Monthly Archives: August 2011

Personal Rant: WTF is wrong with some people?!?!

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Emotional

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As the title suggests, this is a personal rant about some truly stupid people in my life.

I know someone that is actually jealous of someone with terminal muscular dystrophy because he does not have to work. This is the kind of person who hates working and who sponges off of disability money from a back injury he got years ago. (It’s ALWAYS a back injury, doncha know?) He actually told this guy, another casual acquaintance, that he should be thankful he has this disease because he gets to live on disability (which pays crap wages and you’re better off working anyway.)

What…the…fuck?

This next, related rant is about one of my relatives. My sister is jealous of me because when I was going to community college, I got to go to school for free. She is jealous of me because she has to pay student loans and has to pay bills.

What she conveniently forgets is that I live on less than $2000 a year, with another relative who is seriously emotionally disturbed and who also lives on sub-poverty wages. I have no car, physical health problems, a mental handicap, no health insurance, and I DO pay bills-insurance, medical, transportation, and I was paying for my own prepaid phone for a while, which was eating into my finances big time. I have been working all this time despite not having a car and not having a car pretty much guarantees that I will never get any farther than I am now until I either get a car or move someplace with public transport. I also go to a community college in an area where poverty is rampant, there are next to no jobs, and the classes and activities offered by this college are extremely limited. It offers the basics and little else. I have had to drop classes for lack of transportation. I had to pay my own therapy bills…during a period when I was unemployed…yeah.

My sister has a boyfriend to help out with expenses and has had a car since she was sixteen. It was PAID FOR IN FULL by my father. She has health insurance and access to public transport, a job, and opportunities where she is. She has NO health problems or handicaps. She is still sponging off of my father for phone bills (and car insurance, I think). She got to go to three really expensive four-year schools and to travel the world. She had some financial help for this from my father.

I by contrast had next to no mobility until recently. Forget about extra-curriculars, traveling, or any time to socialize or anyone to socialize with.

Oh, and BTW, I will still have to take out an assload of loans so I can finish my education.

Even though it sounds like I am complaining in this post, my life is pretty good for what it is. I have some great opportunities coming up with regard to college and am planning for that. I got two jobs too. (I’m a work study, so I am only allowed so many hours, and this new job won’t offer much more in time. The pay is better, though). Since I can go to school full-time again, I will have health insurance.

The point is that this person has the nerve to accuse me of sponging and to be JEALOUS of me. She thinks I could be working more (Believe me, I would if I could) because she works two jobs. (Uh, I do too, plus full-time schooling and some volunteer work). She DID NOT do anywhere near that much when she was in school. She got to have fun.

But, you know, she’s almost thirty and she has to pay actual bills now. So I’m going to trade places with a mentally ill relative who lives in a backwater, in social isolation, on $300 a month and who has, well, almost nothing materially.

Yeah, makes sense to me.

PS I don’t begrudge my sister these benefits. Hell, I wish I had  them. I just resent her making unfounded assumptions and implying that I’m not trying hard enough or doing something wrong. I could also use less of her complaining about how ordinary demands of life are SO incapacitating and how I have it made somehow (!) Privilege is a bitch.

Yes, There’s a Difference: On FA, Pro-ana, and Feederism

04 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in political

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Before we begin, ladies and gentlemen, I have a very special annoucement.

I have moved up the fat acceptance visibility chain and am now being quoted on virulently anti-fat websites and having blog posts devoted to what a mean censoring queen I am. Two of the most popular search engine queries that have been coming up in the past few days are:

-JoannaDW the big mean censorship queen

-the censoring queen dead of winter

-people who refuse to face the truth

I want to, once again, thank all my lovely troll friends for giving me hits and for ensuring that my heinous, pernicious message of fat acceptance will spread all over the net.

