Monthly Archives: June 2009

Good Morning AMeMeMeeerica

by bigliberty

What is Good Morning America’s obsession with this woman?

And why was she put on today’s show …. two days after the show with Marianne?

Also, why was she given a face-to-face interview, an intimate, softball, cushy interview at that?

She spent her time promoting fat myth after fat myth (obesity causes people to lose their aspirations, Americans can’t “control” themselves, we’re all going to be in the “throes of an obesity bailout” ??)

Here’s some more gems:

“I come from a family of obesity…when you grow up with that and see what it does to people, it’s hard to throw your hands up [about it]“

She generally is misusing parental rights in order to torment her kids and still have them sent to public school.

Obesity statistics —- “one in three are obese” (this is wrong, by the way)

“we just elected a president based on change…we’ve got sick kids, we’ve got fat kids, the school environment needs to be a default of safety”

“Let them call you names, you’re your child’s advocate, there’s no excuse to freshly mint a new fat child in this country.”

Also, the segment featured videos of headless fat children (I’m sure filmed without their permission), randomly interspersed in the segment, focusing mostly on poor little boys’ jiggling tummies. Grrrrr.

So what’s up with GMA, anyway? Does anyone think the timing of this segment is a little too coincidental — Monday, Fat Acceptance; Wednesday, MeMe-brand Obesity Hate?

It reminds me of Rachel’s segment (not on GMA), where MeMe was in the “panel.” This time they just disallowed any debate whatsoever, and gave MeMe the last word.

I’m fuming. Goddamn bubblegum media. When did that woman’s hate become so okay, so reasonable, something an educated anchor would nod to head to, sitting across from her, as the anchor throws the hateful woman softball after softball? You could tell MeMe was absolutely thrilled to be there, since she didn’t have any awful fat people to debate with!

NOTE: I can’t find MeMe Roth’s GMA segment on the GMA website. If anyone sees it later, could you please comment with the link? Thanks!

EDIT: Found the segment. In the “related links” below the article is the link to “The Young, Fat, and Fabulous” (Marianne Kirby of the Rotund’s segment). Perhaps some people reading the hateful, irrational, self-loathing words of Meme Roth will click on that related link, eh?

edited to correct show dates

edited to add Meme Roth segment on Good Morning America: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/BeautySecrets/story?id=7857306&page=1

Our Health, Body, and Morals – Followup

by bigliberty

I just want to thank everyone for the overwhleming response to my last post, The Connection Between Health, Our Bodies, and Our Morals. I’m really pleased by the well thought-out, careful, and rational posts by my readers, and I think my followup to the post deserves its own space.

You will be relieved, I’m sure, to discover that Juliet and family are entirely fictional in the technical sense. However, in the cultural sense, Juliet is very much alive in the minds of many women (and men), most of the time symbolized as a goal, and not a cautionary tale.

That’s what makes Juliet fascinating. What we know to be unbalanced and mentally unhealthy behavior is, for many, the “right” way to be. That’s why I put the most reprehensible bit — concerning Juliet’s behavior towards her daughter Alexis — in the context that Juliet and Alexis were requested by their pediatrician to get Alexis’s weight down. A request, I might add, that’s not at all unusual these days, the illogic of which extends all the way up to recommendations put out by major health organizations.

In effect, Juliet was complying with what the majority of pediatricians would consider Alexis’s prescription for good health. She used no inflammatory methods towards encouraging Alexis to lose weight — she didn’t say Alexis was ugly, or tut-tut at her in other ways. She did precisely what she thought a good mother should do — and what millions of other mothers would consider the right thing to do. Follow the doctor’s prescription in an encouraging, yet firm, manner.

Let’s further analyze Juliet’s behavior. Her entire day, from start to finish, was a measure of “successes” and “failures” with respect to how she perceived she should be monitoring herself. We never know if Juliet is fat, inbetweenie, or thin, or if she is trying to lose weight or maintain, or if she’s structuring her day around her perceived health or her body (or both). There are some intimations about Juliet’s body size in that she doesn’t have the “extra” weight her sister has, and that her husband thinks her butt jiggles less than some nameless starlet, but all of that’s rather meaningless without context.

The reason I didn’t bring Juliet’s body size into focus is to illustrate that the morality of her behavior doesn’t change if she’s fat, thin, inbetweenie, doing it for her perceived health, or to look like some ideal, and so forth.

