Thursday, 30 August 2012

Is fat phobia the new homophobia?

Isn't that really what the title's about? Though the subtitle is;
Telling fat people they ought to be thin is about as helpful as telling gay people they should be straight
The point is deeper than any facile comparison between being gay and being fat. It points at the way 'obesity' has become the homophobia for those who would at least pay lip service to disdaining it, those who wouldn't often can't resist adding it to their portfolio of bigotry.

Eating has come to take the place sex takes up for fundamentalist religions. A central facet of existence, eating even more so, is the means to imbue with the dominant themes of who we are and how we should live.

Free will has come to the fore of our collective consciousness, replacing the fatalism of more precarious religious times. We see ourselves as self created through our conscious will, hence we create our weight.

It's not about whether these things are true or not, it's the need for constant repetition of said theme in every possible place. Like pattern on a cloth, we must always be reminded of what is there (that mimics the way truth is always there).

One of things many object to about those who cannot pretend we control our weight in this way, is we seem to be fatalistic, defeatist.

When in fact, all we are saying is, not this way.

That's pretty easy to discern but such is the fevered clamour for repetition of free will, even this is too provocative. 

Religion is concerned with fertility given the natural pre modern medical intervention(s) high infant mortality rate of human beings. Gayness, seen as not contributing to the creation of life became a container of and symbol to represent fears of extinction.

In more developed society's where the creation of life is taken for granted. Our central concern has moved to sustaining one's existence. God has fallen to earth, from the old creator in the sky, to each and everyone of us being a creation of our will.

We are our own creators.

The extent to which calorie restriction/expenditure consumes one's existence-pun intended- means investment in it creates a momentum to centre our way of life around it. This necessarily extends to distorting the way we see ourselves.

It has to replace the norm which has effectively happened, it is normal eating for many, which now seems disordered or greedy, naughty or worst of all, fattening. Certainly the rigid, inflexible, watchful, unsustainable nature of calorie restriction doctrine exacerbates a sense of insecurity by comparison. Even whilst it is creating and promoting its own mayhem.

It comes down to the insistence on this as the route to weight alteration-which must be a product of an unhealthy fixation on free will as it yields not to evidence or reality of any kind. The refusal to accept that our design does not submit to our modish metaphysical fixations, is the driver of fat phobia, just like the refusal to accept that some people simply cannot make themselves heterosexual enabled the revving up and spread of homophobia. 

The two mirror each other to a weird degree, for fat phobes what has replaced religion as the way to validate reality for all of us, science is now being bent into something more akin to religion by fulfilling a similar role, rather than as a beacon of empirical truth.

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