Now, back to business:

I want to eventually make my own FA 101/FAQ page, but I don’t want to do it all at once. I want to do it in installments by questions and the first one I want to do is answer the question of whether FA promotes fat. I have recently been accused, numerous times, of actively trying to make people fat. It is a misconception common to those outside of fat acceptance that FA=feederism/pro-ana, so I thought this was particularly relevant.

Question: Does fat acceptance encourage people to get fatter?

Answer: To those inside the movement, the answer is obvious: NO!

To those outside the movement, an explanation is in order.

Fat acceptance promotes rights, respect, and access for fat people. Promoting respect and rights no more encourage people to get fat than allowing employees to wear Stars of David encourages people to be Jewish. I have yet to hear anyone argue that requiring wheelchair accessibility for public places encourages people to get hit by cars or to not try walking if the disabled person is able and willing to give it a shot. It is there so disabled people can live their lives and have independence. Why shouldn’t people of all sizes have this?

Question: So you don’t want to be fatter, but you don’t want to be thinner either. Do you have something against thin people?

No, people in FA do not hate thinness. It would be hypocritical to be at the mercy of other people’s bigotry and to then inflict it on others. In other words, for people in FA to hate thin people is wrong on principle.

It also does not make sense.

Many of us in fat acceptance used to be thin ourselves, either naturally or because we worked at it.

Thin people are members of fat acceptance. They do it because it is right. They do it because they used to be fat. They do it because they resent the idea that, because they are thin, they must parade their thinness around as a trophy for the admiration of others. Some thin women are tomboys or are actually trans-men and don’t want to reinforce the waif-like feminine ideal because it doesn’t fit who they are. Thin people don’t always follow conventional healthy lifestyle advice, but because they are thin, people think they must. They don’t like living up to that externally imposed expectation and having people comment when they don’t. Thin women are victims of fat bashing. You can be a size 2, have a “pooch,” and have people call you a fat-ass.

Thin people are objectified by fat phobia as well.

While we do not encourage people to alter themselves physically or to want that for themselves as a condition of feeling worthy, it is worth noting that many thin people appreciate fat aesthetically. Many of them wish they were heavier or curvier for their own reasons, i.e. larger breasts. Many like fat on others even if they themselves are content with their body type. For some, an appreciation for fat could lead them into FA.

Thin people who are thin as a result of illness or eating disordered behavior often resent being complimented for their thinness because it embodies everything in their lives that has made them miserable. It encourages them to stay unhealthy and to stay miserable for the positive reinforcement that comes with being thin. Fat acceptance is not about encouraging people to be fat, but it does encourage well-being at all sizes. For people with EDs, part of that is gaining whatever weight they need to gain to be healthy and never dieting again. Even when the diets are “lifestyle changes.” Even if the restoration weight is what some people consider “too fat.”

So, long story short, we love teh thinnies in FA. Don’t be shy!

Question: How does FA feel about feederism? You’re always talking about how great and sexy fat can be, so surely some of you must think gaining weight is sexy. Am I right?

Answer: Some feeding fetishists are into FA, but FA is entirely separate from feederism and runs counter to it in important respects. Namely that people should be accepted at their current weight, not some weight sometime in the future and fat activists feel there is an exploitative element in feederism as well. Any sexual orientation can be healthy or unhealthy, respectful or exploitative depending on how it is practiced. However, and this is just my opinion, feederism bothers me because of the context provided by our fat-hating culture.

Weight gain is humiliating and demoralizing for most people in our culture, especially for women. It is also in vogue for men and women alike to demean women who do not live up to our beauty standards, and (some) men in particular feel entitled to see hot female bods. Basically, my concern is that abusive partners who hate women in general and even moreso fat women are into feederism because it gives them the chance to indulge both their prejudices at once. They get to get a kick out of demeaning their partners and enjoying the humiliation their partners feel. This criticism could apply to just about any sexual practice. Some people could choose homosexuality because they have a grudge against the opposite sex. Some people might like BDSM because they see it as legal battery and rape. Feederism, however, involves something that our culture finds uniquely shameful, and that is what bothers me.