Ultimately, and what has been noticed by the group of very sharp commenters on my previous post, what Juliet’s story illustrates is the danger zone encounters when one separates his/her sense of right and wrong from what is real, whether through ignorance, or willingly.

There are a couple of ways we can think about this:

1. Juliet may have only her doctor’s words to go on and may not have thought any more deeply about size, health, shape, psychology, women, and morality.

2. Juliet may have done research, or have lived life mindfully enough to realize that there are healthy and happy people of all sizes, but either doesn’t think that applies to her specifically, or perhaps even believes that there is a connection between the pursuit of thinness and and goodness. That belief could be encoded in some kind of modified Puritanical ideal of work and sacrifice, or in some other fashion.

Either one is easy to shoot down, if one employs a bit of reason. If Juliet is ignorant as in 1, then it is still her fault if her behavior hurts herself and others. Her behavior might be more understandable but should be no less morally reprehensible. If Juliet is informed as in 2, and still makes the decision to behave as described in the story, then that illustrates that she is irrational. Irrational behavior, that behavior disconnected from reality, can have dire consequences, as shown in the story. Sure, for the moment everything seems to be in sort of a metastable “goodish” phase, but what happens when Alexis really starts internalizing a bigger body size as bad, and is meant to be a bigger girl, or carries that bias through life as a thinner person? What happens when Juliet’s son learns from her husband that wives and women have to look and eat a certain way, but men and husbands can do whatever they please? And so forth.

And that brings me to a bit of an aside — there was a question in the comments whether or not we should judge Juliet’s character at all. Of course we should. And here’s why: even though we don’t have the right to tell Juliet how to live her life, it’s of vital importance that we understand why what she is doing is right or wrong, as we each (rational, informed people), understand it. More important than holding beliefs is knowing why you hold them, and knowing how to parse your world with respect to those beliefs, and how to understand the fallacies of logic which lead people to hold beliefs that are irrational, misinformed, and possibly hurtful.

Since many reading this blog also write and speak about size acceptance, it’s vitally important to be able to understand how someone like Juliet (and many people who have been taught that Juliet is the ideal) believes quite firmly that his/her behavior is good, upright, and moral, and, ultimately, the best way of living. Is it so surprising, then, when the idea of accepting one’s size is so foreign to these people? But the chinks in their armor, so to speak, are the logical fallacies on which their moral value systems (regarding body size) are built.

Calling out people people like Juliet as bad mothers (or fathers), or wacked-out obsessives, won’t get you anywhere actually dealing with someone like Juliet. They have every (fallacious, yet widely-accepted) reason to believe that they are being good parents, and are only being mindful about what goes in (and out) of their bodies. To them, their behavior is, while structured, admirable, simple, and reasonable. They are merely “watching what they eat” and “moving more,” and encouraging their kids to do the same. They believe they have a right to enjoy all the societal privileges of their body. They “earned” it be being “good.”

I know I’m going into a lot of detail here. But the Juliets are our fiercest opposition. They believe they are being morally upstanding (for reasons of health, or aesthetics, or religion, or whatever rationalization du jour) by spending the bulk of every day on their bodies and, most specifically, the attainment of some kind of thin(ner) ideal. It’s likely rooted in very early exposure to the idea that thin-is-better, but that’s another post for another day.

We need to know how to speak to the Juliets in a meaningful way. I’ll pose the following situation.

Suppose you were an old friend of Juliet. You know the family well enough to talk about its intimacies. You meet Juliet for coffee on a Saturday afternoon, and Juliet speaks with you about her week, mentioning her food/exercise successes and pitfalls, and most notably, that the pediatrician suggested Alexis lose weight. Juliet seems very relaxed and happy and in control of her life. How do you bring up size acceptance to her in any meaningful kind of way?

(Disclaimer: that’s not to say you should bring up size acceptance to your non-accepting friends, I’m just postulating a specific scenario)

The Connection Between Health, Our Bodies, and Our Morals

by bigliberty

Juliet gets up at 5:15am. She throws on some gym clothes, takes a few sips of orange juice, and fills up her water bottle. She opens the storm door ever-so-softly (as not to wake her still-sleeping husband and two children), and begins her warmup. Five minutes later she’s pounding the pavement; forty-five minutes later, she’s stretching in front of her house.

She wakes the children when she gets in at 6:00am, and jumps in the shower. She gets out in time to help the children pour their low-fat, low-sugar whole-grain cereal and skim milk. Her husband gets up and takes a leisurely shower, and wanders down to find the children finishing their breakfast, and wife chewing on a low-fat energy bar, drinking black half-caf. The children’s lunches and afternoon snack (to be eaten before their afternoon sports) — apple, turkey-on-wheat, veggie sticks for lunch, and peanut butter on wheat crackers for snack — have been packed by mom.

