The engagement has been awesome so far! Excited to hear your thoughts on the piece, or pieces, you choose
On fat fetish
Gaining is the fetish that changes how we think about the male body
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/gaining-fetish
Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure
https://www.dropbox.com/s/plxactm1t42iy2v/Feederism%20%E2%80%93%20Eating%2C%20Weight%20Gain%2C%20and%20Sexual%20Pleasure.pdf?dl=0
On race and fat
BMI
https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb
Fatphobia
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w3f75wpefna44p1/Fearing%20the%20Black%20Body.pdf?dl=0
On dismantling thin privilege
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9f06lm0g8j0y1w/Reflections%20on%20Thin%20Privilege%20and%20Responsibility.pdf?dl=0
Week one - Identity
Week two - Capitalism, gender, media and health at every size
As a reminder, these fall in the area of Fat Studies and there's some norms you should be aware of:
- "fat" is taken as a neutral descriptor, think of it as reclaiming the word.
- "obese" arbitrarily medicalises fatness and Others fat people
:sankara-salute:
It's not a strawman, it's what those words in that order literally mean...
I'm not engaging in this conversation until you read that piece. Health at Every Size is a very specific movement, it's not just the meaning you assign to the words. There's a little FAQ at the end of that piece with common myths, one of the myths is "The HAES model argues that people of every size must be healthy"
"These words we use that have a certain meaning aren't actually what we mean."
I looked through the paper, I get what you are trying to say, but the phrase "healthy at every size" just doesn't work. And neither does the insistence that being fat isn't necessarily unhealthy.
There are some good ideas in there. A reduced focus on weight and focusing on a more holistic approach to health can be good, but weight is still an important factor. But again, that's not at all what the words "healthy at every size" convey. It conveys the idea of a very fat person having no more health problems than the average person, which just isn't the case.
But reading the paper I get the impression that they think there is not necessarily anything wrong with being fat. That fatness is perfectly fine. It's not.
lmao, here's a particularly egregious line from the paper:
"Lung cancer also occurs in non-smokers. If smoking causes lung cancer, why does it exist in both smokers and non-smokers?"
And the story about "Jody" shows someone doing all the wrong things to lose weight. It's not her trying to lose weight that's bad (at 195 anyway), it's the way she tries to lose weight. No shit 1000 calories a day isn't healthy. And avoiding fat and carbs is misguided as well. As for 105 Jody, that's a problem of thinking she's overweight when she's not. That may come from some social stigmas that need to be worked on, but that doesn't mean overweight doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean 195 Jody isn't overweight.
I didn't say that. The model says fat people can be perfectly healthy, which just isn't true.
Thanks for putting effort into fighting this nonsense. This poster is making medical concerns arbitrary by bringing attention away from the syndrome of obesity and focusing on the symptoms which possibly can be “present at every BMI level.”
Your analogy of the syndrome of smoking causing the symptom of lung cancer is apt here. For how are we to stop endemic lung cancer without stopping endemic smoking, and how are we to stop what are provably endemic symptoms of obesity without first dealing with obesity?
(my usage of ‘symptoms’ and ‘syndrome’ was chosen bc the word syndrome is widely considered ‘that which causes symptoms’. by calling obesity a syndrome, i am only claiming that it produces symptoms. there is not meant to be any further negative connotation than it being the thing that produces symptoms)
sorry for not engaging with you more, I don't like the effect these online conversations have on my brain. I feel like I get addicted to Being Right.
Anyway, I just want to make an analogy that I've been thinking about that hopefully will be helpful for seeing our common ground. Our idea of cleanliness - in terms of laundry, dirty dishes etc - is based in science (germs, fungus etc) and in culture (squeaky clean, clothes should smell a certain way). It is possible to highlight that our mental models of cleanliness have been corrupted by soap companies to make us hold our environments to a higher standard than they realistically need to be. In making that argument, people may object and say "how can you defend eating raw chicken? don't you know how dangerous germs are?". And like yes. In many cases, of course you need to be clean, however that isn't what the discussion is actually about.
I'm not saying that there are no negative health factors for heavier people, but the framing that we're using isn't about how much it sucks to be fat. We all, especially fat people, know that. I'm trying to provide other, novel perspectives that will hopefully expand our mental models and help us to think of this in a completely new way.