FAT ACCEPTANCE.

(Edit: I'm not linking to anything because this isn't directed at anyone in specific; just something I feel like I keep coming across for years)

I want to scream that every time I see some supposedly body issue enlightened blogger reveal that they are dieting. You want a diet? No one is stopping you. But if you diet, you have nothing to say about fat acceptance. That's not about ideological purity anymore than asking that people who claim to be Democrats actually be Democrats. I don't even care if what you say seems positive. Because you can talk a good game all you want, but if you diet you are rejecting fat acceptance and everything it means. All the talk will be just talk.

I always think about linking to other blogs but I never know if the author is going to reveal that they really don't mean any of what they are saying. I never know if they are going to start putting up fences about who is an acceptable fat person and who isn't. I never know if they are going to posting some weight loss scheme and acting like this doesn't contradict all the fat positive stuff.

It does contradict. You cannot reconcile fat acceptance with fat hatred. You cannot accept yourself as you are and be trying to lose weight. You cannot advocate for body acceptance and withhold it from yourself. And that fact that so many people try to take this position just shows the lack of respect they have for fat acceptance. Because we are contantly expect to put away our beliefs and put our our feelings whenever anyone wants to lose weight. WE are the ones who keep getting told to keep quiet while more important people talk. We keep getting told to shut up. We are the ones who are supposed to compramise, to repress our identities. I'm sick of it. This seems to only happen to fat activists. Its disrespect and we're told we have to just take it.

I don't want to take it. I want my beliefs to be respected. That means having allies who don't talk out of both sides of their mouth. Who don't express solidarity in one breath and completely bury us in the next. There is no such thing as enlightened fat hatred or enlightened dieting. Stigmatizing fat people is wrong. Its not kinda wrong. Its wrong. Dieters constantly expect fat activists to shut up about dieting in front of them. They act like its impolite or mean. All the while they keep pushing the notion of fat people as gluttonous monsters even if they count themselves as one. Well, I'm not playing nice. Fat acceptance should have its own voice. And if you don't believe in, you shouldn't be trying to subvert it by adding your own voice. Show some respect and let fat acceptance have its own space. I don't care if you believe 50%, used to believe, or may one day believe. Fat acceptance is struggling to be heard at all, and it won't help to have people in the chorus who won't sing in tune.

People who do believe in fat acceptance need to stand up for fat acceptance and stand up to people who wnat to twist and subvert it. You can be friends with people trying to lose weight and believe in fat acceptance. Come on, it would be impossible to only associate with people who believe in fat acceptance. You don't have to shout down people who are dieting. I don't. I don't go to weight loss sites to berate the people there. They have a right to their space. We have a right to ours. Just because a dieter claims to care about fat acceptance is no reason for us to give them deference. Fat Acceptance sites shouldn't be linking to weight loss sites. That should have been obvious, but it happens all of the time. I'm sick of finding what looks like a good blog with good insights and then see a link to a diet blog. Diet blogs aren't fat acceptance. They have nothing to offer fat acceptance. I don't care if some dieters don't like fat bigotry, either. That's not enough. We cannot allow advocates of fat stigmatization to set the terms and limits of our community. We cannot become a movement of the lowest common denominator. We should stand for something. We should challenge people to think different. If we limit ourselves to what everyone can agree to, we'll accomplish nothing. We need to have the courage to believe differently.

That's my rant for the day. Like anyone will give a damn.

Fat Liberation Now! (a re-introduction)

This is a blog for unapologetic advocacy of fat acceptance. I'm angry. I'm passionate. I'm not going to mince words. If that hurts anyone's feelings, they need to ask themselves why one person believing and saying something different from what they believe in should upset them.

Fat acceptance has spent too long playing to the delicate sensibilities of our critics. We must stop allowing those who scorn fat acceptance to set the limits of our expression. This blog is about reclaiming fat acceptance, reclaiming fat activism, and reclaiming fat liberation.

If you hate me or hate fat acceptance, save your bandwidth and go elsewhere. I just don't care. I've heard every tired and repetative complaint or sarcastic dismissal. I'm done suffering fools. Post here, and expect your post to be deleted.

If you really want to learn, then by all means stay and read. If you're angry like me, then stand up and speak out. Hope you enjoy your stay.

Happy INDD!

