I’m watching  a television show in which a thin, stereotypically “beautiful” woman is going through a break up and responding by eating huge spoonfuls of ice cream, then spraying whipped topping directly into her mouth from the can.  It’s time to play one of my favorite games – what if this was a fat woman?

Imagine a fat woman eating huge spoonfuls of ice cream punctuated with sprays of whipped topping directly from the can into her mouth.  If you answered that she would be the subject of shame, stigma, humiliation and ridicule, give yourself 20 points.  In fact, many of us have had our pictures photoshopped to look just like this in an attempt to ridicule us.

To review, for thin actresses these behaviors can be considered adorable, but for fat women the exact same behaviors are supposedly irresponsible, causing diseases that we “deserve”, and costing ALL THE TAX DOLLARS!  justified by stereotypes and the obesity hysteria that leads to poor reporting,   gross misuses of science, and “everybody knows” trumping actual evidence.  The fact that this happens isn’t news, but it’s still bullshit every damn time.

So what behaviors should we condone and for which people?

Trick question!!  The answer isn’t to stop “condoning” these behaviors in thin women or to start “condoning” them in fat women.  The answer is for each of us to get out of the condoning business altogether and mind our own damn business.  Each of us has the right to punch, but that right ends at the tip of someone else’s nose.  Probably not coincidentally our right to judge others works exactly the same way.  We are allowed to have all kinds of opinions, but nobody else has an obligation to care how we think they should live their lives. If we start thinking that people do have such an obligation, we soon find that this slope is just too slippery –  whose behavior do we get to choose and who gets to choose our behavior for us?  (I note that people who insist that they should get to tell me how to live are rarely interested in receiving the same treatment from someone else.)

While we’re at it, we could stop making assumptions.  Like not assuming that the way someone is eating tonight out at dinner is the way that they eat all the time. Like not assuming that we can look at someone and know what they eat. Like not assuming that it’s any of our business what people eat or how they look, ever.  Let’s stop creating a culture of guilt and shame around food, and we can also stop creating a culture of guilt and shame around bodies, mind our own business, make our own choices, and maybe live happier ever after.

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What do member fees support?  Between e-mails and Facebook private messages I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I also do my speaking gigs on a sliding scale so that any group that wants me to speak can afford it, and try to make as many things as possible pay-what-you-can. This is work that is incredibly important to me and I am very grateful to be able to do it, and the only way I can is because I do this full-time.  I get paid for some of my speaking and writing, but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

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So I’ve decided to do another marathon, specifically the LA marathon in 2015. The world’s best best friend ever, Kelrick, has agreed to do it with me again.  There are a lot of reasons that Team Never Again has decided to become team One More Time but that’s another blog post. For now what I know for sure is that last time I focused on just finishing and not getting injured.   This time I’ll be focusing a bit more on speed, and run/walking instead of walking.  I’m thinking about making Sundays “marathon update day” on the blog, we’ll see how it goes.  If you have a preference (anywhere from “I love marathon updates, totes do it!”  to “I don’t care about your marathon bullshit”) please feel free to leave it in the comments.

Before someone gets confused, this is not about the good fatty bad fatty dichotomy, and the good fatty bad fatty dichotomy needs to die.  My choice to do a marathon is an expression of my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or perhaps more honestly the pursuit of medals), it’s not a justification for those rights. Absolutely no justification is necessary because our civil rights aren’t size, or health, or healthy habit dependent by any definition (and let’s be clear as well that this is about me wanting a challenge, not about health).  It would be no more or less laudable if I chose to do the LA marathon, or watch a marathon of every Star Trek episode that ever aired, or knit a tree cozy out of plarn.

When Kel, who is both my Best Friend and, for all intents and purposes, my adopted brother told our mom that we’d decided to do another marathon, she sent the following e-mail to both of us:

Subject:  Where have I failed you as a parent?

