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:
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.