Weight judgement rebounds

Are people stuck in the land that hates fat ever capable of joining up their thinking? Gwyneth Paltrow has apparently decided to avoid feeding her children carbohydrates and this has amazingly caused consternation among some nutritionists, yawhn.

Before you lose the will to live, fat hating food activist (how many of them aren't?) Joanna Blythman isn't happy. It seems the weight shaming cemented in the public consciousness by a certain crusade is being applied to the wrong targets;

Paltrow is putting her children, aged eight and six, "at risk of nutrient deficiencies", warns one. Her children "won't be able to think straight as their brain won't be functioning", says another.

Now where have we heard that kind of thing before? Not that I'm dismissing or concurring just noting- the same points are made in the same partial and biased manner. Setting out to provoke, upset and manipulate reactions, rather than to illuminate. 

Why do those who are slim and/or their supporters think they can bang on ceaselessly, defining fat people's weight as a record of habits morals and character-as diagnosis-yet take for granted that this will somehow not be used on them?

The weight spectrum as risk factor is U-shaped. 

That's kind of how the concept of privilege works. It's not, the atmosphere's neutral and some have gold, silver, brass or nothing in their pockets to help them along. It's more that the atmosphere is unforgiving. Some get shielded from that, others less so.

The momentum of the attempt to classify and regulate fat bodies is already known to be rolling over everyone-to those who are looking at it the right way. The extent to which this use of weight has been re-inforced constantly, is too much to remain contained solely in fat people.

It's one of the reasons why FA people have been so shocked by the hostility of those who usually tend to promote the idea of united we stand, divided we fall. 

Disconnection from fat people puts empathy in a stupour. This means others fail to make the right connection between what they're going along with, when it starts on them. Often they react by pointing fingers at fatness. That always feels so right;

....it is even observed that Paltrow's children are thin – shock horror! – as if this was automatically cause for concern. So accustomed are we to the sight of overweight children, thin ones are beginning to look unusual.

Typically sophorific lack of insight. 

Casting Paltrow in the role of the neurotic celeb, selfishly inflicting her own faddy and dangerous eating habits on her poor starved offspring, has undeniable appeal, especially for those of us who aren't rich or pretty and who struggle daily with our own excess weight.

Right, if you replaced the relevant parts with fat or 'obese' would it make any difference? JB bemoans this critique of Paltrow's book;

"The book reads like the manifesto to some sort of creepy healthy-girl sorority."

The feeding of fat children is often portrayed in this kind of sinister way, it is frustrating, divisive and unnecessary. Though frankly, healthism can sometimes be quite odd if you look at it more objectively and I say that as someone who used to be very into that way of eating.

Many haven't noticed this because it rationale has had a free pass for a long time. Never has it been continually subject to its own critique  of diets it considers less than optimum.

As for carb free/low carb I agree with the sentiment that going without is unlikely to do to do any more harm won't than any other faddy diets. That is, the effects will eventually be seen no doubt, if they stick with it. I daresay it's the usual case of a different set of upsides and downsides in the end. 

How to think progressively

The European Union is planning to vote tomorrow on a proposal brought by Dutch Euro politico Kartika Liotard. Its intent, reflected in the title is to "eliminate gender stereotyping in the media", it isn't legally binding;

whereas stereotypes still exist at all levels of society and in all age groups, affecting how we perceive each other through oversimplified assumptions based on socially constructed norms, practices and beliefs that are often cultural, and religion-based and -fostered, and which reflect and perpetuate underlying power relations

This move to ban pornography is seen by many progressives as an attack on civil liberties.

Okay, I'm sure you spotted a gap there. The document lists 69 points (oh sauce) aiming to improve the status and opportunities of women. Part of that focuses on the stereotypical portraits of girls and women relayed in various forms of media from advertising to the mainstream advance of pornography;

Calls on the EU to conduct research into the links between child pornography and adult pornography and the impacts on girls, women, boys and men, as well as the relationship between pornography and sexual violence. Calls on the Member States to establish independent regulation bodies with the aim of controlling the media and advertising industry and a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls; 

The latter is what seemed to most excite the sensibilities of progressive civil libertarians who see it as a slippery slope obviously, given it's supposed to be about ending the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes especially to supple minded youths.

Porn's okay because there's no evidence to prove it encourages sexual aggressiveness toward women. So phew, no cause for concern there. In fact, it would be a bad idea if that was being planned because apparently wanking, decreases the likelihood of sexual abuse. Convicted sex abusers say so. 

Pornography is not just the commercial proposition of anything for a toss, it's a social, nay feminist good. Keeping folk safe(r) from the more harmful elements in society. Free speech tends to go with it too.  