In a different time and place, feederism would be just another personal preference, but it is riddled with contextual implications that make me, and others uneasy. This does not mean that you are one of the people I described above or that you should not do what you want.

Anyway, feederism is not fat acceptance and cannot be fat acceptance. Moving on…

The last Q&A section is devoted to answering why fat acceptance is nothing like pro-ana. This is my all-time favorite anti-fat trope and it is also very long because it is full of implications for fat people’s health, eating disorders, social acceptability, and fat politics.

Question: You know, I have heard of pro-ana. Isn’t FA a lot like pro-ana in that it glorifies an extreme body type?

Answer: No, it is not. We give people of all sizes a chance to feel good about the bodies they have. We do not glorify any particular body type or want people to change their bodies. When we show fat women in bikinis or fat men in white, the purpose is to show the world that fat people are people with normal, fulfilling lives doing what we want, not what others want. Moreover, whereas pro-ana glorifies and aspires to extreme thinness, FA includes a wide range of sizes in its net as representative of fat bodies.

Contrary to popular belief, most fat people aren’t the superfatties that you see on TV. ‘Fat people’ includes people who appear to be normal-weight but whose BMI, waist circumference, etc. indicate overweight or obesity. They include people who are obviously fat, but who are small fats. They include people who are total death fatties. In a fashion context, it includes people who are actually quite thin but who are still “too fat” to be models or have “fat spots.” It might seem silly to have such a broad definition of ‘fat,’ but our culture does, and that puts us all in the path of fat hatred. So I hope this puts in perspective the idea that FA glorifies obesity.

Question: But people in pro-ana promote extreme weight control behaviors. So FA, by definition, promotes extreme weight gain behaviors because it tells people that it’s okay to be fat and not change your lifestyle, right? 

Answer: We do not promote “unhealthy lifestyles” either. Fat is a body type, not a lifestyle. Fat people and thin people both practice a wide range of lifestyles. There are fat people who are 100% organic vegans and thin people who lead stereotypically “fat” lifestyles like eating fast food all the time or passing up gym membership. We posit that “healthy lifestyle” has a meaning unique to each individual.

Ordinarily, we think of “healthy” as being low-salt or low-fat. Low-salt is not healthy for someone with low blood pressure and low-fat is not healthy for people with anorexia. Neither low-fat nor low-salt is healthy for children and teens. We posit that diet cannot prevent any disease and that, at best, it can help manage an illness you already have. In other words, you cannot gorge on sugar and eat your way to diabetes any more than you can gorge on gluten and eat your way to celiac disease. However, being careful about sugar or gluten consumption is invaluable  to the management of these conditions. FA is NOT against healthy eating to manage health conditions. The Fat Acceptance Police will not show up at the house of a person with diabetes and beat you with a hose until you eat your carbs.

Question: Fat people have eating disorders, though, just like extremely thin people. So by saying it’s okay to be extremely fat or extremely thin, you are promoting eating disordered behavior and this  will keep people from getting the help they need, won’t it?

Answer: Not all extremely thin people have eating disorders, nor do all extremely fat people. We believe that you cannot reliably predict a person’s health by their size. You also cannot detect the presence of eating-disordered behavior by a person’s size. You can be a 90-pound sedentary compulsive over-eater or a 400-pound over-exercising anorexic. EDs don’t discriminate. Stereotypes of who has what eating disorder based on a person’s size hurts people because it pathologizes and infringes on the freedom of healthy people. It keeps people who really do have eating disorders from getting the help THEY need.

To anyone who knows anything about FA OR pro-ana, this will be obvious. Type “pro-ana” as a query into the YouTube search engine and see what you find. Videos that advertise themselves as either thinspiration (thinspo) or reverse thinspiration. Thinspiration is anything that promotes extreme thinness as a goal through eating-disordered behaviors. It could be pictures, real or airbrushed, of thin people, quotes, or anything that a person can look at and be reminded of why they should  try to be skinny. Reverse thinspiration seeks to achieve the same goal, except that they show pictures of “fattening” foods, degrading pictures of extremely fat people, or other things designed to disgust people away from fat.