I thought I raised you better than that – Woe is me, to have failed so miserably………………

Have I not always taught you “No pain, YEAH!” Another marathon, REALLY?

Love you both and will be here for you always

My mom is awesome and hilarious and with Mother’s Day coming up I want to take this chance to thank her publicly for all of the support she’s given and continues to give me.  One of the things I do in my training is ritual around the music that I listen to.  I always listen to the same songs at the beginning, middle and end of each training session.  In honor of my mom, I’m beginning each session for this marathon with “Mama Told Me Not To Come.” And because I enjoy messing with song lyrics, I’ve re-written the lyrics to be a bit more relevant to the marathon experience.  (Of course any blog readers who are also singers and who feel inspired are very welcome to make a video or audio track and put it in the comments!) Either way, consider wishing me luck as I once again hit the streets with a marathon finish line looming!

Got some bodyglide on your hoo hoo?
Bib pinned to your T?
What’s all these crazy questions they’re askin’ me?
This is the earliest wake up that could ever be
Glad the sun’s not up ’cause I don’t wanna see

Mama told me not to run
Mama told me not to run
“That ain’t the way to have fun, no”

Drank way too much water, now I really have to pee
Twenty minute wait for a port-o-potty at mile three
And that aid station at mile ten, is all out of Gatorade
Less than halfway through, and it’s 90 in the shade

Mama told me not to run
Mama told me not to run
“That ain’t the way to have fun, hon”
“That ain’t the way to have fun, hon”

Elites already finished, they just run so frickin’ fast
I can’t believe there’s more hills, this is so kicking my ass
Finish line seems so far, I’m hungry, tired and sore
Once this race is over – I don’t wanna run no more

Mama told me not to run
Mama told me not to run
She said, “That ain’t the way to have fun, hon”
“That ain’t the way to have fun, no”

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If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

This has been coming up a lot lately so I thought I would discuss it again today.  Let’s start here:  the definition of oppression is “the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner; to burden with cruel or unjust impositions or restraints”.

The simplest explanation I can give is that as long as my government is waging a war against me (the War on Obesity) a war in which they are actively trying to involve everyone from employers to restaurants to healthcare providers and insurance companies in my eradication, against my will  – and as long as there are people who assert that we should all hope for a world where people who look like me don’t exist because things might be cheaper – I will assert that I am the victim of oppression.  I think that society’s attempt to police my body and rid the earth of me and everyone who looks like me, including but not limited to insisting that we risk our lives trying to become not fat, constitutes the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel and unjust manner. I don’t think you can say, “I want a world where no fat people exist” in a non-oppressive manner.

But let’s look at some other examples:

This article discusses workplace weight discrimination (which is legal almost everywhere) -trigger warning for possible victim blaming language

Here is a more scholarly article about workplace weight bias and wage discrimination

Professors who sit on admissions committees feel comfortable tweeting to the world that fat people can’t complete PhD’s based on their stereotypes of our eating habits.

If we work at Whole Foods, we wouldn’t get the same benefits package as my thin co-workers. Companies like Michelin  and CVS would be happy to charge health insurance penalties based on how I look.  No amount of healthy behaviors or metabolic health could get me the same benefits (which would still be massively problematic), I have to be thin, despite that fact that not a single study has ever achieved long term weight loss for more than a tiny fraction of people.  This idea of rewarding thin employees and punishing fat employees at the workplace (aptly nicknamed “Carrot and Stick” benefits) is gaining popularity.

Studies show that 24% of nurses said that they are “repulsed” by fat people. More than half of the 620 primary care doctors questioned described obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and unlikely to comply with treatment.”

Access to medical care is a massive issue.  I’ve personally had doctors refuse to set my broken toe unless i agreed to go to a class about weight loss surgery, tell me that my strep throat is due to my weight (and admit the lie when confronted, but defend that no matter what was wrong with me I would feel better if I lost weight), try to lie to me about my blood pressure to scare me into weight loss (and try to justify the lie as “for my own good” when confronted).  I’ve been prescribed weight loss for anemia, a dislocated shoulder, and strep throat, and I’ve had experimental medicine practiced on me without informed consent or permission and so have most fat people.