Large size sugary drinks on the other hand have a proven link with porn unfriendly obeastiness. Regulating these isn't any kind of attack on freedom. That's just some propaganda put about by cynical mega global food corporations. New research finally shows;

sugary drinks were found to interact with genes that affect weight, significantly amplifying any genetic risk for obesity

So there.

Could there be potential for agreement here?

whereas the alcohol industry, with its vast investment in the marketing of its products, strongly contributes to perpetuating gender stereotypes and the sexualisation of girls and women.

 Booze, drinking calories;

On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor.

No way then, LOL!

What we have here is a dilemma

Well there's even more to this than I thought. In the discussion accompanying Lesley's post, the threat of a fat body becomes looming spectre haunting beauteous slimz.  Pressing their conscience into giving up tha pity sex. We are this way due to being denied sex on account of our looks. Forever yearning for undeserved shags, craving the beauty that so rejects us.

Obeasty is modern mythology.

This seems to be personifying the unspoken distress of all the people out there having sex with those they no longer desire that way.

It's touched in the talk about faking orgasms. It cross ones mind. Often it's volunteered apropos of very little from some men as "We don't want to be forced to find fat people attractive."

The extent of this distress and the determined characterization of fat people as angling for pity sex- something many feel is burdensome to resist-speaks to a need to express upset, without facing implications.

So much for fatness being caused by people using food to block or blunt emotion. If that's the case, it's unnecessary effort. Good news for "binge eaters" and "food addicts". You don't have to "eat your emotions" anymore, just hide from them like everyone else! I wonder if I can patent that as a cure? I'm guessing at no.

The easy prevalence of this theme displays the underlying rules of sexual exchange, or "rape culture" as it's evasively termed. If any who are seen as radical try to take this on, they're labelled fanatics or feminazi's, such is the extent of reluctance.

Despite the above, I still couldn't believe people were framing this was men v women. That was stink bomb distraction of sex-positive-prude Rowan Pelling ed. of "The Decadent Handbook: for the modern libertine". Hiding her own attitudes behind those associated solely with men. 

When for many fat people, men have been the ones who let them know they were desirable. In some cases women taught them they weren't. The amount of fat people who've been used and abused by that belief. Degrading self worth can be the quickest route to being fodder for those on the look out for damage they can turn to their advantage.

It wouldn't have made any difference if the positions were swapped (I know). If it was a wife speaking of her husband. The issue is a person being turned into an adjunct of someone's, everyone's ideology. You know what feminists famously complain about.

Being defined solely in terms of other people's feelings, an object dancing to their tune. Without reference to their experience of themselves. Only concerned with how they must obey their honourable overlord/ess. Even expected to respond to questioning on why they want none of this. How can this feel like self ownership? Which if I'm right is a primary underpinning of agency. 

Exactly why is a partner suddenly turning into an obesity crusade drone supposed to be such a turn on for the fat person? You have both become mere servants of that. The one  who loves you and who you love suddenly is distanced from you because this is now more real to them than all that you've shared.

Who is this person? And who is it they wish to connect with anyway? You or their idea of you? I'm actually not saying that anyone shouldn't feel free to tell me they find my body off putting. I'm saying that changes my view of them too. Something crusaders don't get because this couldn't be articulated before. It was all pressed down, disassociation and added to the general sense of malaise many fat people feel.

Fat phobes need to realise their eyes of god pose is dead. There person involved, who is learning to value themselves more than the value accorded them by society. The one you're so lovingly trying to work. Like someone in a mixed relationship explaining that according to white supremacy, you aren't shit.

Sorry, love! I'm "hardwired" to use every advantage for my own person gain. Isn't that kind of red in tooth and claw sexy for you?

The pointed reference to the way thin privilege is seen as having shut down reasonable debate is worth a mention. i.e. "Isn't there one place left where we can tell the truth?"

Don't think I'm judging slimz. Fat people are apparently the last place for the "truth" and look at all it's brought; huge scientific advance, greater humanism, penetrating sociology and a widespread increase in the depth of understanding about human biology, amirite?  

Are fat women really supposed to say, boo when slim women autonomy is held to be porous? But tally ho if it's their own? Because we sort of aren't women? That was about the last straw for me and feminists not something as (relatively) trivial as fat phobia.

Whatever fails, I at least expect them to manage to be in favour of the liberation of women. Sometimes it's not women who reject feminists, but they who withdraw from women. If fatness means feminism doesn't work, then acknowledge it and modify theory accordingly. That's how feminism, happens.