Mom loads the kids on the bus to school, making sure to tell little Alexis that maybe she should try out for junior cross country, because she’s worried about her unhealthily-expanding waistline which the pediatrician made sure to mention at their last visit. She suggests that perhaps Alexis should try to only eat half of her afternoon snack, and drink as much water as she could (and no juice).

Juliet arrives at work right on time, taking the stairs up to her fifth-floor office. At 10:00am she retrieves a non-fat, sugar-free yogurt from the breakroom fridge, and savors it at her desk for the next half-hour, drinking plenty of water. From time to time she stretches her legs under her desk, using a small rubber exercise ball purchased just for that purpose.

At lunch time she is asked to go out to lunch with her boss and a few colleagues, and she agrees. She orders a side salad and cup of low-sodium minestrone soup, then splurges on a half-piece of cake ordered by a male coworker. She thinks about how she will need to do an extra half-hour during her afternoon workout.

She skips her afternoon low-fat, low-sugar energy bar, and instead drinks a cup of black coffee. She picks up the kids from after-school activities, congratulating her daughter when she discovers half the peanut butter crackers remain uneaten. She gets them settled on their homework, and when her husband comes home she takes the opportunity to go for another run. She runs harder than usual, thinking of the cake during lunch.

She showers again, and starts to prepare boneless, skinless chicken breasts for dinner. She takes a few calls from her family, trying to convince her sister that her diabetes is curable if she loses enough weight. “I’m from the same family as you, sis, and I don’t have diabetes — or the extra weight you have, for that matter.” By the time she’s done talking, the vegetables have been steamed and seasoned with a low-sodium all-purpose seasoning. She mashes cauliflower and seasons it, then calls in the family.

Juliet savors every bite of her dinner slowly, fighting back her gnawing hunger. She suggests that Alexis do the same, “You might find you stop being hungry sooner, sweetie!” Her husband adds a few slices of cheese to his vegetables, and some canned gravy to his meat. She disallows this for the children.

There is no dessert in the house, so everyone is eventually tucked into bed with a glass of water. When Alexis says she’s still hungry, Juliet replies, “You only think you’re hungry, sweetie. Just keep sipping on that water, you’ll be fine.” Juliet shuts their lights and leaves their doors open a crack, pleased as she imagines the praise she and her daughter’s reduced waistline will receive at their next visit to the pediatrician.

She joins her husband for their evening movie, cuddling close. Her husband remarks that the lead starlet’s butt can’t hold a candle to hers, and they joke about how the starlet’s behind jiggles in particular scenes. They make separate bowls of popcorn: his regular butter and salt, hers plain with pepper. They fool around before bed, and fall asleep sated.

_____

Now, based on the short description above, choose one of the following. First pick on your gut, your base perceptions that may be greatly influenced by what you were taught growing up, and the current media-saturated culture in which we live. Then pick your real answer, and let me know in the comments what you chose.

Juliet is:

A: Admirable and hard-working, a diligent mother, wife, and sister.

B: Healthy, but could stand to spend more time with her family. But at least she’s trying to make it work for her, and is probably reasonably afraid of diabetes if it runs in her family.

C: Only admirable in the current context of our culture, but is actually morally neutral based on the description.

D: Seems to impose on her daughter way too much. What’s up with that? She shouldn’t be so self-absorbed, projecting her body paranoia on her child.

E: None of the above (enlighten us!)

Misdiagnosis of Cushing’s Blamed on Fat

by bigliberty

I’m not sure if anyone in the Fatosphere has brought this up before, but I was watching episodes of TLC’s Mystery Diagnosis for the first time, and came across an episode where a woman with Cushings is ignored for years, because one of the symptoms of Cushings is rapid weight gain. And guess what the various doctors she saw said when she complained about the weight gain? Yup — “eat less and move more.” And when she did, eating a starvation level of calories and exercising with personal trainer? “Well, I bet if we locked you in a closet and gave you only water, you’d lose weight.” (!!!)

Her story begins at about 6:37, and goes into the next part, which I included.

No Fat People in Concentration Camps

by bigliberty

Oh, how many times us fat activists have seen trotted out this tired platitude:

“Don’t you know, there were no fat people in concentration camps?”