I get so much hate mail for being public about loving my body and rejecting diet culture that I created a separate website for it.

We can get almost 400,000 negative messages about our bodies every year.

As a fat woman people feel comfortable making comments about what I eat, mooing at me out of cars, throwing eggs at me while I exercise, blaming me for everything from global warming to world hunger with absolutely no proof, and being unspeakably rude.

Behaviors that are considered unhealthy for thin people are encouraged for me.

People argue that I deserve to be shamed and ridiculed because my body proves that I’m not being personally responsible.

We have to be concerned that professionals who work with us will use their position to enforce their prejudices against us.

People who look like me are not allowed to have any success, except weight loss, without the ridiculous accusation that we are promoting obesity. This creates a situation where people try to make sure that I neither have role models who look like me, nor am I a role model to others.

People posit that because we are fat we are not capable of making decisions for myself  and, if not told exactly what to eat, will simply binge on Twinkies and call it healthy eating. Not to mention the fact what we eat is none of anyone’s business and that people who have no desire to have their eating behaviors policed feel justified in suggesting that mine should be policed because of how I look.

We are told that because we are fat we’re not a credible witness to OUR OWN experience and that other people know better than we do how we behave, what we think,  and what we truly want

Not to mention that studies funded by people who profit from selling weight loss that make ridiculous claims about fat people, from which they profit, are published as factual news

And again, even for fat people who want to try to sole oppression by giving our oppressors what they want, there is not a shred of evidence that any intervention will be successful at changing our weight long-term.

So yeah, these are my observations and they leave me to believe that fat people are being oppressed.  I’m not trying to say we are more or less oppressed than any other group.  I don’t believe in wasting time playing the Oppression Olympics. I believe in stepping up and getting involved which is why I do what I do.  I think the idea that oppression is too strong a word is one of the things that keeps us oppressed which is why I use it. That said, I don’t speak for all fat people, only myself.

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Charles Barkley is a paid spokesperson for Weight Watchers.  He is also paid to be a commentator on TNT’s  Inside the NBA.  He decided to let those two worlds collide when the panel was discussing an upcoming game with the San Antonio Spurs and co-host Kenny Smith felt compelled to ask  “what kind of women are in San Antonio?”

Apparently not wanting to let an inappropriate question fail to live up to it’s full potential, Barkley went on a fat shaming rant that the rest of the guys seemed to find absolutely hilarious:

Big old women down there…That’s a gold mine for Weight Watchers….Victoria’s definitely a secret. They can’t wear no Victoria’s Secret down there…they wear big old bloomers down there, ain’t nothing skimpy down in San Antonio.

and on and on. And on.  Four grown men paid to talk about sports using their airtime to make fun of women because of how we look.  Keep it classy guys.

This is not ok.  Making fun of women for their appearance is never ok, and it’s certainly not ok as part of a show that is supposed to be about basketball, especially in a show that has decided not to have any women on its panel.   TNT should be denouncing this and Weight Watchers should be denouncing this unless they want people to think that they encourage their spokespeople to promote their product in this way (which, on second thought, might be the case.)

Meanwhile, a slew of commenters indignantly pointed out that what Charles said was wrong because not all women from San Antonio are fat. I’m sure that is true, but I don’t think it’s the best argument against Barkley’s hateful rant.  I think it would be cool if, instead of responding to fat shaming with “I’m not fat!” the response was “Fat shaming is not ok!”  or “Shaming women based on how we look is never ok.” rather than suggesting that it’s cool to shame women who look a certain way, as long as you’re clear that it doesn’t apply women who don’t look like that.