I have yet to see anything (outside of feeder porn) that serves as “fatspiration,” direct or reverse. There are no videos in which fat people post pictures of vegetables and runway models in an attempt to disgust people away from thinness. We do not have quotes along the lines of “Nothing looks as good as fat feels!” People in FA do not post pictures of ourselves gaining weight. We don’t brag about how many McDonald’s value meals we have eaten or cry about weight we’ve lost. The comparison is 100% unadulterated nonsense.

Question: So if you’re not about the glorification of unhealthy lifestyles, what do you call this project?

Answer: At its most basic, what I said from the beginning: rights, respect and access for people regardless of size. Insofar as quality of life and options are concerned, we do have a health aspect to our advocacy.

The general party line of FA is that there are no good or bad foods and that any well-balanced diet will lead to good health. It’s not healthy to only eat chips and cookies but it’s equally unhealthy to subsist on apples and nuts. We do have lifestyle gurus and food activists in  FA, and they will probably contest the “All foods are good foods” mantra, but otherwise, this is the stance taken by people in FA. The one thing we all have in common is that healthy lifestyles should be about diet and exercise that fulfills you as a whole person, not weight loss or meeting some other standard.

We call this approach Health at Every Size, or HAES, as proposed by Linda  Bacon. A healthy lifestyle is accessible to people of all weights, shapes, abilities, disabilities, and every other human variation you can think of. HAES discourages strict food and exercise rules and seeks a holistic version of health-physical, mental, and emotional. We do not eat the way Morgan Spurlock from Supersize Me thinks we eat, nor do we desire that for anyone. Nowhere in FA will you find anyone who can be fairly construed as promoting such a lifestyle for all people to follow.

There are people in FA who complain a lot about something called healthism. So you obviously don’t all believe in healthy lifestyles. That makes you the pro-ana branch of FA, doesn’t it?

No. People, myself very much included, do not oppose healthy lifestyles or education and advocacy of healthy lifestyles. Some of us follow healthy lifestyles ourselves. I, for example, have never smoked and only drink occasionally. I  shop organic sometimes and I like it.

We are, however, anti-healthist. This means that we oppose the use of health as a means to promote stereotypes about people, like fat people, disabled and poor people. We oppose interference in the lives of people who lead politically incorrect lifestyles and painting the pursuit of health as a personal or social virtue.

We don’t oppose people adhering to healthy lifestyles or sharing health advice with others. We oppose denying rights and respect to those that choose not to. Plus, we oppose government programs that promote healthy lifestyles like “Let’s Move” where the intent is to reform a culture so that people are coerced into leading lives and supporting political agendas with which they do not agree. Two very different things.

I know it’s a lot, but I wanted to be thorough. How do you guys feel about this?

ETA: Some  people took issue with my comment about homosexuality, and I want to clarify something. I do not think all or most gays or lesbians have a grudge against anyone. They truly love and are attracted to members of the same sex. My point was that some people, theoretically, engage in gay behaviors for the wrong reasons. Some people, again theoretically, engage in BDSM, have sex, or do all sorts of things for the wrong reasons. This does not make the orientation or the activity bad in itself. Likewise, feederism is not bad in and of itself, nor are the people who practice it. I was commenting on the context in which it happens.

JoannaDW, the Big Mean Censorship Queen

02 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in general interest

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Apparently, I have been accused of being closed-minded and of censorship by people with a grudge against fat acceptance. I can’t handle opposition to my ideas and am the thought police.

Why? I won’t acknowledge that obesity causes health problems and mobility problems and that we should try to cure it.

Wow, what a radical idea that has  only been expressed and reinforced every motherfucking where. What a shit stain I am for not allowing this brilliant new insight on my fat acceptance/anti-healthist/anti-ableism blog.

