First a call-out of fatphobia (https://hexbear.net/post/4189552) that ended up proving its point, then the stuff about "he/hims" (https://hexbear.net/post/4187781) ". Apparently a mod got banned!?
I am not very active and I never look at the megathreads, the number of comments in them scare me away from them. Is that where it's happening? I feel confused about what this community is like now.
I, uh, don't really know what my point is. Maybe someone can explain what the state of the site is? Especially on the he/hims thing. Maybe that's the main point of this post.
I feel sad for people that got hurt by this.
For what it’s worth, I’m the user who made the fatphobia call-out post and my goal/intention was never to purge users from the site for being fatphobic. My goal was to create some guardrails around these discussions so that a fat person can post “Wow, going to the doctor as a fat person sucks” without getting a bunch of unsolicited diet advice and concern trolling in the replies.
If we kicked off every user who has some fatphobic beliefs, there wouldn’t be many users left. Which is kind of my point. It’s not an issue of individual users being assholes and therefore needing to be purged; it’s an issue of unexamined and unchallenged beliefs about fatness. Those beliefs dominate the larger culture and the left is not an exception to this.
What I’d like to see is a rule against giving unsolicited diet and exercise advice here (if people want advice and ask for it, of course that’s fine. I don’t want or need to see it but I can keep scrolling.)
And I’d like to see a rule about content warnings applied to fatphobic topics and topics/replies that may trigger people with ED. This site generally has a culture of “when in doubt, be courteous and use CW and spoiler tags,” so it’s honestly pretty upsetting that people have no interest in simply expanding the existing guidelines to include fatphobia and ED triggers.
I didn’t see any replies that I feel warrant a ban; I would like to see fatphobic comments removed when they go too far and challenged/refuted when they don’t. And as with everything, the line between what should be removed and what should remain with a rebuttal is up to mod discretion. I don’t expect everyone to get it right every time or do things perfectly.
I thought your post was good! This one too. Sorry it had so many people saying fatphobic things or derailing. Not really what should have gone down, imo. Fatphobic doctors suck and you deserve better.
I liked your post and was sad to see what it devolved into. I was really frustrated about the hostily I received in the thread as well.
For the record, I actually liked your post, and this is what I wanted to comment before it became some shitty struggle session. Possible CW for not great terminology and phrasing on my part since I'm not familiar with fat activism at all:
I'm not entirely on board with what your post said, but I had seen similar arguments before on Twitter and have incorporated some of what was said in my current fitness goals. I did the repeated cycle of fad dieting and failed fitness goals and self-loathing eating, so taking inspiration from those fat activists(?), I decided to ignore my weight this time but still exercise anyways. What I found was this:
Once I stopped hyperfocusing on weight and see reality for what it is, I realized my weight didn't really impede in my exercise at all. There's some stuff like how my treadmill wears out faster, but my weight has surprisingly little impact. I thought jogging would be an issue except it turns out overweight people have the corresponding developed leg muscles needed to move that weight around. The only real impact are things like planks, pushups, and pullups, but even those have "easier" forms like doing them with your knees on the ground or pushing off a table instead of on the ground. Sure, they might not be "real" pushups, but a pushup is ultimately about exercising certain muscles under a certain amount of body weight. Therefore, a heavier person should be exercising with a form that puts a lesser percentage of body weight on those muscles than a lighter person so they both are working on muscles under the same effective weight. It's only fair.
People started to comment on how much weight I "lost" despite the fact that I lost a grand total of two fucking pounds. I've taken shits and piss that weighed more than that. But after reading your post and some reflection, I think what they're actually trying to say is that I look more fit, that I have better posture and balance among other things. And with some pride, I can say that it is certainly true. But there's a disturbing element to this. I have come to believe that they are blinded by ideology, in this case fatphobia. And they are so blinded by this ideology that even when faced with the objective reality of someone who has obviously become more fit despite being overweight and not losing a single pound, they literally have to invent their own reality and say that I must have lost weight somehow.
This is a bit off topic, but the original thread is locked and I think it would be super weird if I DMed this to you lol
Hi, I read some of the resources that were linked in the replies. I was taken aback by your claims at first and the medical journal article in particular gave a good explanation of the points about weight loss and ties to racism you made.
I stand on the opposite end of the spectrum: I'm naturally thin, work out and basically follow intuitive eating without realising it. So I felt a little awkward witnessing the mess down there, because I know that I have this privilege, that I still have prejudices inherited from my social upbringing and that biology is messy and often counterintuitive.
I probably will get things wrong from time to time, but I'll try my best not to, and to respond well to criticism if I do.
I guess what I want to say is thank you for making the post.
Slight disagreement with the unsolicited diet advice aspect: for the purposes of fatshaming, I agree.
But I think unsolicited diet advice for moral reasons should be allowed.
For example: If a user on c/food posts a picture of Sabra hummus, a poster should be a to reply "You should avoid eating Sabra because it's manufactured on an illegal West Bank settlement and is owned by Isr*el"
I have a comrade irl that didn't know KitKat is owned by Nestle, which is a company so evil the executives deserve to be summarily executed for their actions in Africa and the Middle East. Reminders like these are good because companies are owned by other companies owned by other companies and it's hard to keep up a boycott if you don't have a photographic memory these days. Like obviously no Pepsi or Coca Cola products, that's easy to remember. No McDonalds or KFC, that should be easy. Pizza Hut had a hand in the fall of the USSR, so that's a no.
Comrades should encourage comrades to not be complicit in genocide.
I think that's not diet advice but advice about your diet, if that makes sense. Diet vs dieting?
Making personal adjustments to your routine diet and lifestyle vs ideological stances that influence your diet vs the overbearing influence of capitalist commodification of food to profiteer off of its every aspect.
Yeah that's what I was getting at. Like your diet can be vegan, but you're not dieting