This whole thing, top to bottom, is bullshit and it never should have happened, and as far as I’m concerned it shouldn’t go without comment:

Activism Opportunity

Let TNT know what you think at tnt@turner.com

Let Weight Watchers know what you think.

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If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

A recent study by researchers at UCLA found that if girls had been called “too fat” by someone by age 10, they were more likely to be “obese” at age 19, and that the more people who told her she was “too fat” the more her chances of being “obese” increased.  The study included controlled for income, race, childhood weight and puberty age.

Full disclosure:  I reference A. Janet Tomiyama’s work often – including her work with Traci Mann –   I have tremendous respect for both of them as researchers doing great solid work in an area that is really controversial, and I’ve even briefly corresponded with Janet about a piece I wrote about her work for iVillage.

The study isn’t really what I want to talk about though, what I want to talk about are the reactions to this study and the hypotheses that people are drawing from it.  As I read articles about this around the internet the most common idea I’ve heard is that when girls are called “too fat” they probably resort to “emotional overeating” or “stress eating” and that leads to weight gain.

I’d like to suggest another hypothesis.  I think when girls are called “too fat” they resort to dieting (often at the recommendation of authority figures including their parents, teachers, doctors etc.) and that leads to them to gain weight.

Research from the University of Minnesota found that none of the behaviors being used by adolescents for weight-control purposes predicted weight loss, but they did predict significant weight gain.

Earlier research by Tomiyama and Mann found that most adults regain the weight they lost and many (from one to two thirds) gain back more than they lost.

We know that the most likely outcome of intentional weight loss interventions (whether they are called a diet, a lifestyle change etc.) in adults is weight regain – often more than what the person lost – and we have no reason to believe that dieting works better for kids.

So maybe the issue isn’t so much about trying to keep girls from “emotional overeating” (a questionable concept which is a subject for a whole other blog) but trying to keep them from dieting – which is to say trying to keep them from feeding their bodies less food than they need to survive (while those bodies are still developing, let’s not forget) in an effort to manipulate their body size.

I’ve also seen a lot of people using this as support for the idea of banning the use of the world “fat”. I vehemently disagree with this strategy.  The issue I see here is that, however well meaning, saying that we shouldn’t call kids fat suggests that being fat is such a terrible thing that we shouldn’t utter the word out loud. But fat kids actually exist, so making fat kids into Voldemort by making fat the “physical descriptor that must not be named” actually further shames and stigmatizes them, whether we call them fat or not.

Girls (and kids of all gender identities) deserve to live in a world that encourages them to love and appreciate their bodies and gives them the information and access to make choices about caring for those bodies, and I think a great first step would be to end body shaming and negative body talk and celebrate body diversity.

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If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

May 6 is International No Diet Day!  In honor of INDD I took some time today to reflect on the many, many years I wasted dieting and came up with 10 reasons that I’ll never diet again – and let me clarify that my definition of dieting is any attempt to use eating and exercise to manipulate my body size. Let me also clarify that I am only speaking for myself here – your mileage may vary.

1.  I refuse to manipulate my body size to try to conform to a social stereotype of beauty.

2.  I refuse to attempt to manipulate my body size to try to solve social stigma, bullying or oppression.  The cure for bullying, social stigma and oppression is not weight loss, it’s ending bullying, social stigma, and oppression.  The problem is not my body, it’s people who bully, stigmatize and oppress me because of my body size.

3.  Of course health is not a guarantee, an obligation or a barometer of worthiness – we each get to choose how highly we prioritize our health and the path that we want to take to get there.  For me it’s important to know that research suggests that habits are a much better indicator of future health than body size.

4. There is not a single study of any method of intentional weight loss (whether you call it dieting, lifestyle change or something else)  has shown it to be successful for more than a tiny fraction of people.  Even the diet companies’ own studies show that they don’t work.