It’s a brilliantly ignorant phrase, at once loaded with misconceptions about fat and about the nature of concentration camps, all while insulting the experience of those who actually had to survive, I dunno, war and genocide and stuff.

As such, I think it’s beneath us to really take it on in a serious manner, debunk, and explain where the misconceptions have taken root. Really, it’s about as well-thought out as the playground curse, “Well you wouldn’t be so fat if you were dead, fatty!” …Well, no kidding. ‘Cuz I’d be dead. Which means eventually a skeleton. Which has no fat.

Usually it’s only the supremely ignorant, or the supremely hateful, who would dare unleash the “no fat people in concentration camps” platitude. A Temporary Lapse of Reason recently posted on a New Zealand doctor who apparently teaches this platitude to his students. (I wonder, does he ever have any students who are fresh from a course on the human metabolism take him to task when he brings this up?)

I think it’s important at this point to remember one important thing, that’s often lost on the non-academic media: there are crackpots, who are so entrenched in some kind of bias that it skews their whole perception of their research and academic goals, all throughout academia. I come from a background of math and physics. At one point in time I was very interested in theoretical physics, and learned a lot of various theoretical physicists (I’m still quite interested, though I come from a different field at this point — complexity theory). I discovered that there was a different theory for the universe for every day of the week, color of the rainbow, flavor of ice cream, and so forth. And that many very serious, life-long academics, were entrenched in theories which, on their face, were a house of cards.

In mathematics it is the same way, though you’d think it would be the field least yielding to crackpots (and it might very well be, but that still doesn’t mean it is entirely free of them). There are many mathematicians so entrenched in expressing ideas using one particular branch of mathematics, that when they encounter these ideas more cleanly and intuitively expressed via different methods, they reject the different methodology all together. These people, who have to prove thousands of statements, using mathematical logic, before they are granted a PhD, can entertain irrational impulses in their professional lives.

Imagine then, a field that is much less precise, much more opaque, much more influenced by politics (and vice versa), much less known than mathematics and physics. It would stand to reason that there would be many more wrong-headed and irrational life-long academics. That is, life-long academics from prestigious places who cling to irrational ideas and theories, because they can bear to think out of the tired, dusty box in which they learned and in which they’ve spent the better part of their life researching within? These people, even when encountering a preponderance of counterexamples to their claim, have the ability to weave in and out of rationality, at once making grandiose, easily disproven claims, and using the force of their dusty “experience” to lend credibility (this is a fallacy of logic called “argument from authority.”).

Getting back on topi, it’s therefore not important to debunk the heath claims made by this so-called doctor — we’ve done it handily, many times before. And, quite frankly, he’s a crackpot if he would ever state such irrational platitudes in the first place. His hate, sense of superiority, and disgust is showing, worn proudly on his sleeve. Through the lens of his hate and bias, his statements might make some kind of sense (and certainly do to the writer of the article, who sadly takes him seriously). But without that lens? Even on their face, to someone who knows nothing about the science of the human metabolism and genetics, they’re utterly ridiculous.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. Sometimes, insulated by the Fatosphere, we forgot what the average politician likely believes about fat people.

Quoted from A Temporary Lapse of Reason:

But Dr BirkBeck’s desire to take ‘further steps’, to ‘make people realize’, shame people, legislate their bodies, medicate, mutilate, or otherwise impel people into his ideal of what is good for them is FAR from uncommon. And it all stems from the root of moral superiority that says ‘I know what’s best for you’.

This is such an important distinction to make. As it stands, if you are a fat person in New Zealand, Dr Birkbeck’s words are just words. If you don’t like him, he doesn’t have to be your doctor. However, his words can become dangerous if it is possible to legislate one’s health (I’m not sure if this is currently the case in NZ).

Then all it takes is for one demagogue-doctor to sway some committee comprised of the majority party in power, and suddenly a fat person finds that they are disallowed from obtaining health insurance, or penalized/taxed for their fat, or given an ultimatum to lose weight or be financially penalized at tax time, etc. The legislature can even exonerate itself in the eyes of the non-fat and self-loathing fat (the majority of voters, to be sure) by claiming the extra money from the fatties will be going towards “programs” to “help them” lose the required weight.

Of course, we all know such programs don’t work in the long term (or even short term, looking at some examples from the UK), and what you’ll end up with is a fat tax and useless programs set up to torture fat people. Fat people will be tortured (and possibly mutilated via ‘discounted’ WLS, when the Bunsen Burner weight loss programs don’t work), and will have to foot the bill for their torture.