Nor is fatness like personal hygiene, grooming, having a certain kind of haircut, freely scratching your pubes. Each one of those behaviours is the direct cause and cure of themselves. So, if you stop washing yourself- you are unwashed. Washing yourself, causes you to be washed, I can't make it much simpler. 

The equivalent in terms of fatness would the capacity to direct fat or not fat. Instead, in order to cease fatting, you're required to reduce your intake of food and increase expenditure of energy, both are indirect actions, that are supposed to lead to lowered and indefinitely maintained weight.

A habit of dressing in formal attire does not battle your inbuilt instinct for survival, both of those do. One directly, the other less so.

As for the 'self care'/health angle;

Since your spouse protests she 'likes being curvy', I would concentrate on the health issues at stake. 

 Subtle.

Why don't you tell her you feel exercise and a better diet would keep her longer on this planet by your side? Lead the way by taking her for runs or to the gym and by ordering healthier groceries and cutting down on booze.

Like a little doggy? 

Sex is also good for you. Not sexing could therefore be framed as 'self harm' not taking care of yourself. Is that convincing or indeed, edifying? Perhaps she could "lead the way" by starting off on her own and encouraging him to join in if he feels up to it. And if he doesn't hey, some women don't get vaginal orgasms anyhow.

Hey, is that the solution? Masturbation!!! Independently or parallel. I'm surprised Mz Kinky Boots didn't suggest such herself.

I'm such a reliever of agony.

Compassion Fatigue

We don't need to ask fat phobes if they've got any compassion, nothing so high falutin' is required. We are talking removing the deliberate suspension of common courtesy. I don't have one iota of compassion for a certain well known, repeated child sex abuser.

Yet when people started voicing their indifference to preserving his life, that it would be okay for him to be left to die, I instinctively drew the line. He is human and should be accorded the same rights to preserving his life as everyone else. As worthless as that life may be.

 Although it may sound a bit cheesy, there's a point where attempting to demean others demeans you in order to do it. In fact, it's quite possible that's pretty early on.

Knowing that requires no compassion whatsoever. Common decency or living up to your beliefs is not compassionate, it just feels too basic for that.

Such is the extent to which crude abuse of fat people is aired here, there and everywhere. Too often haters are flattered in appealing to their sympathetic side.When really they need to turn off their self elevating vitriol, that exists to advance themselves at the expense of someone else.

If this was one of those examples of pomposity about tax payers money BS. Then I'd say, they're plundering the mental wealth of others, leaving them to pick up the tab.

Your body is someone's libido

There's always been a dubious trope that prudishness is all about this. When the pinch faced prudery of fat phobes is cringe inducing and ill judged. As seems to be the law with fat phobes, they can't hear themselves.

There's something peculiarly sexless about someone who requires another to meet some exacting standard of physique, they no longer have merely in order for their groinal area to erm, come to life. Isn't there such a thing as an appetite for sex? Or is that just an affectation?

Either you're game or not. There's no way it's going to be all about another person. That kind of projection is the basis for behaving as if your sexual appetites are the responsibility of others provocation. Or not.

Adults are not just objects onto which sex occurs.

Some stirrings are supposed to come from within. Our expectations of our sexual desires may not always match the day to day reality in the long term.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting sex all that so much-or at all. If you've not managed to marry a thin person from a long line of lifelong thinz, then you'd better consider the possibility that your partner may gain weight. Turning it into an offense against you, is emotional blackmail.  

This line too many slimz are airing about how fat bodies are uncaring the fat person is about their fee fees needs to be quietly put to sleep and treated as a folly of the previously unaware.

Many of us realise, no one really cares about fatness. Obesitality (that's obesity + fatality) didn't start to bite until it was made all about slimz-in the guise of being all about fatz, as a cover. And boy are some of them riding that pony into the dust.

Give it a rest with your offended by someone's gut, I'm offended by your invasive and entitled prudery. Especially this Rowan Pelling who's made a career out of being........

....you guessed it, sex positive, what I hear when I hear that term? Similar to "pro-life".

What is it with these fat phobic "sex positives"? Positive for a chosen few in their own image alone? Fatz should just twiddle their thumbs (not a euphemism)? Become celibate?

I've never gone along with the idea that being bothered by looks is "shallow". It's the cultivation of extreme distress about looks, as if this makes one some kind of precious aesthete that I have little patience for. Especially when you complain that distress is being caused by the other person, rather than your own thinking.

A person is supposed to run around half starved and probably not becoming slim or for long. Yet this person can't get the hell over themselves? They cannot find a way to just calm down and chill the fug out and see if they feel the same way?

Because guess what? That's a whole lot more in your power than declaring war on your instinct to survive in the stupidest way aka weight loss dieting.  How on earth has it come to seem like the other way around?