5.  Even if I managed to be part of the tiny percentage of people who succeed at long term weight loss, there is not a single study that shows that it would make me healthier, in fact, the little research that exists suggests that it wouldn’t

6.  During the time that I was attempting intentional weight loss my body size would decrease in the short term, then increase over time no matter how strict I kept to my habits (which, it turned out, is exactly what the research said would happen.)  I wasn’t able to stabilize my body size until I started practicing Health at Every Size.

7.  During the time that I was attempting intentional weight loss I had unhealthy relationships with food, exercise and my body.  A focus on appreciating my body and supporting it through healthy habits has lead to my having healthy relationships with food, exercise, and my body.

8.  Three words:  Uncontrolled Anal Seepage.  And a whole bunch of things that I was told were “healthy” as a dieter, often by doctors, that don’t make any damn sense

9.  I don’t want my money to be part of the over 60 billion dollars that we spend every year on the diet industry – an industry that has lost so many deceptive trade practice lawsuits that they are actually required to remind us that their product doesn’t actually work every time they advertise it.  I think that there are a lot better things we could buy for 60 billion dollars.

10.  Diets don’t work – I definitely gave dieting the old college try and it didn’t make me thinner, healthier, happier, or anything other than miserable.  I think I’m right, but even if I’m wrong I choose Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size.

Happy No Diet Day!

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Gabourey Sidibe recently gave a beautiful speech on confidence:

“I hate that [being asked about the source of her confidence] I always wonder if that’s the first thing they ask Rihanna when they meet her. ‘RiRi! How are you so confident?’ Nope. No. No. But me? They ask me with that same incredulous disbelief every single time. ‘You seem so confident! How is that?'”

“Gabourey, how are you so confident?” It’s not easy. It’s hard to get dressed up for award shows and red carpets when I know I will be made fun of because of my weight. There’s always a big chance if I wear purple, I will be compared to Barney. If I wear white, a frozen turkey. And if I wear red, that picture of Kool-Aid that says, “Oh, yeah!” Twitter will blow up with nasty comments about how the recent earthquake was caused by me running to a hot dog cart or something. And “Diet or Die?” [She gives the finger to that] This is what I deal with every time I put on a dress. This is what I deal with every time someone takes a picture of me. Sometimes when I’m being interviewed by a fashion reporter, I can see it in her eyes, “How is she getting away with this? Why is she so confident? How does she deal with that body? Oh my God, I’m going to catch fat!”

How are you so confident?” “I’m an asshole!” Okay? It’s my good time, and my good life, despite what you think of me. I live my life, because I dare. I dare to show up when everyone else might hide their faces and hide their bodies in shame. I show up because I’m an asshole, and I want to have a good time. And my mother and my father love me. They wanted the best life for me, and they didn’t know how to verbalize it. And I get it. I really do. They were better parents to me than they had themselves. I’m grateful to them, and to my fifth grade class, because if they hadn’t made me cry, I wouldn’t be able to cry on cue now. [Dabs tears] If I hadn’t been told I was garbage, I wouldn’t have learned how to show people I’m talented. And if everyone had always laughed at my jokes, I wouldn’t have figured out how to be so funny. If they hadn’t told me I was ugly, I never would have searched for my beauty. And if they hadn’t tried to break me down, I wouldn’t know that I’m unbreakable. [Dabs tears] So when you ask me how I’m so confident, I know what you’re really asking me: how could someone like me be confident? Go ask Rihanna, asshole!

In addition to desperately wanting a “Go ask Rihanna, asshole” t-shirt, I cried and cheered when I read the speech.  I’m also struck at how much this shouldn’t have happened.  She shouldn’t have had to learn skills as a response to stigma, bullying and oppression.  I’m happy that she made the best of a bad situation but let’s make sure that we call bullshit on anyone who is suggesting that the confident, talented, fat woman ends justify the bullying means.

Discussions about how difficult it must be to live in a fat body are often really about talking about how difficult it is to live in a world where you are subjected to tons of stigma, bullying and oppression because you live in a fat body.  I’ve certainly suffered because I’m obese, but not because of my obesity.