Dr. Birkbeck, I recognize your methodology, but it hasn’t been in practice for about 80 years or so…

This is another reason why it is vital to make sure that no body of people has the power to legislate your health, and at the very least you have the option to opt-out without financial penalties, the non-payment which could land you in prison. It should never get to the point where some people are fined or otherwise for simply existing as they are. And fat people, by virtue of their existence, would be fined/taxed by a government if any government believed it would be popular to do so. As long as they can get the votes they mean and bring in more revenue, what do they care?

Given our current culture’s entirely irrational views on health, it would be the worst possible thing to get government involved in the legislation of health. It would take a single Dr. Birkbeck to sway some subcommittee regulating the distribution of healthcare that cutting fat people out of the system, and making them pay for it besides, would be a boon to their balance sheet, and it’s all over.

It’s vital to preserve competition in the field of healthcare, just as competition is a boon to any industry. That way people can still vote with their dollars on a much more grassroots, individual manner, that could have the power to see fail one healthcare company overnight, and rise a new, better company in the morning. Actual voting will not give an individual this kind of power over their healthcare, not by far. An individual vote for a politician is so far displaced from the choices those politicians might make about healthcare, there’s no way effective change could occur in the time it would need to occur. The idea that voting for a particular politician will give you more power over your own healthcare than currently exists, is a fantasy, and a dangerous one.

The last thing I, as a fat activist want, is the current fatphobic culture to have the majority vote over my private health matters and, as a consequence, fundamental way of life (since I would be forced to become a marionette to their anti-scientific whims by virtue of my fat). What we have in the US now, and in every other country that hasn’t adopted a government-run healthcare monopoly, is not ideal. There should be far less regulations, restrictions, and tax fiddle-faddling with healthcare as it stands, so that the average person might have a chance of actually affording basic care out-of-pocket (like most people can for auto-insurance).

But that’s not the point. As many prominent economists have noted, it is nearly always a worse idea to move away from greater competition than towards. When you adopt a planned economy, you become a planned citizen. And a planned fat person, in our current culture, and certainly as well detailed by the words of Dr. Birkbeck, is a nonexistent fat person.

The Fat-Hate Troll in the Livingroom

by bigliberty

I’m writing this in response to a heartbreaking post on RandomQuorum. I was just going to leave a comment, but really, this hits too close to home for me to be able to leave a comment of any kind of reasonable length.

As background, the author of the post is going through a tough time in her marriage. She married long before her discovery of FA and body positivity, when she was still in dieting-mode, at war with her body. Naturally, negative comments from her husband about her weight were, before FA, likely met with agreement and an extra tablespoon of self-loathing and dieting incentive. Now, after FA, she realizes them for what they really are: the words of a troll.

Yesterday she made the first post on the subject of this particular tough spot in her marriage, to which she had several replies, including a real live troll.

I did manage to catch a troll though! And it’s lucky I didn’t find their comment until this morning, because today I find it kind of amusing/ironic, but yesterday it probably would have made me homicidal.

My dear troll Vicky said: [insert inane troll platitudes here]

After which she and her husband sat down and had a talk about what was concerning her (good for you, by the way — it’s best to air your concerns as they come up, or else they would just fester and make you feel worse). In the description of her conversation, she many times compares her husband’s words to the words of the Vicky-troll. I’m not sure if she was intentionally showing how similar they were, but after reading the post I came away with one very clear impression: her husband is The Fat-Hate Troll in the Livingroom.

Us bloggers know how annoying trolls can be. It’s annoying enough when they junk up your spam box, or even ecstatically get a bit of hate through your filters. Sometimes the words of trolls can rankle for a long time after they’re said, in an almost irrationally important way — like the first “Moo!” from a schoolyard bully, or that time mom clucked when you were weighed at the doctor’s. Now imagine the fat-hate troll — the one who really doesn’t care about you as a healthy person and instead wants you to change your body for their shallow, visual/sexual benefit — in your livingroom. Permanently. There, with you always, to waggle their fingers at your — gasp, SECOND Hershey kiss of the day, and it’s only 7pm??! — and then scurry off to post vitriol on My Fatt Spouse (intentionally mispelled. No search candy for you!).

