Fat Hatred in the Feminist Blogosphere
I would like to call on all feminists who blog to put an immediate moratorium on the fat-hating comments of their visitors and themselves. I would like to call on you all to examine the bullshit that comes out of your mouth when you lambast fat people for “liking to sit around eating twinkies all day.” I would like you all to stop yourself before publishing or approving comments that talk about how if fatties would just realize the One True Vegetarian/Vegan way and quit consuming fatty animal products all fat and heart disease would go away. I would like you all to stop before you publish posts where you say, as if its a truism, that “of course” it would be healthier for everyone to lose ten pounds and get more exercise, or be more aware of what they eat, or pay attention to what they eat, or eat more vegetables, or less fast food, or less sugar. I would like you to educate yourselves on anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia, and get a clue about how damaging these comments are to the millions of women who suffer with this.
I would like you all to stop blaming fat people for being fat. I would like you all to just fucking educate yourselves for once before you spout off about how the most important thing to poor people should be that they have organic food stores in their neighborhood or sidewalks to take long walks on because you think the worst thing about being poor is we all sit around eating mac and cheese and Little Debbie snack cakes and watch tv all day. I would like you all to stop using “fat” as an insult against powerful white men with lots of money who do something particularly misogynist. The problem with Rush Limbaugh isn’t that he’s fat – its that he’s a hideous human being who treats women like shit.
I would like to to stop pretending, when called on it, that your hatred of fat people is just “concern” for their “well being” and I would like you to stop claiming fat people are “eating themselves into heart attacks”, are lazy, undisciplined, uneducated about food, all secretly overeaters, and the like.
I would like you to stop enshrining both “good health” and thinness as characteristics both desirable and attainable for everyone and instead take apart the numerous sexist and classist supports for these beliefs. I would like you to examine the ways in which women starving themselves, aka “dieting” has become the new standard of morality after being sexually abstinent (for women only, again) fell into disfavor. I would like you to be aware that not all fat people are unhealthy; that very few, if any fat people who are unhealthy are that way BECAUSE of their fat – in fact, the converse is true and often health problems LEAD to weight gain and not the other way around; that not all skinny people are either healthy or compulsive exercisers and calorie counters; that neither being skinny and healthy nor being an obsessive exerciser and dieter make a person more moral, disciplined, or educated than someone who is or does not.
I would like to challenge all feminist bloggers to look into their own assumptions about weight, health, and their attitudes towards their own bodies and others’. I would like to challenge feminist bloggers to do a little research of their own into finding any long term studies that show it is possible for anyone who tries hard enough to lose weight and keep it off (long term being “more than 2 years”). I would like to challenge feminist bloggers who assume that fat = unhealthy to find any legitimate scientific studies showing that being 10, 20, 50, or even 100 pounds “overweight” is more than a very, very minor risk factor for heart attack, diabetes, cancer, early death, or any of the other things we are frightened with. I would like challenge feminist bloggers who claim their hatred of fat people is really just concern for people’s health to compare the way they treat fat people, even healthy fat people, to the way they treat people who are chronically or severely disabled and who probably will not live a long time.
I would like feminist bloggers to question the societal assumptions that have made their way into medical literature and examine the ways in which medicine, in the past, has enshrined misogyny as medicine, and the continuum; ranging from the old claim that education would atrophy women’s reproductive organs to the advent of the lobotomy which was performed mostly on women to the wide variety of social control drugs (diet pills, tranquilizers, and anti-depressants, to name but a few) that are prescribed mostly to women – to modern day “healthy living” advice that says women should weigh less and eat less food than men of the same height, to demonizing women’s fat, even though body fat is to a large extent a female health trait (women need a MINIMUM of 21% of their body weight in fat to be healthy, as opposed to 8% for men); to the inevitable outcome of the policies of encouraging women to eat less than men and certainly less meat and other protein and iron rich foods that also happen to be fatty, which is that women are chronically iron-poor or anemic in large numbers, even among rich populations, and often feel weak and tired, and girls grow to be significantly smaller with no real reason for such marked sexual dimorphism in our species (in less misogynist cultures, women and men grow to practically the same height) because they begin systemically starving themselves and avoiding “bad” foods (foods reserved for men) just at the beginning of adolescence; to medical testing of drugs and procedures that excludes women because men’s bodies are considered the norm and women’s bodies are considered too complicated and strange to be tested (although they are happy to then give us the medicines). I would like feminist bloggers who say “but of course fat is unhealthy” to examine why even “morbidly obese” women live longer than “healthy” weight men to help them understand what a tiny role one’s weight plays in one’s longevity. I would like feminist bloggers to stop screaming about McDonald’s and fat lazy Americans when in fact, the US does NOT have the highest percentage of obese adults, nor does it have the shortest lifespans; nor are the majority of McDonald’s customers grossly obese, uneducated, and lazy.
I’ve had about all I can take of your assumptions about fat people, especially fat women. I’ve had enough of being shamed in places I hoped to find a glimmer of social consciousness. I’ve had enough of being preached to about low carb, vegan, calorie counting, exercise, and “health” by people who aren’t doctors and certainly aren’t my doctor or anyone I would consult for medical advice. I shouldn’t have to beg your pity and gratuitous absolution for my fat because I have an endocrine disorder – it shouldn’t matter to you at all why I’m fat. It shouldn’t matter to you if I do sit around all day eating red meat and twinkies. I am chronically ill – I expect from any feminist blogger who has a shred of social consciousness about ableism to not throw out garbage advice like if I would “just” eat less, or the “right” foods, I would lessen or be rid of my migraines, back problems, PTSD and ovarian malfunctions. I would like feminist bloggers to quit telling fat women who’ve been raped that they are stuffing their mouths with food because of their rapes because now they hate their body and are trying to make themselves so unattractive that no man will ever rape them again – you don’t know how much I eat.
Just stop it.
Just fucking STOP IT.