Then I made the greatest of all internet mistakes – I read the comments (feel free to skip the indented parts to save your rage points)

She doesn’t have to lose a truckload. I just want her to take care of herself physically as well as she does emotionally. ~Shannon N

Gabby I can admire you for having the ability to have self-confidence about who you are but from someone who has had a weight problem please try to get some of that weight off. ~Adrienne

At such a young age age, this girls life expectancy I threatened by high bloodpressure,stroke,diabetes,and heart disease. She needs help. ~Scot Solomon

This is textbook concern trolling. The idea that a fat person needs medical advice from random strangers no matter how non sequitur a discussion of our health might be, or how unqualified the commenter is to give such advice. It doesn’t matter what the fat person is talking about, or what they’ve accomplished to get in the news, random people will feel the need to dole out health judgment and advice in the comments.  I don’t know how I’ve not become desensitized, but I’m still shocked at the over-exaggerated sense of self-importance that could lead to someone typing these things.  Or the unmitigated prejudice that allows people to believe that they they can look at somebody’s body size and know how much they “take care of themselves.”   I think that these people are running on prejudice over facts but even if they were right, Gabourey Sidibe is in the news for giving an amazing speech, why does that make strangers think that they should chime in about her health?

It seems that fat people aren’t allowed to succeed at anything, except weight loss, without being concern trolled about our health.  Sadly we can’t stop the bullshit fairy from posting in every comment section, but we can see this for what it is – Pure unadulterated bullshit.  I don’t think for a minute that this is about our health – I think it’s about people wanting to feel powerful and using fat people to do that.  To paraphrase Marilyn Wann, the only thing you can tell from someone’s body size is what size they are and what preconceived notions, stereotypes and prejudice you have about people that size.  Similarly, the only thing that you can tell from a concern trolling comment, is that the commenter is a concern troll.

Like my blog?   Here’s more of my stuff!

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If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

I get lots of questions from parents asking how to help their kids have a positive body image and high self-esteem, and I get questions from people asking about how to help friend with body image and food issues.

I keep thinking of the flight attendants and their pre-flight safety speech – “put on your oxygen mask before you help your travel companion with theirs”.  Because if you can’t breathe, you’re not in a position to help anyone else.

I think it’s the same with self-esteem and body image issues,  and I think that there are two really good places to start:

Realize what’s happening

I think that the way to combat the subconscious programming that happens when hundreds of thousands of images are coming at us all the time is with intentional consciousness. For me it was about becoming very clear that this standard of beauty is arbitrary and that the people who are pushing it are generally using it to make me feel bad about myself as a way to convince me to buy their product.  I think it was my brilliant friend CJ Legare who I first heard put it this way:  They are trying to take our self-esteem from us and sell it back at a profit.  Just say know – know that horrible body image isn’t an accident, it’s the result of a highly profitable marketing campaign.  Know that the machine that oppresses us runs on our time and money and energy and so we can make it stop by taking away the fuel.

End Negative Body Talk Starting with Our Own Mouths

We can just stop.  Stop engaging in negative body talk of any kind – whether it’s overt (“she’s way too thin, she needs to eat a sandwich”, “at that weight she’s obviously not healthy”) or subtle and said as if it’s a compliment (“She has the perfect body… We hate her…”, “you lost weight- you look so good…”) We can choose never to put someone else down to make us feel better: Even if they’ll never know,  it still usually ends up effecting us negatively in the end.   Whether you are a  thin person who wants to create a body positive world, or a fat person who wants to live by the golden body rule, and not by the rule that the road to self-esteem is paved with blatant hypocrisy, or somewhere in between, may I suggest that talking badly about someone else’s body is just never the way to go.