All I have to say is that the author of the post linked above is some kind of brave I never was, when I had to deal with The Fat-Hate Troll in the Livingroom. When my eff-wad ex said I needed to “lose 50 pounds” if he was going to marry me? — I curled up and cried on my side of the bed, then started starving myself (what else could I do to lose weight? I had already dieted myself down to well below my setpoint). When my self-loathing dad’s “Christmas present” one year was to, on Christmas morning, explain to my brother and I how drinking enough water will make us skinny and promptly stuck us on diets (he was starving himself at the time) — I internalized it, realizing what he wanted more than a talented, sweet, generous, loving daughter, was a skinny one. A few years later I got the praise from him that I wanted, when starvation caused my spine to rise out of my flesh, like a mountain range (and not when I had won third place in the debate competition, that is).

The most dangerous fat-hate troll is The Fat-Hate Troll in the Livingroom. There, he can live where all trolls want to be — inside your head, pushing your buttons, getting you to do what they want you to do, all the time. What kind of love would have you abuse your body? If it’s ignorance which drives his call for you to diet, I ask: has he not watched you diet umpteen times before, and fail? Has he not seen what it has done to your mental and physical health? And, if he’s not really concerned with health but instead with looks, isn’t that fact something that should greatly concern you?

Saying that the world treats fatter people more harshly is a coward’s argument (and is what my dad used, when he would flog himself yet again with some new diet). The world ain’t gentle, and it ain’t fair. But cowering in the corner won’t make the world treat you any better, it will just attract the bullies who feed off cowering conformists. Maybe what’s bothering your husband is that you are no longer cowering in the corner, and he feels like he doesn’t have as much control over you as he used to. Back when you were preoccupied with being thinner, he didn’t have to care so much about your character, individuality, and thinking of you as an attractive woman outside the media-condoned box (which can take some real bravery on the part of many men and women alike). All he had to do was crack that whip — unleash a fat-negative comment — and you were back where he wanted you to be, and he didn’t have to do anything at all.

When it comes down to it, I’m so sorry to say, his arguments are completely self-centered. He’s not even pretending to be concerned about your health. And that is something that might be the real flaw, not his fat-hating attitude. He’s asking you to abuse your body so that he can find you more sexually interesting, and can cart you around like a trophy in public (or, at least, not have to feel “ashamed” of you). This is a real problem.This is not something that can be fixed by convincing him fat isn’t bad, or that you can’t be thin. I’m not sure any of that really matters to him. He’s not treating you like you’re his wife — he’s treating you like you’re his favorite shirt. Can’t let it get too faded or misshapen or wrinkled, what will people think?

The idea that he’s already foisting upon you the necessity of losing post-baby weight kills me, and really drives home his objectification of you.

I’m sorry to say, but the author’s husband and Vicky-troll and two sides of the same coin. And yes, marriage is not something you just discard. Not without a fight. And you are fighting, and really trying to make it work. But is he honestly doing the same for you? Is he even trying to understand where you’re coming from? Or is he so afraid that he’s going to lose whatever control he has over you (which is symbolized by his irrational fear that you’re just going to “keep getting fatter” and Eat the World and so forth), that he, like my eff-wad ex or my dad, will do anything to put you back in that place where your self-abuse can stroke their egos, can exonerate them from ever really thinking or caring about you, and can justify their own deep-rooted bigotry?

Not all husbands need to be indoctrinated in FA not to fat-hate. My husband grew up in the same fat-hating culture as everyone else, and his sexual preference is generally not women as fat as I am (and wasn’t before he met me). We found out that’s just because of what he had been exposed to, and in fact he was attracted to me and loved me for who I was, fat or thin. When it comes down to it, this isn’t really about fat. This is about control and objectification. And his desire to control you, and his objectification and de-humanization of you won’t necessarily be changed by him accepting your fat (though for that same reason I doubt, quite honestly, that he ever would accept your fat).

A Fat Dream

by bigliberty

I had a dream last night that the very fat, the moderately fat, the slightly fat, the average-sized, the thin, and the very thin were intermingling without thought to body weight. Some of the very fat were the lovers of the average-sized, and the very thin with the moderately fat, and so on and so forth. And they were all, ultimately, friends.

When I walked through the crowd of All Sizes, I didn’t wonder at the size of any one, it was merely a part of how their body was described, like their hair color, or height, and had no connection to their worth as a person.

To walk amongst those of All Sizes and have no thought to what others might perceive as the moral value in being any one of those particular sizes, was a kind of freedom I’ve never known.

I’d like to get back to that feeling. I’d like to feel it permanently. I would like for you to feel it permanently.

I had a fat dream last night. A dream where people, of All Sizes, were the sum of what counted: their experiences, their character, their own dreams…

…and not a timeline of numbers on the scale.