For some reason, people find this difficult to accept. They mis-attribute what is the product of being silenced, for absence of sufficient identifying with your weight. Fact is, IDying with your weight to the extent that is normal for many slimz is abnormal-they'd do well to reconsider.
A few tweeters spotted the substitution of "thinness" for 'obesity' and complained about it, one in particular, @medicalinguist, nailed the point pretty well...
"Your thinness has taken so much from you" suggests that thin people are "defective" by default....for totally the wrong reasons😆. This is suggestive of how slim people know ob is trash and why, they're just going long with what's wrong.
An astute and sympathetic responder @nomilubin, explains the feelings behind this well,
This is so on point, and generous, as I know many slim people can and will be-when fat people give them something to go on. It what's driving the professionals too who are abusing their professional sphere to enact this denying and diminishing.As a thin person, I find it extremely painful to hear these realities. I don't want them to be true to the point where I can imagine denying them or diminishing them.
It leads to a key question at the heart of this-what do lay people do when professionals who control and police everyone's understanding and perception of reality-go rogue?
The professionals engaged in this weight jazz, are as we speak trying to trade on an impression of the public as savages full of prejudices that need to be lanced by their enlightened selves, trying to absolve themselves of responsibility. This impression is possibly left by everything from civil rights struggles to scientific advances that challenge people's beliefs.
For some reason I cannot fathom fat activists keep getting on board with this line, positioning the white coats (doctors, when its actually all of them plus sundry sub-clinical types, along with the original quacktastic alt-med contingent) as merely influenced by contact with these lowly issue.
Hell no, it is them driving this, their stamp is all over it. Who decided BMI 30 meant anything? Your fat phobic mother? Who decided people would be deemed "the obese", until people was hyphenated to "obese-people", on-line mras? Which cretins are trying to get other bullshitters to say "with obesity" because it sounds virtue signally?
Why deny this?
The reason I make this point is what's happening doesn't make sense unless it is made clear that ob is a top-down effort and which particular group it is coming from. It's not the law or politics, its medics, researchers, scientists who are messing up.
That needs to be pointed out.
No one has to confront anyone, but if you cannot tell the truth about who's poisoning the well, how can you stop it? If indeed people do want to put a stop to this mess. Another oddity is this over stating and understating at the same time.
On the one hand, we're oppressed-we aren't, what is really going on is more like "Learned helplessness",
American psychologist Martin Seligman initiated research on learned helplessness in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania as an extension of his interest in depression. In Part 1 of this study, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group 1 dogs were simply put in a harnesses for a period of time and were later released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of "yoked pairs". Dogs in Group 2 were given electric shocks at random times, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. Each dog in Group 3 was paired with a Group 2 dog; whenever a Group 2 dog got a shock, its paired dog in Group 3 got a shock of the same intensity and duration, but its lever did not stop the shock. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. Thus, for Group 3 dogs, the shock was "inescapable".We are like the group 3 dogs who act like we can't escape, when there isn't anything holding us other than this learned behaviour.
At the same time we suffer bias. Bias? That's when you favour red over yellow, not when you wish to starve people and mutilate their organs, that's malicious assault, that's iatrogenic. Since when do doctors make their 'bias' the subject of a phoney baloney 'science' and insist on "treating" a non-existent disease, i.e. assaulting and damaging health?
How to do self acceptance has already been discovered. Two examples, learning to embrace and acknowledge your own body and pointing out that-diets don't work.
None of these required any input from slim people, professionals, counsellors, dietitians or anyone else. They weren't about moaning about who is or isn't nice, they were about our feelings and our needs based on our histories.
The first is about restoring or even introducing a normal reaction to your body and your size, the latter was reality-testing.
Fat people need to learn that we have to dismantle the rubbish we've been taught, not so much internalisation as a single voice and mode of expression we were all taught. We have to unearth our own voice and that will not come from constructing a social justice frame that isn't really there.
Slim people will turn up for us, when we turn up for ourselves.
What's stopping us from pointing out that the professionals have failed? That we turned up for do it yourself, i.e. "personal responsibility"? What's stopping us from stating facts, barracking, bullying, insults, yes, I get that, but that's always been there. It didn't stop us from starting. It's we who keep stopping ourselves when we get any momentum.
People were told, if you jump on this "body positive" bandwagon, you will not be served by it. We were brushed off, because anything slim people do is where it's at. That warning turned out to be correct.
Finding our buried voices is what fat acceptance or w/e you wish to call it should be about. This is what "speak the truth to power" means. Our continued silence aides those who are doing us dirty. Only enter the ob fictionalisations, to lead trace a path from there to the truth, this is not a debate, this is (largely) fiction versus truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment