RE: What are your thoughts on fat acceptance?
June 6, 2017 at 5:26 am
(This post was last modified: June 6, 2017 at 5:27 am by Regina.)
I think "body positivity" more broadly should be about accepting things people can't do anything about - like being a short man, a tall woman, skin conditions, hair loss etc. I think it should also include education on a range of "healthy" weight, and show us what normal average bodies tend to look like. By all means, educate us that these models and celebrities do not live real lives and only look like that because they're on very strict crazy diets and have time to work out 6 days a week. It can also cover things what normal genitals look like, as opposed to the ones shown in porn.
I do have a problem with the way the "fat acceptance" argument is often framed though. If we're talking about simply not being rude to fat people, and creating a more open supportive environment for fat people trying to live healthier and permanently lose weight, then by all means I support it. However, when the argument moves into denial that obesity has adverse health affects, or that it is caused by bad lifestyle habits, then yes I do take serious issue with it. That's serious misinformation to put out there. I also see it as a defeatist attitude, when you have an obese person who isn't even willing to try losing weight, they just want to blame "society" for treating them badly for being fat.
I do have a problem with the way the "fat acceptance" argument is often framed though. If we're talking about simply not being rude to fat people, and creating a more open supportive environment for fat people trying to live healthier and permanently lose weight, then by all means I support it. However, when the argument moves into denial that obesity has adverse health affects, or that it is caused by bad lifestyle habits, then yes I do take serious issue with it. That's serious misinformation to put out there. I also see it as a defeatist attitude, when you have an obese person who isn't even willing to try losing weight, they just want to blame "society" for treating them badly for being fat.
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"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
