Vibes Cartel

"Fategories – Understanding “Smallfat Fragility” & the Fat Spectrum"

Over time, as fat activism has become increasingly intersectional and as communities aim to center the most marginalized in their ranks, people have developed labels that describe where they fall on the fat spectrum. 

Crusaders got there first: overweight, obese, morbidly obese, super morbid obese.

“White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.” 

Like;

“I know this is a sensitive topic,” you say to me as I sit on your examination table. Don’t go there, please don’t go there, can we just get through one appointment without this conversation? We had this conversation last time and it was so awful it had me in frustrated tears for hours after my appointment. ...But you go there anyway. “We need to talk about your weight.” 

Despite being able to think about it from a conscious mind, years of experience, knowing this talk is out of the arse, expecting it, preparing for it, rehearsing it, the minimal stress of this idiotic jabber provokes,

This is a topic that can drive me to tears. It’s because I get so angry and frustrated that all I can do is cry. The anger chokes me, burns in my chest, and wells up in my eyes. 

Why still in this same unchanged state? Such invariably low tolerance, such "fragility" as you say? Just because slimz act like its valid, doesn't mean we have to, we choose to, by acting as if we have to. The person dealing this is unmoved, the torn up insides are in the target. How can you still feel this way about something you should recognise as outside yourself, coming from someone else's ignorant take?

Defecting/leaving. This is really common in groups I’m in. When this conversation gets to be too much for the smaller people in the group, they leave… and often form their own group for themselves without realizing how delightful the irony is when they have been complaining about there being too much division in the group based on size and privilege. 

Aware of this or not, they're running from the previous pattern of dealer indifference with torn up target. When someone tries to put you in a framing that threatens your mental and/or physical health you E-X-I-T.

Rather than do this, fat people would rather seek to stay in this same state by seeking to drain anyone they can latch onto, of all available energy, rather than recognise their exhaustion with this shit as reason to walk away.

From an unpublished blog post called [I am] "Not Body Positive";

Body positivity is what newer fat activists threw away fat acceptance for. It had the glamour of slim women. Or should I say the absence of taint of 'fat'? That's more accurate. 

I expected fatz to be ready walk out of slim people's imagination from the beginning. 'Obesity' and compulsory CRIWL was slim people's, we'd submitted totally as it was presented by medics and scientists as "diagnosis", we'd rinsed that out and now we were done and could leave to discover our own consciousness that had been submerged to oblivion, under this rule.

That turned out to be as much of a non-starter as it is today. To do anything but stay living inside slim people's imagination is unthinkable, for the same reasons those subsequent activists wanted to be "body positive" to avoid "fat". Whether people want it by being in proximity or internally via hoping to lose weight, fat people are chasing slim people's vibe.

The bopoistas learnt the logical conclusion of that premise the hard way, as they would not allow us in FA to tell them, beforehand, they didn't care for us at all, then. Later, a couple admitted that they heard about bopo through the media and were moved to get involved in that, not fat acceptance which they couldn't relate to at the time. 

I didn't notice any greater difference between fatter or less fat in this. The default maintained in all fat people, to some degree or other, is humanness resides outside themselves, in the "system", in slims, not in each and every human being regardless of size.

Stepping out of slim people's mindset is seen as somehow stepping out of reality, merely because slim people bother to speak what they feel, even though it is horseshit.

Once slimz are out of the picture, we easily dispense with the burden, distortion, energy-suck of privileging them and just act like human beings, according to our own internal reading. We get it then.

So it is in us to do this, but we consistently refuse, hence I told people to sit with whatever discomfort is preventing them from accessing this necessary breakthrough. This stasis of, ability but refusal to exercise it is what exhausts and drives people numerous good people away. It is an

Knowing fat people have proven time and again that they can act in accord with their own knowledge before, during and after bopo/fat acceptance just beats up anyone who tries to act in solidarity with them, whatever their size. That Jameela Jamil better be as shallow as this, for her own sake. 

Nothing can shake this refusal to drop out of upholding this status quo, whilst greater trivialities are highlighted as substitute activity. "Oppression" is offered as reason. Only when slim people are around though.

Fat people are not "oppressed" we've stayed if not preserved the same sunken state we were in before we realised what was up. 

As for internecine struggles, the difference in reaction to that doctor versus the smug superiority towards other fat people, suggests no comparison. Fat people are the amongst the biggest fat phobes, the only way we truly press each other is subservience to what has brought us to this low point. Even some haters have listened better and even more respectfully, with their fat phobia than many fat activists.

I've even heard fat activists report to me my own insights heard from the mouths of trolls, as having come from trolls.

Now  crawling along this blog like bots, mangling and misusing my work unethically to support positions I do not support, uncredited of course, praising others for lifting my own efforts, usually on the usual basis of a race based sense of entitlement.

Fitting centuries and on-going murder, plunder under the justification/enabler of white supremacy into not fat/slim but fat and fatter? Doesn't exactly show sound judgement and a deep and instinctive sense of proportion does it?

Hardly inspiring of confidence that anything said about the more opaque mission of reading and perception of emotion can be trusted without reservation.

Fatphobia is a systemic issue, meaning it is not about how one feels or an internal experience but a system that is in place to grant some people privilege while oppressing others. 

Stop supporting what is openly wishing to tear you up and find the hell out.

When you are as unmoved by the performance of "weight" talk as those dealing, you'll know better.