If you follow Bette Midler on Twitter, you know that she is known for biting political commentary against the current “administration.” But recently she used her feed to demonstrate exactly what not to do in the fight against donald:
Text: “Is it my imagination, or has Porky added some avoirdupois to his singularly unattractive form? #TrumpbeenSNACKING”
I’m not sure she could have made more mistakes here if she tried.
First of all, you can’t believe that fat-shaming is ok for some people but wrong for others. That’s just being a hypocrite. There is no way to fat-shame anyone without reinforcing the idea that it’s ok to fat-shame everyone. Every justification for fat-shaming donald (yes, even that one) is total bullshit.
Second, the answer to the white supremacy, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, misogyny, sexual assault, grifting, and all the other wrongs committed by donald and his regime is not to fat-shame them and call them names. Even if you agree with donald that name-calling is appropriate behavior, responding to this kind of horror and oppression with name-calling actually minimizes the offenses.
Adding in a bit of food-shaming to the fat-shaming won’t bother donald, but it can harm people of all sizes dealing with disordered eating and eating disorders.
Nobody is obligated to do activism, but if you’re going to be involved, please consider making a base-level commitment to not harm to marginalized groups through your work. The Divine Miss M needs to know better and do better.
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How disappointing to see!
I’d say she can get to the funny part any time now, but we all know that when it comes to fat jokes, there IS no funny part and there never will BE a funny part. Fat jokes aren’t told to make people laugh. They’re told to shame fat people into silent deference and condition thin people to see fat people’s pain as a source of amusement. It’s only by convention they’re even called jokes. I mean, come on, “Trump been snacking?” Why not just drop all pretense of being clever or original and skip straight to “eat a salad?”
Thanks for this. I tell people on FB every day that fat-shaming the Current Resident does no good for anybody, and a whole lot of harm.
It was gonna be comedic gold when he got in there, the superlative “fat cat” bloated greedy businessman leftists (I am a liberal democrat) have always like to lambast. It is a hold over from the days where a flabby white body meant ready cash. That changed over 100 years ago, we just like the “piggies at the trough” visual for our ‘to be socially shamed’ for having, taking, too much.
A fat body, or any degree of deemed excess fat is todays Scarlet Letter. A big red F for Fat Failure, Fuck up, Forlorn, Forget it.” It also reads FUCK YOU!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: fat bodies are a douchebag Rorschach Test. If they look at you and see a greedy corporate fat cat, “Amerifat” scooter redneck, or poor widdle charity case who shouldn’t be “burdened” with the adult autonomy to decide what to eat and how to work out, they’re a liberal douchebag, and if they look at you and see a welfare queen who sits around eating bon bons and having children on the taxpayer dime (as if you are not yourself a taxpayer, not that it would be okay to treat you like shit if you weren’t), a “beta cuck” who got fat from all those liberal vegan soybeans, or a poor widdle charity case who needs some Tough Love to teach you how to man up and fulfill your responsibilities of not being a fat person, they’re a conservative douchebag.
Either way, they’re a douchebag. If you look at a fat person and see the person they are, good or bad, without viewing them through a filter of stereotypes and social stratification… congratulations on not being a douchebag.
Pahahaha!
Dude, way not enough opportunities to congratulate…
Where is the updoot button?
I really wish more people understood this and also understood that if you criticize the fatphobia in the comment, you’re not defending/praising that shit head, but all too often I see that false equivalence. I couldn’t care less about him, but I do care about fat people. He’s not a piece of shit because he’s fat; he’s a piece of shit because he’s a bigot and terrible person.