This from people who assert women should be able to get drunk/drugged up if they've a mind and go about in public unmolested.
True, but how hard is it not to get drunk? If you don't expect any woman to manage that, how do you expect them to manage lifelong proto-anorexia? Why is it not acceptable for sexists to say that women brought sexual or other assault on themselves by the way they looked in their clothes. But, okay to say fat women bring harassment or illness on ourselves through what our bodies look like?
Why's it okay to claim to be concerned about a person's health, but not their sexual health? Or about how much a person's eating, but not how much clothing a person is wearing?
Why has clothing become more inviolate than the flesh it hangs on?
I finally exclaimed, "Can't they even come up with a bullshit vaguely leftist/liberal form to abuse fat people? Can't they even be bothered to make that effort?" [Whilst lecturing us about laziness natch.]
Well blow me if one seems to have arrived-the use of addiction as metaphor.They seem to like that one.
This is the era of folks wishing to dub everything addiction. Whilst I have time for drug addicts contribution to human dignity-by refusing to submit their humanity to the moral minority/majority- I have zero time for when the more presumptuous of them feel their experience makes them specialist instructors on what fatness is, to fat people.
I'd have to say a hell no to that.
The signifier of this sorry impertinence is often; "I'm a recovered [or whatever] drug addict and I think losing weight feels like my addiction." Or some such to that effect. It's always about their fee fees.
That's apt to get me feeling stabby.
Drug withdrawal has got nothing to do with a fat or other person, trying to become anorexic.
First off, dieting is a pathology-regardless of what anyone thinks about fatness. Withdrawal, is a product of the pathology of drug addiction.
See the difference? Dieting=a pathology in itself. Withdrawal from drugs/alcohol detox=product of the pathology of drug addiction/alcoholism.
Both alcoholism and drug addiction are acquired dependence. Hunger is an innate biological signal.
What really narks is that they fail to examine the 'obesity' construct, even more to notice that authentic voices of self-expression from fat people are missing from the ritualistic discourse on fatness.
I actually find that unforgivable, technically speaking. One of the reasons we are being tormented with this wretched 'addiction' bollocks is that the extreme subjectivity established by addicts and their friends has been taken full advantage of by the psychiatric police, threatening to undermine civil liberties.
Its because of the mental mush coming from all this that it's hard to insist that bodies cannot be defined as 'disease.' You'd think the least these self aggrandizers could do is notice a lack of a subjective voices, but no.
They actually go ahead and behave as if 'obesity' operates on the same terms as addiction does with them. Peopled by sympathetic and dedicated (if at times wrong-headed) observers. How the hell can anyone make that mistake? Let alone them.
What's amusing about this-depending on your pov-is that by comparing the impersonation of anorexia to drug withdrawal, they show how little objective insight they've gleaned from their experience. Due to its suffocating, distorting extent of its self conscious shaping of the addict persona, it's of precious little use to apply to others. Let alone with those who's subjectivity has been ironed almost out of existence.
The author, Tanya Gold* clearly doesn't have a clue about what hyperphagia nervosa is about, let alone the difference between being fat with and without such an ED. Many with hyperphagia or aspects of aren't fat. Though she was herself, that goes for alcohol, given its high calorie density.
Of course, she went to the ED field, one dominated and distorted by anorexia nervosa, with similar problems of extreme subjectivity. Consequently, this field has often had as much relevance to diagnosing and dealing with HN as an umbrella in the face of a force 9 gale.
Sugar is more dangerous than the drugs we are taught to fear.Er, no.
One of the more surprising things about this noise though is its subtext of exposing the undercurrent of 12-step quackery.
My feeling for a long time has been that abstinence is bullshit. Addiction should be ended by finding ways to restore a normal chemical balance-so the addict's body loses the physical need for drugs.
Rather than the conventional way which is to stop the drug and see whether the system balances itself after being beat up by a withdrawal phase deemed scary enough to deter people from going through it.
I've little time 12-step-group therapy is fine and rational- its the other b/s tacked on to that. Tough love/you've got to hit rock bottom etc., It's just a way to get people to sign up to their own abuse and potential destruction. To accept incompetence as efficacy, as all there is or should be (sound familiar?) They've gotten away with this shit, due to the extent of guilt users carry about being addicts and /or the things they may have done during it.
The impression I mostly got though was that the addicts/alcoholics parroting this guff, believed this guff. Stories about their debauched, degraded downfall. How they "needed" to be utterly abject, broken, sometimes even up to stating that they were left to their potential deaths when no one could deal with them anymore. And that this ruthlessness of exhaustion was the saving/making of them. Ugh.
Though I used to root for those addicts who expressed their often experiential skepticism towards this hookum, I at least assumed those telling this conventional narrative were for real. Other people also, to the extent they assume there's some kind of process that can lend itself to other areas.
It prompted me to point out there isn't. It's all image. Fatness can't succumb to this kind of flummery, because there's nothing to succumb to.
What Gold reveals a real sense of outrage at every single lecture she was probably given about her dependence. At being in a position of dependence, about having had to ask for help from others, especially those hostile towards them of being declared "stupid", degenerate, worthless corrupt and so on.
It shows that this approach, which deals in stigma hurts and damages no matter who its aimed at and why. That doesn't necessarily go even if a person vanquishes their habit.
And no, it isn't justified, it's mostly lazy, mean and punitive for the sake of it. It's a chance for people to look down on others, to get one over on them. To loudly bray about how great they are and how lowly and pitiful their object of scorn is. All rapped up in a pompous sense of self righteousness.
There's similar going on with this participant in another aspect of this culture of horse pucky. People talking a good game of 'sickness' and recovery. Yet, who actually haven't processed enough of their baggage for that to be convincing.
Meaning their "recovery" is probably a change of mind, a gritting of teeth. Or if they're lucky a spontaneous, partial or whole unravelling of the underpinnings of their dependence. Rather the indistinct mystical revelatory process they propose.
This is becoming a pattern. We see the same high degree of bitterness and rage in a former smoker who also wants fat people to be even more aggressively abused and broken in their desire for some kind of catharsis. Any excuse will do. Despite him admitting we have already-all the way through the 'crisis' he's blowing more hot air into.
And despite stating freely that stopping smoking may well have prolonged his life to get to this point, it doesn't matter. Resentment of every aspect of the situation they advocate as their 'recovery' is evident.
That's denial.
* apologies for link mayhem.
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