Fear and Loathing

Fat generates fear and loathing, and it's not about looks or the supposed Darwinian reverence for beauty, heath et al. "Obese mannequins are selling women a dangerous lie". It's a (true) burden we must all endure, trying to work out what the hell ob cultists are going on about at any one time. We are told we must "treat" ourselves with exercise.

Your GP can advise you about losing weight safely by eating a healthy, balanced diet and regular physical activity.

Presumably one might wear stuff created for such exertions promoted as the primary weapons of war. You have to remember the 'obesity' construct and its cult, including its continued promotion of CRIWL-calorie restriction induced weight loss, requires the suspension of critical (and moral) faculties. This leads people to display something akin to trance logic,

An altered mental state in which a person’s normal capacity for critical analysis is suspended, and an increased level of logical inconsistencies is tolerated...the alternate thinking process that enables ideas that would be paradoxical to the conscious self to peacefully coexist within the mind

See what I mean?

I fear that the war on obesity is lost, or has even, as is fashionable, ceased to exist, for fear of upsetting people into an early grave.

We're talking about weight change, war is not required, all that is, is to find out how to reset the body's destination with regard to its (homeostatic) restoration of its own mass. Put simply, a way to use the body to alter weight, that works. Is that Tanya's complaint? Quackery continuing in place of science, about what a disgrace that is? 

Nike Inc, the multinational company named after the Greek goddess of victory, has introduced plus-sized mannequins to its flagship store in London to “celebrate the diversity and inclusivity of sport”. They wear the famous Nike tick, which says: welcome to the mainstream.

Okay, she's talking about the un or dis-easing of fat people to the point where it surpasses the dis-easing of (repeating) the same pathological and doomed experiment of weight loss dieting. This un-easing consists mostly of; medicalisation, pathologisation, bullying, insulting, punishing, condemning, silencing and hiding the existence of people above a certain size. Tanya feels this mannequin represents a violation of those well-known medical tools. Why isn't she prepared to state this clearly?

I would never want a woman to hate herself for what she finds in the looking-glass.  

She can't bear to think of herself as the type of person who would seek to make women unhappy on account of their looks. 

Advertising has always bullied women, but this is something more insidious. I have watched the spindly, starved creature – the child ballet dancer – who was, for many years, the accepted ideal, walking down the Paris runways in so much make-up you could miss the signs of malnutrition. It was an ideal designed to induce enough self-hatred that women would shop to be rid of it.

Always bullied, really? Not, welcomed them to the "mainstream"? You know I've never found this sort of rhetoric remotely plausible, not even when I first heard it as a child. Then I assumed I'd catch on eventually. Not so. 

My view is simpler, advertisers strive to shift the product of those who pay them. Haute Couture is well known to be a province of middle and upper class folk. Fashion uses thin models to sell their clothes as female curves were felt to distract from the rags they display. In terms of its mores, its an outgrowth of middle and upper class sentiments and ideals, of what they aspire to be.

Middle and upper class [slim] women complain about this by shooting the messenger, thin women and their bodies, but what they're really complaining about is not winning at thinning. They don't want to dismantle this system of "unattainable bodies", they want to win at being the it-girl. They're uneased about that so they re-route their complaint. Rather than examine their own feelings.

If this is about poor old innocent women being made unhappy bad men in advertising, why does the notion of having something that works for all women not really interest these complainers? Winning wouldn't be exclusive then would it? You can see this in the elitism of Tanya types in her desperately trying to have her celery and munch it too, trying to be underhand in exhorting everyone to keep fat women in their place, hidden.  

This sort of argument as it is presented is dead on its auto-dialled arse. Fat phobia is ruthlessly exposing it and others,

Recovery depends not on...... personal responsibility and seeing the truth.

Personal responsibility and seeing the truth eh? What's personally responsible about insisting your mind is in the control of advertisers? That they dictate your view of yourself? If you are so personally responsible, why don't you own your mind? Either you like the perfume etc., advertised, or you don't. If you do buy it-through personally responsibly earning sufficient funds- if you dont, leave it be. 

Why are you so oppressed by images folks trying to sell you stuff use? I'm waiting for you to tell me again in a way that doesn't require you to do/be the opposite of what you insist fat women are/are failing to be. Have at it TanTan.

the truth is not so pretty; it is unease that sells clothes and bags and perfume and cosmetics as redemption

What uneases you, eases us? Presumably that is the distance between refinement and erm, being as common as fat. How does feminism make sense if women differ so fundamentally?

The fat-acceptance movement, which says that any weight is healthy if it is yours, is no friend to women, even if it does seem to have found a friend in Nike.

FAM says pretty much what Tanya said in her 2008 piece, "In defence of our fatties, let them eat cake".

For many months now, it has been clear that I'm at war with society. Or rather, that society is at war with me. Call me paranoid if you must but everywhere I look, I am denounced, oppressed and scolded. According to the advertising industry, I am unattractive; men don't want me. Or if they do, they certainly won't tell their friends about it. Clothing shops don't cater for me. In fact, they detest me. In Bond Street, I am literally waved away from the racks of precious clothes.

Well.....

...the Kim Kardashian body – was even weirder, and worse. It’s both fat and thin – a pornographic body designed by gamers – and, if you are mad enough to want it, is only really achievable by surgery and sleeping in the gym.

Those hating fat women's bodies invariably like to go in hard on other women's bodies-they're demonstrating their fairness. Word to them, spreading your mysognist gaze to other bodies, isn't saving you. I mean, "pornographic body"? Your guess is as good as mine.

She obviously does want FAT women to hate themselves for what they see in the looking glass. That doesn't sound good at all. It would be bad enough if you said you wanted women to hate themselves on account of their looks. Picking out specific women somehow sounds like trying to creep through a squeaking door. The feminist notion of "sisterhood" ergo, all women and feminism itself is on the ropes.

But to have control over your body you must first know it; to be oblivious is not to be happy, unless you are a child.

Oblivious to what hun? It's called FAT acceptance, is thin now spelled f-a-t?

To know your body is not by any means to hate it, Tanya knows this, but how to advocate for women to be pressed into doing something by making them feel like shit about themselves until they keep doing it: for some, whilst complaining any such discomfiture oppresses women, without seeming to be a sell-out biche?

Dear o' lorrr, it's a conundrum I don't envy. 

Suffice it to say again, this could all be avoided by finding the proper way to alter bodyweight rather than trying to uphold discomfort to drive people into repeating failure and deepening despair. But people like Tanya don't seem to want that either.