This kind of harassment takes me back. It tends to create a reluctance to eat in public. I remember snorting sourly when this was named as a key symptom of hyperphagia. How important was that to me when I had it? I'd actually forgotten about reluctance to eat in front of others, until I kept reading this in descriptions of that disorder. Only then did I remember.
I had so many other problems, both being fat and having an eating disorder, that it didn't even figure as in any way notable. I honestly didn't realize what a big deal it was supposed to be, 'til I saw Rae Earl's My Mad Fat Diary.
How typically obsessive of the white coat establishment to focus on shame as definitive of an ED associated with being chubby and fat!
It became a norm for many, especially fat people, not to feel able to eat or eat much in public. I know the latter has always been the case for some slimmer women too. But the crusade may well be heating this all up. Either increasing the extent of unwanted intervention, and/or making feelings surrounding eating more charged.
That's what does it as much as the actual interference.
It's hard to know what to say about this. In some way it feels like its travelled slightly the other way for some fat women, smaller fat people. Ironically, the heights it reached, in one form or another, from being pinched, slapped to being laughed at, in a context of needing to get slim NOW. Caused such a build up of unprocessable pain in fat people, that this transmitted created a force of silent anguish so powerful, it put off some of the less insensitive. It discomforted them too much for them to go there.
This is what is sometimes referred to when folks say "We can't say anything about fat people-why can anything be said to slimz" etc., This harassment may rise among slimz due to the emphasis on "prevention." The absence of such internal emission of emotional radiation within slim women creates no discomfort in others.
Their lack of unease is key here.
Any thing that travels using misogyny will travel through all women, at some point. This is a bit chastening a real feminist fail for sure. If only we could have joined hands, we could have stopped it from getting here. But well, wasn't to be. The 'obesity' construct has distanced women from each other.
The motivation for this impertinence is of course the investment in calories in/calories out moreso the decision to make that the only route to weight management, whether up or down. Food policing is happening in the slender direction too, i.e. being told to eat up for the menz, as they like something to grab hold of.
I know people find this hard to grasp, but it is the problem. Not comprehending its significance, its begetting of things as seemingly disparate as; good food/bad food, clean eating, junk food, bad/good for you, calling thin women anorexics, accusing them of not eating that, calling fat people food addicts, increasingly defining us as mentally unsound child abusers etc., means women in particular, continue to support our own harassment and encroaching loss of autonomy.
There simply is no way to sacrifice fat women for slim. It should never have been necessary at all really, again, that need to throw fatz under the bus is ci/co. Only the privileging of slimmer could prevent this. And that looks like its being eroded by fat phobia which threatens to become an increasing powerhouse.
Take the whole anorexia is not a problem 'obesity' is.
So, until it can be grasped that weight is regulated by metabolic metabolic function rather than "behaviour." This dysfunctional dictate will continue spitting up its manky furballs.
Policing of food, is exactly justified by this idea. That is it in a nutshell, police food, policed life, equals healthy life. Could we really have been naive enough to think this was just about weight? It's always about control isn't it?
Misogyny is liberated by the sense of ownership over women. Still, no one is more porous than fat people, we're defined as an extension of other people's imagination.
The two mix, merge and feed off each other
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