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.

Pile-On Your Voice

Okay, enough of this Jamelia pile-on. This is later than it should have been and things have kind of moved on-in more ways than one- but I still felt the need to say it.

Jamelia was raring to go and didn't even catch the warning of the chair, Ruth Langsford when she mocked her suggesting segregating small and plus sizes out of the high street, into specialist backwaters. She felt otherwise was facilitating unhealthiness-if you are unhealthy, you should feel unhappy, said she.

I was enraged up to that. I'd imagined remonstrating with her and it wasn't nice. That last bit surprised me though, that's exactly what the @besity construct is for. To place and keep fat people in a state of permanent dis-ease. I usually dismiss whining about how difficult it is to broach this subject, but I'm begining to wonder whether there's too much of a contrast between the acceptance of medicalized notions of @besity and what that really means.

The social media pile-on changed the way I felt. It's one of those cases where you end up, not so much feeling sorry for the target, but recognizing they're taking too much flak for the wrong reasons, i.e. not a white coat.

That Jamelia could so accurately, however unwittingly depict the essence of a crusade, reminded me of the instigators and propagators of this whole canard. I'm not even sure I can say she's a bigot. A tool of the establishment, yes, but she did not stand on casting most of the usual aspersions about fat people being of bad character.

She even started with her belief that people should celebrate themselves, be able to look good etc., and yeah, I do believe that because it has a deep cultural underpinning, especially in resistance against racism's degradation of Black people's humanity. Along with meme of celebrating life.

Like everyone else though she ends up not being able to end the thought she started with and going back over it. That's caused by the inherent bankruptcy of the @besity construct. It's not compatible with humanism. When people eventually catch on that they're doing this. I doubt they'll be best pleased.

As I've spent a lot of time explaining how fat people are taking it for everyone's disappointment about the distance between their internalized abstraction of humanness and their actual humanness, you may get why my ire was stopped in its tracks.

To those who called her out I ask, where are you when all the usual bullshit is going down with so called 'scientific' findings? I don't ask that you take fat haters on directly, on the contrary, I see your reluctance/disinclination as a positive virtue. The exposure of their irrelevance is long overdue.

All I say is learn to keep making your presence felt and your voice heard in this way. Don't read comments that upset you. Just address your feelings to articles and do not be intimidated by any so-called bandying of science. Speak your mind, i.e. Where is my voice in this? Why am I continually shut down/ sidelined from my own life? How does this help me? When are you going to talk to actual people about how they feel/the effects of all this on them and their health? etc.,

I'm sure you can come up with waaaay better. Just whatever you feel you want to say or what you want to be heard. A couple of lines is more than good. Say something of your feelings. Maybe even how much those close to you are on at you.

How long they've been on and you. How long you've been on at yourself and what that has done to you.

Pile-on your real voices wherever cold dehumanizing @besity is banded about as if its some theoretical abstract. Make it impossible to forget this is an assault on real people. Make others hear from you. And try not to take @besity noise personally, or feel you have to answer any personal questions or justify yourself. Do not be on trial. You are not on the witness stand. You do not have to defend yourself. Say that if you want. "I'm not here to beg or plead or persuade you or any. Just to say my peace thank you, bye."

In fact, start asking other people questions. Ask them if they'd appreciate having to answer to everyone, justify their existence, whatever. Move it out of weight and on to other examples. And don't be discouraged if you run out of words or don't know what to say. Let go and come another time. Learn to put words to your feelings away from the heat, so that when its on, you can garner some thoughts.

For bit of context, here's virtually the whole conversation, ignited by this programme;



The whole discussion such as it was, was much of a muchness, consisting of participants repeatedly making points and going on to contradict them in the same breath/sentence that's a construct-related cognitive distortion -thought or sentence bending as I call it. 

i.e. "Diets don't work unless you keep on them." The end doesn't simply contradict, it jettisons the initial recognition that they don't actually work.

The slightly different tack here was to focus on "young girls" who were in their estimation, shockingly fat.  A grab-your-smelling-salts, size 20-22, as opposed to a size 14-16, so its not as if we're being unreasonable. 

On the one hand, it was recognized that this was about tapping an undeserved  market, on the other that the glamour images of beautiful women used to sell these clothes would hide the truth of 'obesity' which was physical infirmity and health breakdown years later on.
 
This may portend a slight shift in assault. That middle aged spread is one thing, but being fat at a young age is another. It's also increasing the concentration on the most visibility fat BMI 40 +. It's weird to see fat phobes trying to actually think. To recognize on some level that here are real human beings whom they have to attempt to persuade in some way.

Rather than their usual triumphalist rah, rah, rah obesitah. This represents a chink of vulnerability. A sense that things maybe slipping away from them. Now powerful forces, in the pursuit of lucre most filthy are threatening to bypass their tyranny of unthink.

They're not quite so cocky.