While we are at it,   we can notice how we deal with our own bodies.  When we reject a culture of self-hate and put on our own body love mask first, we let other people know that loving their bodies is an option.  On the other side of the coin, every time we choose to talk out loud about how we hate this or that about our bodies (“I love my body, I just don’t like my…”), we add to the cacophony of body hate that already exists and we model body hate to other people, especially any young people who are listening. In talks that I give I’ve spoken to middle school girls who have told me that they’ve never, in their lives, met an adult  woman who wasn’t trying to lose weight, and that terrifies me for their prospects of them ever loving their bodies.  We can do better for ourselves and our kids.  If you’re struggling with how to say nice things about your body, try this!

There is one way that our metaphor of the flight mask breaks down:  On a flight we really can help someone put on their mask.  When it comes to body positivity it’s not so simple – we can give the option, and then people will make a choice for themselves. If we chose body positivity, then we show everyone around us that Body Positivity is an option that they can chose. If we put our own mask on first, then the person beside us may decide to put on theirs or they might not.  That’ s not our choice to make.  What’s important is that either way, we’re breathing.

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Sorry for the lapse in blogging, More Cabaret hosted our first all plus-size variety show in Los Angeles and it was awesome. Then we moved, that was less awesome but is more awesome now that we’re actually in the new house. Anyway, I’m back and I’ve missed you all!

I’m not sure why, but recently I’ve been receiving lots of e-mails and comments discussing one of the arguments that I often hear “against” the concept of Fat Acceptance.  Here are a couple examples from the e-mails I got (I tried to pick from each end of the spectrum):

 I just can’t get behind accepting fatness.  I like my body as it is, I don’t want to be fat and I will do whatever it takes not to be fat.

Fuck you fat acceptor fucks and your fat acceptance.  You will never make me be a fat fuck like you!

I used to think that people only made this argument to try to derail the actual conversation around Fat Acceptance, but just in case there are people who are really concerned about this, let me try to provide some clarity:

The Fat Acceptance/Size Acceptance movement is not a monolith and there are various perspectives as to what exactly FA/SA means.  Nobody speaks for the entire movement including me, we can each only speak to our own perspective.  That said, I’ve never heard anyone in any FA/SA space anywhere suggest that Fat Acceptance is about compulsory fatness for everyone.  I cannot imagine how people got the idea that if Fat Acceptance/Size Acceptance proponents get “our way” everyone will be forced to become fat.

This is about civil rights – life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and being treated with basic human respect – for people of all sizes.  With that in mind, here are some things that will and will not happen to people who disagree with me if I get “my way” as a Size Acceptance Activist:

Things that WILL NOT happen to those who disagree with FA/SA if I get “my way”:

• They will be forced to become fat
• They will be forced to give up their prejudices and stereotypes about fat people (don’t get me wrong, I think it would be just dandy if they did but I’m not trying to control people’s thoughts)

Things that WILL happen to those who disagree with FA/SA if I get “my way”:

• They will get to make choices for themselves and their own bodies, but not for others (For example:  public health will be about making options and information available to the public, not about making the individual’s body the public’s business)
• They will no longer be allowed to turn their personal prejudices into public policy (for example, they will have to stop waging wars that aim to eradicate everyone of a certain size.)

How about a short video to help answer the question – Does Fat Acceptance mean that everyone will be forced to become fat?

So to sum up, Fat Acceptance:  Yes to respecting body diversity, no to forced fatness.  I hope that clears some things up.

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Thought Catalog reprinted my response (sadly without the links) to the ridiculous “6 Questions I Have About Fat Activism” piece by Carolyn Hall. You can read my post about it here, but the short version is that the article didn’t so much ask questions as it ranted against fat acceptance using common fallacies (stereotyping, equating body size with behavior and eating disorders and heroin addiction, and generally misconstruing Fat Acceptance and Health at Every Size.)   Immediately the haters descended, as I knew that they would because I chose not to mitigate my tone to suit them.