So, today was International No Diet Day. Unfortunetly, a lot of people like to interpret this as "Cheat on your Diet" Day which very much misses the point, I'd say. INDD isn't supposed to be a day you get to eat cake while you loathe your body the rest of the year. I think it ought to be a celebration of self-acceptance. You don't gorge yourself on INDD because you don't deny yourself the rest of the year. I don't let myself get worked up over food guilt issues. I don't take undo responsibility for my eating. I eat what I want to. And no, that isn't ice cream every meal. People need to realize (fat people, too) that being fat isn't proof of being out of control. Indeed, as a self-accepting fat person I feel very much in control. In control of how I eat and how I feel. I haven't given up that control to some weight loss scheme designed to make me take false responsibility for being fat.

So how did I celebrate? I had a late breakfast. I went for a lovely hike in the Middlesex Fells. I came back and had a light snack and later had dinner and dessert. Just another day for me. Now that's a way to celebrate.

One thing leads to another

Believing in fat acceptance is tough. I just don't have much to say right now. What can you say in a month when we learn that diets don't work (duh!) and that fat people are being carved up in ever increasing numbers. The sad thing is that instead of calling into question the goal of weight loss, the first story probably just does more to fuel the second. Since eating well and staying active don't "work", organ amputation must be the way to go.

Its sad. I'm sorry, but I don't know how else to look at this. Fat people are criminally underserved and, indeed, abused by society. And its just not letting up. We can do better. I hope that some day we can.

That video everyone's posting...

So, everyone has posted this, so I might as well join in. Joy Nash's "Fat Rant".



Okay, my bad response first. I'm not completely enamored with the video. There is a lot of good stuff, but the "Yes, there is an epidemic" bit is a concession I'm sick and tired of seeing fat activists making. Its a way of drawing lines about when its okay to be fat and when its not. Especially from smaller women, this is often a way of saying that "I'm okay, but you might not be". Still, she doesn't go down that road so I'm not going to freak out about it. I'll just say that fatness is not an "epidemic". If rates of fatness are going up (and not simply the definitions of fatness going down and reporting on the "epidemic" going up), I think its far more likely that fat hatred is fueling it and not rampent overeating and laziness. The fat person stuffing their face on the couch watching TV is a strawman. Its a way of guilting fat people for behavior that everyone does by magnifying the blame when the person is fat. Do I sometimes eat while watching TV? Sure. Doesn't mean that's all I am, but the strawman is designed to make fat people self-critical when they do things we're told we shouldn't do, but which really everyone does. It can become a self-fufilling prophecy when they make all the efforts to lose weight and don't, so they conclude that eating well and being active isn't working because it doesn't make them thin. I don't see any good reason to think there is an epidemic independant of the freaking out over the epidemic. A lot of relatively fat positive people think they need to agree that fatness is a problem to be taken seriously as the comment on the issue, but I don't think they grasp the concession they are making. They may think, "Okay, so there is a problem, but I'm not part of it" but the fact is that the problem they are agreeing exists DOES seem them as the proof of it. Sure, they love bringing up the 500lb strawman, but their true target is the person who is 200lbs. Making that concession isn't meeting them half-way. Its meeting them at their front door and we have to stop allowing the discussion of fatness to be only made on the terms of those who hate fatness. Diets don't magically work if you're the person who "needs" to lose weight. There are no lines that can be reliably drawn.

So, I've said my peace. The image of a fatty stuffing themself is a button pusher for me and I couldn't let it go without comment. All that aside, though, Joy Nash makes some great points and makes them well. She's engaging and makes some very keen observations. I loved the presentation on dieting's failure rates as concluding that 95-98% really means everyone. Really, for all my talk, I took issue with about 2% of the video. So that means I liked 98% of it. Which means I liked it. Check it out.

My Big Fat Greek Eviction

Via Feministe, I found out about an incident at DePauw college where the national officers of the Delta Zeta sorrority were concerned about a decline in membership at the school and responded by kicking out 23 women and driving another 6 to quit. Which would seem a much sharper decline than the one they were to fix. The interesting thing, though, is that the 23 women who were evicted included all of the fat women in the sorrority, not to mention all of the black, Korean, and Vietnamese members.

Now, I'm generally not a fan of sorrorities or fratnerities. I was happy my university banned Greek socieites as they generally seem ripe for promoting discrimination or elitist mindsets which frankly don't belong in higher education. But I'll admit some chapters can prove to be exceptions and the article suggests that this Delta Zeta chapter was doing just that, catering to students normally shut out from sorrorities by including a lot of women from math and science majors as well as disabled women. Unfortunetly, the national chapter was more interested in proving my apprehensions right. Its a feature, not a bug, I'm sure they'd say.