No one should be pressuring anyone to have sex with anyone else. Equally, no one should be forced to try and become a lifestyle anorexic for someone else's cultivated distaste either.

Obviously negotiation and compromise is part of relationships. Thinking about getting into fitness, without having to disorder their eating, might be worth discussing. At the same time, the partner could take some time to get over nurturing this;

The fact is we are hardwired to find certain physical attributes attractive, and human nature means it can be difficult to over-look the loss of those qualities in our spouses.

Nope, the body is hardwired to resist and overthrow weight loss diets. That truly is fact.

Any female readers who feel this man is being over-judgemental should ask themselves whether they'd want to make love to their husbands if they had raging halitosis or huge beer bellies.

What? Bigger than mine? Comparing a person to halitosis is also pretty typical of this mindset. For people who demand so much for so little reason. They don't like to trouble their brains unduly.

The use of obesity

[Reblog]

I’m glad moves have been made to feed children properly. Ask yourself why that would ever be necessary. Tying these initiatives to ‘obesity’ means the underlying classism of writing off certain children and therefore people, is ignored.

The ethics of feeding children the industrial food effluent of the political classes cronies. i.e. Crony capitalism, is goes unqueried.

At least voice the deal society has done. The well-being and undermining of the health of children, for purportedly saving money. This should be done in order to insist so called advanced societies pledge never to do that again.

That they at least acknowledge this kind of proposition as a false economy. So that if say, the Right get in, they do not reverse these policies on the grounds that it interferes with their friends ability to offload dubious products on those under their charge.

Without at least being asked, how much money will cutting good practice for the poor “save”? What effect will that have on their health? Cost that and subtract it from your proposed “savings”, the result is your policy. Is that really a saving? That should be a common question for any attack on the poor under the guise of supposed cost cutting of budgets.

Obesity depoliticizes and obscures those who’ve already been subject to hard end of politricks.

Capitalism is theft

There's been a persistent strain in FA of apologizing to our bodies, or to ourselves. For all the hateful trash talk many of us have poured on. No, let's say all of us. Anyone who's accepted they're disease has indulged in hate speak against themselves.

I remember saying FA in part felt like an apologia to the child I was. Not an inner child, but in my memory. The one I unwittingly betrayed, whilst "doing right".

All this can be cathartic in some sense-though I'd say, do it whether it feels that way or not. To find again and keep the faith with yourself, in the face of such a hegemony of vitriolic disapproval, is worth doing.

In a way I pity those who will wait until the tide to fully turns. They'll not have the thought of knowing that they turned first. On their own, because they realized their own value. Through having devalued themselves for so long.

That though they could feel like they sold themselves out. They equally rescued themselves against the current.

And if you're assuming that it's unusual for "doing good" to be the problem you may be forgetting the old axiom "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Oftentimes, when you're trying to change course from some badness, of habit or ethics. You can waste a lifetime rooting out your sinfulness or moral failings. When often it's the good things you believe in that really nailed you in place.

It tends not to occur to look there.

Even now, I'm still bemused at the sheer extent of impropriety I was prepared to ascribe to my nascent self without question.

I can be very obedient, yes. But there's always been this ticking part of my mind that will question anything. Why did I never think, can  I really be this bad? What else backs it up?

I certainly saw flaws along the way with the mainstream diet weight hypothesis. But I promise you, never did it occur 'til well after my weight loss diet burnout crash, that there was anything untoward about the motives behind the diet weight hypothesis. Or that I might be worthy of some kind of case for the defence. Some mitigation or character statements.

If anything I was just bemused at how I could be sinning so badly, with so little effort, let alone intent. At one point in my teens, I actually became worried that I might be some kind of sociopath. How else could I have been trying this hard for this long (already) to so little end? Perhaps there was way more wrong than I assumed.

Nor did I question the lack of supporting evidence. I mean how bad(ass) would I or the average fat person have to be to ignore society's strong views on fatness, disregard what medical professionals, scientists and researchers were saying about being fat?

What everybody of all ages were so united in feeling. How would that not show up elsewhere? How could that possibly not be noted in a general insouciant disregard for rules and conventions?

Psssh, please.

All this is leading to the fact that a certain slimming outfit have picked up on this device and cheekily used this self apologia to flog the industrial food effluent they package as VCLD virtual starvation. Or like bariatric surgery without the gastric re-tailoring.

And incidentally shitheads, you really do need to stop claiming fat people are so full of blaming others. Do we call fatness a disease? Nope. An eating disorder? Nope. A mental illness? Nope, a "disability"? Nope, an addiction? Well, only some who believe solely in calories in/out.

Anything that's not nailed down.