This time they weren’t just upset that I stood up for Fat Acceptance, this time I was also accused of the heinous crime of being angry at being mistreated.  People chose to ignore the long piece I had written to complain about the way that I wrote it (aka Tone Policing) and “for my own good” tell me that I wouldn’t convince anyone to agree with me if I wrote that angrily, saying that I “squandered the opportunity” to respond without anger..  Meanwhile other commenters called me names and said that my committing suicide would be a favor to the world. Why on Earth would I be angry?

A couple of things.  First of all, let’s be clear that what these people are saying is that they want to both oppress fat people, and control our behavior around how we deal with that oppression. How entitled must one be to think that the people who they are oppressing owe them a smile and a kind word? We are not obligated to deal with bullying, stigma, and oppression in a way that makes our bullies, stigmatizers and oppressors comfortable.

Activism can have many different goals.  Sometimes activism is about politely asking people if they wouldn’t mind not oppressing us so much, and sometimes it’s about demanding better treatment.  Sometimes it’s just about standing up for ourselves and giving other fat people an opportunity to see that, thus demonstrating an option they may not have been aware of.

I’ve discussed this before and I’m going to re-post a bit of that here:

I am definitely very, very angry – I am, in fact, pissed.  There is no excuse for the way that fat people are treated by everyone from the government, to strangers that we meet – I’m angry that treatment happens. That doesn’t mean that I’m not happy – I’m happy about a great many things, and I’m perfectly capable of holding happiness for some things and anger for others at the same time.

Then there is the argument that if I was really at peace with myself, if I really loved my body I wouldn’t be so angry. I’m at peace with myself – I’m at war with a large part of the world, and not of my choosing.  Perhaps you’ve heard of the “war on obesity?”  That war is against me, and my body. That war tries to convince people (including me) that I, and everyone who looks like me, should be eradicated based on the shaky assumption that it will save society money (as if it’s ok to suggest that a group should be eradicated in order to save society some money.)

Not only am I at peace with myself, I’m at peace with myself despite the fact that I’m being given the message that the way I look is proof that I’m a bad person who deserves shame, stigma and oppression.  It is that peace that makes me want to fight for my body and my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness which includes the right to exist in a fat body without having the government wage war on me for how I look. It’s my love for my own body that drives the anger.

Let’s try this – Imagine that you have a best friend, and every single day that best friend is bullied, shamed, stigmatized.  If you become angry about the way your friend is treated, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a good relationship with your friend, it means that you are justifiably angry at their mistreatment.

I spend a lot of time smiling politely and asking people if they wouldn’t mind not oppressing me.  I don’t begrudge that and I don’t apologize for it – it’s effective, it gives people the benefit of the doubt (that perhaps they weren’t aware of the consequences of their actions,) and it’s reasonably pleasant.  That doesn’t mean that I’m not angry at a society that condones the behavior and the social constructs that support the behavior.  That anger is because I love my body, because I’m at peace with myself and I’d like some peace with the outside world. Nor does it mean that I give up my right to speak out about my oppression in any tone that suits me for any reason I want.

To try to characterized the anger of people who are oppressed as a sign of deficiency in their relationships with themselves is dangerously dis-empowering – it suggests that to prove that we are happy with ourselves we must not speak out against our mistreatment (not to mention the serious issues with having some obligation to prove anything to anyone about how we feel about ourselves in the first place.) That’s flat out wrong – it’s way out of line, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it makes me very, very angry.

I do want to take a second to thank the Rolls Not Troll Facebook community and everyone who took to the comments to defend, educate, and model Size Acceptance – y’all rock!

Like my blog?   Here’s more of my stuff!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details

Become a member: For just ten bucks a month you can help keep this blog ad-free, support the activism work I do, and get deals from cool businesses Click here for details

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

Fit Fatties Virtual Events:  If you’re looking for a fun movement challenge that was created to work just for you, you can check it out here.  There’s still time to get in on Early Bird Rates.

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