The community there has been fast to respond to the lookism that was openly evident from the sorrority's actions. While the article mentions some women withdrawing from classes as a result of the personal attacks directed at them, it seems that many are not standing for it and I applaud all of them. If the national officers of Delta Zeta are going to be so blunt about their priorities, the school should respond inkind. DePauw is an educational institution and it has no room for a club for pretty people. They should revoke Delta Zeta's authority to act as an official sorrority. Their purpose is clearly not the “enrichment of student life at DePauw,” but rather the promotion of a sexist, sizest mind-set for the purpose of affording extra privlages to the already privlaged. They've shown they have no purpose on campus. The school should respond accordingly.

Fat is not a choice. Neither is thin.

Fat oppression is nothing if not adept at adaptation. Fat hatred gets pitched in a shiny corporate packaging. It gets pitched as the ultimate in anti-corporate activism. Fat hatred is anti-poor, fat hatred is anti-rich. Fat Acceptance shows up, and fat hatred co-opts its vocabulary to promote a fundementally incompatable position. Fat hatred is a Conservative political principle. Fat hatred is a progressive political principle. Its always garbage, but its always presented with unflinching and self-righteous certainty.

As a progressive, though, I'm more intimately annoyed to see my political beliefs used to promote fat hatred. One that I've seen a lot is to co-opt language of the pro-choice movement and refit it to promote dieting, or at least to censor criticism of dieting. Dieting is a choice, so goes the exclaimation. The implication is extended to compare fat acceptance with the anti-abortion movement. Just as they want to keep women pregnant, fat acceptance wants to to keep women fat. We're trying to deny women their choice to be thin.

Bull shit.

Fat is not a choice. Neither is thin. Fat is NOTHING like abortion. I don't care how you fall on that issue. Fat isn't like it. At all. Dieting is not feminist empowerment over an oppressive pro-fat patriarchy.

Diet promoters are trying to kill two birds with one stone with this presentation. Firstly, the want to blunt the feminist arguements against body hatred by trying to make dieting into a feminist act. Secondly, it wants to continue to establish the notion that fat people have chosen to be fat. Thus, they are responsible for the discrimination and hatred directed to them. Further, any fat person can choose to be thin. This just isn't true.

Diets don't work. I don't care if they work for an small number of people. Presenting 1% success as "proof" of the effectiveness of dieting is absurd. Suggesting that a 1% success rates means you can't say that diets don't work is insane. Its using semantics to advantage the status quo. Its the kind of advantages the status quo always demands for itself and I'm not giving in. I'm not letting the status quo define how I can disagree with it. You can choose to diet, but you can't choose to be not fat. The minimal number of people who lose weight and keep it off even for a moderate amount of time have no secret. They have no cure. All they are is the exception to the rule. They are flukes. Either by being the fluke people who were fat unnaturally or by taking unnatural and debilitating steps to enforce a different weight upon an unwilling body. I've seen a dieting "success" up close and personnel and it was a lie. It was an eating disorder that was greeted with congratulations instead of intervention.

Dieting isn't really about choosing to be thin. That's a false promise. I don't care if dieters don't want to hear that. Its why it needs to be said. Its not because anyone wants them to stay fat out of malice. Its not about trying to impose my view of what your body should be. I'm not trying to impose anything. No one in fat acceptance could even pretend to have the power to impose our will upon anyone. That doesn't seem to stop the forces of fat hatred from suggesting otherwise, though. They act like we are terrorizing people into giving up their freedom of choice. At its worst, it accuses of denying people a quality of life by withholding medical treatment. In what world? In what world do a few people standing up against a multi-billion dollar industry have those powers? In what world does expressing a position against the status quo oppress ANYONE? Not this one. But that doesn't stop those who endorse fat bigotry. They claim for themselves immunity by hiding behind pro-choice language. They claim for themselves immunity by professing the sanctity of their self-hatred and the inability for their self-hatred to withstand the oppression of those who say they don't need to live their lives in self-pity for what they are not.

Fat hatred is not a progressive imperative. It is not a conservative imperative. It is a sham. And it is the shame of those who promote it that they would seek to silence those who disagree with a false morality.