Wednesday 14 November 2012

You won't be under the bus if you're still driving it

I agree with the underlying sentiment of this we can restore our self possession without using slim women's bodies. 

Though I no longer say this with any real enthusiasm. There was a time when I would have reacted against attacks on slim women's bodies with a sense of heartfelt fellow feeling.
The solution is to shake each other excitedly, all the time, and yell, as loud as you can, “You guys, aren’t bodies the coolest?!”
Sounds like a familiar feeling.
I thought..........we would go on the journey together, egging each other on.
I'm not sure exactly where the first break came from, perhaps the demand for a rename, "fat" is "alienating", which was kind of the point. Or the assumption on our part that slim women affected just as devastatingly by the hate invested in the word "fat" would revel in the chance to be free of it. 

Instead they want approval for their "fat talk" and "feeling fat."

Telling us how feminine it is to attack your body, that's what women do, anything else is FAKE! Meaning fat acceptance is of course. That knocked me off my perch. If it is fake then how do you get over the culture of tearing yourself down?

Then there was the attitude that we were most definitely not equals, no one likes you, which was a bit diverting given that slim privilege is a laughably pisspoor and hardly worth defending, the ceaseless demands for reassurance that we weren't trying to do to them what they'd already participated in doing to us.

Yeah, fat people have to reassure slimz that self restoration isn't a hostile act against them. No amount does or can or will. I could go on, but I'm already bored myself.

There are always fat people who are going to behave like this. Why are fat people expected to be any better than they?

By now, I can't tell whether my frustration is as much about trying to avoid yet another snooze-fest of whining about "real women" farrago.

Though there is amusement to be had at the over-earnest fighting for inclusion for this misappropriated term "Real Women."

I am not a real woman. Woman is realness inclusive enough for me thanks, as in: "Feminism the radical notion that women are human beings." You dig? I know other women are real too, without needing to be told this by Hanne Blank or anyone else.

It is undoubtedly wrong to abuse slimmer women's bodies. Just don't do it. I would appreciate some acknowledgement of the extent to which slim women often don't have a problem seeing themselves as the standard and defend it as if it's their birthright. 

Patronizingly lecturing fatter people that their act won't do any good in the long run is not just laughably hypocritical, it is something so many slimz obviously don't believe themselves. So why they expect some fatter people to behave any better than they I don't know.

This capacity to only see your own sin in the "sin eaters" is hardly endearing. As is usual, people seem to keep expecting FALSE superiority to pay out more than it ever does (because it is false natch).

At the base of narrow body standards is not so much fat phobia as those setting them, probably the thin/slim upper middle class/middle types who seem to populate 'obesity research' and the like, have no perspective other than their own.

They are surrounded by people just like them. They are in a state of uncritical assertion of their own spoiled behaviour and rarely encounter the kind of interruption to this, that allowed them to mug us with their BS standard in the first place.

Everyone starts out assuming they are the standard by which all should be measured.

Remember when you were a little kid and you went to nursery/primary school and first realized other kids were weird. Their families weren't just like yours. Yes! Your family's rules, laws, mores, habits, traditions were not the way things must be.

We have to learn not to do similar with bodies as well. Not to use them as the rule to measure others.

To understand the different associations applied to various body sizes means sensitivities vary. I still remember in the primary school playground, hearing a thin girl protest about how she kept being patronized as barely there. It made her feel insubstantial, lesser somehow and that really angered her.

She was strong, felt healthy and capable-as indeed was my impression of her.

I was taken aback. I'd assumed she wouldn't have any real issues with her body as she was the ideal. I've never forgotten that and made an effort to listen more carefully. To this day, I explain to those fat people who keep this habit. That they are really doing the same underlying thing we all do, using their body as a yardstick to measure others. 

To come across this in fat people doing the same as slim people, is hardly "hypocritical" it means, not every fat person is particularly thoughtful about consequences. Notably, the person who provoked the OP was formerly thin.

The many of us in fat acceptance who've never had any truck with this sort of thing feel that way, because we engage our minds critically and empathetically on the subject. We've thought it through a bit.

That is neither a product of being fat or being involved in fat acceptance, in itself. It would be nice if that wasn't taken for granted.

Of course you are going to fat people who think the same way as so many slimz still do. What would be impressive would be if it ever dawned that this is what fat people still find it difficult to escape.

Frankly, until they found the real woman thing, I was beginning to think slim people didn't get the point about an enforcement of a standard being self defeating. Well seriously, does it look like they do?

It was a little dispiriting knowing they knew it all along, but just allowed things to progress. Now we are being told that it doesn't do any good, as if we couldn't tell from the constant venting of insecurities.

That is actually a female trope now, We are women we are insecure.  I think we could see this collusion in fat hate didn't do much good. It's whether they see the end of that as more of a loss than a gain, for them.

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