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!
Thanks for this, Joanna. It always bugs me when someone expresses an unpopular opinion and suddenly that opinion is ‘oppressing’ the popular opinion. Lolz.
Let me come out and say that I believe ‘curing’ obesity is like:
1) curing tallness
2) curing femaleness
3) curing freckledness
4) curing not-perfect-hour-glass-shapedness
….etc. (all the above correlate with greater risk for certain ‘conditions’)
When can we be honest with ourselves and confess that ‘curing obesity’ is just a proxy for curing the human condition — that is, aging and death? If you think that’s a radical statement, just reflect on how often thinness is equated with eternal youth and fatness with age and death. I mean, one of the main features of those fucked up ‘live forever’ clubs is severe calorie restriction and thinness.
Obesity is not a fucking disease, people. Seriously, if people call themselves ‘fat accepting’ and still claim obesity is a disease that should be cured (or that they wouldn’t mind a cure, which is a passive way of saying the latter), then don’t expect ME to call you ‘fat accepting.’
Yeah, I left a group on Facebook because I’m evidently too radical for some of them – I have a problem with people saying that losing weight is going to cure all the ills we have because all those ills are caused by being fat/aggravated by being fat. When I made the comment that I had dieted myself fatter, and WLsurgeried myself fatter, and made my disabilities worse and was done with that shit, I was told that I was giving up and that if that’s what I wanted to do, it was my body and fine, but they weren’t going to give up their weight loss efforts in an attempt to improve their lives/disabilities. WTF ever, I’m outa there, I’m not going to bang my head against a brick wall trying to tell people who have drunk the Kool-Aid that the diet industry/medical complex have dispensed that they may not be as successful as they think they will be. They’re shouting down experts like Pattie Thomas and Linda Bacon, so they sure as hell aren’t going to listen to me.
As for the trolls who think they can come into our spaces and argue with us, not in this lifetime. Want to spew that hate? They can get their own blog and spew it there, but probably no one would read it.
Tell this to the Dimensions community. They are also a fat acceptance group that have point blank told me that their fat has in fact caused them mobility problems even when I have tried to argue that and point them towards blogs like yours. They say that once you start to carry a certain amount of weight that you muscles and organs can’t support, you start have problems with stamina and walking.
I think there’s reasonable physics-based arguments about gravity, bone-structure, muscles, and weight for much larger people as opposed to much smaller people. The thing that always gets me about these conversations isn’t the statement of fact about how different bodies move differently, fit into spaces differently, go at different speeds, etc, but the treatments of these differences as bad and wrong and evidence that large body size is a disease that needs to be cured.
Very tall people (like me and my family — most of us are over 6 feet tall, and my brother, at 6′ 9″, is the tallest) also have to fight with gravity. We can have joint issues, collapsed veins, too-low blood pressure, and other issues because we’re tall and interact with our world differently than shorter people. But no one’s trying to suggest that tallness should be cured. No one’s talking about stunting ‘too-tall’ kids or wringing their hands over the knee braces too-tall kids have to wear when they’re growing, and so on. One simple reason: tallness is considered high-status. That’s it. So, at bottom, the weight hand-wringing isn’t about health, it’s about status.
That said, some of the Dimensions folks — who might be referencing very very fat people, a small percentage of the population of fat folks and not where most of the diet money is being made — might just be talking about different bodies interacting with the world in different ways. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with that. What’s wrong is pathologizing differences, and saying that if you don’t *fit in* then you’re broken. If you have different challenges because of a different body, then you need to do everything you can to conform, conform, conform! Different bodies have different challenges, and there are some very fat people (like myself) who don’t have any health issues, pain, or body-related problems due to our weight.
I think there’s reasonable physics-based arguments about gravity, bone-structure, muscles, and weight for much larger people as opposed to much smaller people. The thing that always gets me about these conversations isn’t the statement of fact about how different bodies move differently, fit into spaces differently, go at different speeds, etc, but the treatments of these differences as bad and wrong and evidence that large body size is a disease that needs to be cured….Different bodies have different challenges, and there are some very fat people (like myself) who don’t have any health issues, pain, or body-related problems due to our weight.
I think that if body size were a disease or a disability, then *everyone* over a certain weight would have mobility issues, and that’s not the case. It’s one thing that interacts with a bunch of other physical variations and that sometimes contributes to problems in certain circumstances. For example, someone with a genetic propensity for weak joints or less tendency to build muscle mass might have more trouble carrying that weight than someone whose joints and muscles were stronger. But then, someone with weak joints could have problems at 150 pounds just as much as at 350. We blame the weight, not the knee structure or the muscle development, not because it’s really more at fault, but because it’s a status thing and something that’s moralized.
Every physical characteristic has its pros and cons (which a given individual might or might not experience). Thin people tend to get cold easier, and they don’t have reserves that would keep them alive during a prolonged illness or survival situation.
ALSO, I think that fat acceptance and Health at Every Size *are* helpful even when fat and disability are related.
First off, if our culture was fat accepting and people just didn’t diet, a lot more people would be able to stay in their “normal” weight range. Not BMI “normal,” but whatever is normal for their body. If gaining weight can in some cases be problematic, then the last thing anyone should be doing is pushing diets, which are about the best way there is to gain weight long-term.
I’m not saying “don’t diet because it’ll make you fat and fat is bad.” More that if a given person has a musculoskeletal structure that will have trouble above a certain weight, dieting makes it more likely that they’ll encounter those problems, not less.
*And* if doctors didn’t jump to “oh, you must feel sick because you’re fat,” there are plenty of cases where they’d identify metabolic problems earlier.
Ahh welcome to the joys of being a visible, public fat person dear Joanna! There is this belief amongst the ignorant and bigoted that somehow fat people “owe” the world proof/explanation/justification for our fatness and our lives.
I used to engage. I refuse to now, because honestly, I have a life to live, not a life to explain/justify/prove. Now I just talk about visibility and the issues that affect me, and people like me. Fuck the ignoramuses who insist I have to do anything. I choose what I do in my life, not anyone else.
The most powerful thing you can do is to simply BE without apology.
Thanks for the reinforcement. Honestly, as someone who is relatively new to FA, I would be lost without a fat feed. Your approach is exactly what I am going to do from now on…and of course, part of that is enjoying the steady stream of hits that I am STILL getting from those two posts.:)
My comment went off on a very random tangent, but I did want to say “Go you” for being the big mean censorship queen. Your blog, your rules. And maybe, just maybe, one or two of the people whose comments you block will realize that, hey, they can’t say whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want, and that being a jerk has consequences.
I am extremely curious where you have read (besides other FA blogs) that obesity doesn’t cause health or mobility problems. Any legitimate sources/studies etc?
I want to reply to this in-depth, but I can’t do so right now. However, I wanted you to know I approved your comment and did not forget you.:)