Yes, I am ableist too. These people clearly have not read my blog, nor do they know much about my background.

Look, we are fat acceptance. It is not our job or our desire to find a cure for obesity. Those of us who are in fat acceptance, including those who are “morbidly” obese, some of whom are disabled AND “morbidly” obese, don’t want a cure for our obesity. We want to be treated REGARDLESS of our weight. Men are at higher risk of health problems, but we don’t treat male sex as a solution.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Fatdoes not cause health or mobility problems, so curing fat would do no good. We could make all fat people thin, or at least less fat, and the health issues would remain. Even if it did, we cannot make people permanently thin in a safe way.

Finding a cure for obesity also misses the point entirely. Fat people deserve compassionate care regardless of what our bodies look like. To say we need a cure for obesity is the equivalent of saying that the onus is on us to change who we are as a condition to receive that care. What will happen when a cure for obesity is found? Will be we denied care because we don’t want to change our bodies rather than do our best with the bodies we have? Should we HAVE to change our weight, our sex, our hearing ability, etc. to live fully in the world? I don’t want to mitigate my risk of skin cancer by changing my skin color. I don’t want my mitigate my risk of breast cancer by removing my breasts. I don’t want to mitigate my risk of “fat-related health problems” by changing my weight, and my right to do so is very much at risk in this culture. My right to do otherwise is not. That’s the difference.

And no, you don’t have to love being fat in order to be in fat acceptance. I don’t like being fat. Lots of people don’t like being fat. Lots of us  don’t like being fat or disabled. However, we accept that it is what it is, and sometimes, you have to do that. No one said you have to like it.

Yes, there are morbidly obese and/or disabled fat people in fat acceptance who are as radical as I am. Please don’t throw that one at me.

If you want to find a cure for obesity or to discuss the trials or being fat and/or disabled from the anti point of view, rock on with your bad self. There are LOTS of places in which to do that, and my blog is not one of them. Sorry.

Why do people who espouse fat negative viewpoints constantly claim they are being oppressed and censored by fat acceptance?

I don’t claim that Wiccans are being delusional, oppressive, and censorious when they block comments from me about how I used to be Wiccan, how horrible it was, how I am so much happier now that I converted to Christianity, and how much I wish Wiccans would acknowledge and discuss how lacking Wicca and Wiccan pride is. That is NOT THE PLACE for that kind of discussion.*

Scientific American is not the place for me to post articles about the paranormal. Scientific American is not censoring me by not giving me that forum for discussion.

A blog dedicated to the Palestinian viewpoint is not the place to argue for the Jewishness of the Israeli state. And that blog is not being mean and censorious when they refuse to allow Israelis to argue that point in their space.

I refuse to accept that some fat people are just too fat or disabled for fat acceptance. You don’t have to like the movement or be a member, but you don’t get to speak for all fat disabled people, either. Don’t like that? Tough shit.

I am JoannaDW, the Big Mean Censorship Queen, born in the dead of winter, and those who violate the rules of my space invoke my wrath upon them. Thou shalt be skewed by my silver spear and be cast into the sea of moderated nothingness. Be afraid, my friends, be very afraid.:)

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*I am not, in face, a former Wiccan who hates Wicca and who has been saved by Jesus Christ. I went straight to Christianity. I think Wicca is awesome and I fight side by side for their right to practice their religion as I see fit. Yes, I even discuss Wicca in RCIA.:)

ETA: I do not “censor the hell” out of my blog. Read through the comments on most of my blog posts and you will see a number of comments that do not agree with me. You will see them being treated respectfully. But guess what. I demand respect in return, and that means respect for my views and for my comment policy. I do not demand that you agree, and I never have. However, you must show some respect or you will be banned. Don’t like it? Go suck it. And this is the last I will say to people trolling my blog. Get a life, guys!

On second thought, keep coming. Post comments about me. Link to me. I’d LOVE the traffic!