#fat hatred

YOUR BODY IS NOT A REFLECTION ON YOUR MORALITY

“Just be careful, yo-yo dieting is so bad for you.”

“Have you tried listening to what your body wants?”

i just generally think the privilege/disprivilege framework is useful for three main things: race, sex & class. i don’t think the absence of a particular experience of an oppressive force is necessarily a privilege. in a feminist context, being a fat woman & thin women both have conditional “advantages” that are accompanied by disadvantages. i also believe strongly that fat hatred hurts all women (and men as well, but that’s not my focus)

it is absolutely a specific experience to be a fat woman in a fat-hating world. i used to have a lot of misogynistic anger & hatred at thin women for “having it easier”. i spent a lot of time purposefully facing the reality that just because a thin women’s experience of fat hatred is different, it doesn’t mean things are better for her. however, it does really fuck me up on the daily how i don’t feel most thin women are interested in doing the same kind of consciousness raising about fat women, even within the radical feminist community.

fat activism is a radical feminist & lesbian feminist tradition. critism of the diet, beauty & food industry are also essential feminist values. i would suggest reading the books shadow on a tightrope, which is an 80s anthology of radfem fat activist writing, and also the more recent dietland (especially if you find yourself resistant to the idea of criticizing fat hatred as an essential feminist practice)

something I was sent that I am in no way qualified to answer

This person really has some kind of awful caricature of fat people in their head. And the 9/11 thing is just awful...as if fat people personally killed others just by existing.  As if fat people weren’t part of the group of victims that didn’t deserve to die in that attack. It makes me sick to read a lot of this. 

They also don’t seem to think much of people in general. If whether you get to exist boils down to whether you’re good for the economy and the usefulness of your organs, you’ve gone wrong somewhere in your thinking. 

This is basically just every justification I’ve heard for hating fat people (plus a couple of new ones) put together in one place. It’s basically a Gish Gallop, and would take a lot of work to refute this all. And the thing is, I’m not even likely to be able to find things that refute some of these things, since they’re not actually based in any kind of real data...

Here’s a few though.

As for the medical worker injury thing, the technologies exist to help with this. It’s rich people not being willing to pay for things that help other people and then blaming it on fat people.

Climate change - most of that is systemic and perpetuated by wealthy corporations not individuals. Transport in total (which is what they’re talking about, I think) only accounts for about 15% (this is easy to google, but I couldn’t find a good, simple link) of greenhouse gas emissions.  And we weren’t the ones who manipulated the housing situation in at least the USA to increase dependence on cars (you can blame Henry Ford for that)

The set point thing is real, but I am just going to link you to @bigfatscience here. Fat people feel like they’re starving (cold, depressed, etc) when they’re eating less than they need. It’s true this is at a higher intake than thin people, generally, but it’s not worth being miserable to satisfy some internet troll. 

The thing is, even if all of this were true (it’s not), fat people are still people, we still deserve respect and medical care. We’re not bad people for being fat. Unhealthy fat people are not bad people for being unhealthy and fat.  

We’re more important than money. 

People are always more important than money.

It’s Bad Advice Tuesday over at The Establishment, and this letter-writer wants to know how they can super covertly force their partner to lose weight in order to satisfy their own sexual desires, a really cool thing to do!

Thin women are paid more than fat women -- tens of thousands more by some estimates. This means thin women are valued as if they had more years of education and experience than fat women. To be at parity wages with thin women, fat women need to be much more educated (almost two years more education than thin women) and experienced (about three years more experience than thin women).

Researchers trying to determine why, have discovered that fat women are more likely to work in physical jobs and less likely to work in public-facing jobs than thin women. Public-facing jobs are generally better paid. Discrimination against fat women in public-facing jobs, like upper management and performance and waitressing and modeling and sales, could be the reason fat women on average make so much less than thinner women.

The most pay on average nets to relatively thinner women--about a 22 on the outmoded BMI scale.

Finally, take a gander at this absolutely devastating graph that shows a significant negative relationship between BMI/body fat and income for women from the St Louis Fed (2011):

This is thin privilege---massive, obvious, thin privilege.