queering the game of life

you can’t talk about your intentional weight loss and be neutral. 

it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about goals, wishes, hopes, process, success, or failure. it doesn’t matter what tone of voice you use. it doesn’t matter whether you’re sounding serious or playful, confident or self-deprecating. 

we live in such a virulently fatphobic culture that talking about your personal intentional weight loss reinforces the hegemony. can’t help but. i left a disability community because of this: people wanted to share their personal weight loss successes and they wanted those statements to count as “only personal.” they wanted to talk about their intentional weight loss without being considered to be talking about anyone else’s fatness.

that doesn’t exist.

it can’t be neutral, and it can’t be just personal. we hear too many fatphobic messages every single day at gale wind force for anyone’s personal weight loss talk to be neutral or just personal. we’re subject to too many punishments for fatness. talking about your intentional weight loss contributes to the cultural value that fatness is bad, terrible, disgusting, unhealthy, immature, a “before” picture, a sign of a house not in order.

(unless you’re being analytical about something you’ve done in the past, and using a fat politics lens. that’s not what this post is about.) 

you get to do whatever you want with your body. if someone tells you that fat activists want to prevent you from trying intentional weight loss, that’s a straw man and a lie. it’s also fucking laughable to frame fat activists as the power side of that any binary. you get to do what you want, and you get to talk about whatever you want – but your words count, and they have impact.

so if you go ahead and talk about your intentional weight loss, know that you’re not being neutral in the world. you’re supporting the fatphobia that slams people every day. the fatphobia that kills fat people. no, you won’t kill a specific person from talking about your diet. but you’re on that side of the war. 

5th richest person on the entire fucking planet wants you to give him more money

It’s easy to forget how disgustingly, perversely rich this man is. He could live in the most absurd, decadent luxury, never lifting a finger, until he turned 1000 years old without spending even a tenth, a twentieth, of the money he has now. He could buy a Tesla and drive it into the ocean, every day, for the next 100 years, without spending even a twentieth of his money.

Even 1 billion dollars is so much money that the human brain has troubles fully comprehending it, so much more money than any one, ten, twenty human beings would ever need in the span of a lifetime, even assuming a lifestyle more comfortable than that enjoyed by basically any other human throughout all of history. He has over 63.

And he wants you to donate to him?? TO HIM??? He could improve the lives of untold hundreds of millions of people if he just decided to give away some of his absurd riches. He could give away 95% of his money without it impacting the quality of his life in any measurable way. And he wants people to just give him more of it?