- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.world
Reason number 5,386 to delete your Reddit account and encourage your friends & loved ones to do the same.
Reason number 5,386 to delete your Reddit account and encourage your friends & loved ones to do the same.
I do find it concerning just how many people talk about things like this without ever challenging their fundamental understanding of social norms. A lot of you do just assume you’re smarter than me, which is funny, and I wonder if you’ve ever actually read anything on fatphobia and the arguments for its recognition.
Bigotry is difficult for liberals to understand because they typically want to recognize it as individualized actions of aggression like calling someone a slur or being mean about someone’s weight. Have you considered for a moment that you are vulnerable to the laundering of values that promote dehumanization and genocide through vectors of “bigotry” which you don’t take seriously, such as fatness? You used the word “curable,” which is very convenient for me as it is a good demonstration of how this topic is medicalized (we can ignore the well-documented discrimination against fat people in medical settings for now), and specifically how it is pathologized. When something is pathologized, that means that whatever is seen as wrong with it is always relative to an idealized, “positive” thing; a fat body is bad (unhealthy) because it is not good like a thin body (healthy). Regardless of the medical science behind this construction (of which I’m sure you also have not read as it is well established by this point that fatness is not necessarily unhealthy relative to other factors), this has manifested socially as a vector of discrimination exactly because of the perception that this is an illness that is cured by willpower. Conveniently in an neoliberal culture, an illness that materializes laziness, poor self-control, and general moral degeneracy reinforces an individualism where individual people are responsible for the effects of their material conditions; i.e. you can choose to be fat the same way you can choose to be poor.
Because fatness is not a recognized vector for discrimination in the same way that racism and sexism is, it is an important site of scholarly discourses exactly because of how effective it is at laundering ableism and classism; along with the fact that it is a measurably oppressed and vulnerable group based on the research I allude to above. Liberals like you don’t question any of this, and then readily engage in the fascist rhetoric I am criticizing in this comment with the assumption that you are doing the righteous thing by promoting bodily health and dissuading any claim that a person’s fatness is not related to their moral quality of character. It is not about, “body-positivity” any more than anti-racism and anti-queerphobia is even though those forms of oppression similarly relate to the subordination of particular bodily attributes to others. That oppressive ideal of thinness is inextricably linked to ideas of whiteness, and “fitness” in a very fascist understanding of the natural world and human evolution.
Hope that explains some of it to you.
Being fat is objectively unhealthy and in fact a chronic disease. It brings with it high blood pressure, chronic fatigue, higher mortality rates in younger people, diabetes, higher rates of heart disease, blood clots, arthritis, strokes, poor sleep, and a hundred other things. And it’s in fact a chronic disease that can be cured. Without drugs.
There’s a reason the first thing they do at a doctor’s office is weigh you. It’s a simple metric that is a strong predictor of overall health.
I’m not saying this as an indictment against fat people. I’m not saying it’s okay to fat shame. I’m saying this as a simple fact that being fat is unhealthy and has real consequences. I am also saying it is morally wrong to say it’s okay being fat. Saying being fat is okay teaches people that health does not matter and they go on to live shorter more painful lives.
I don’t think I’m smarter than you. I think you’re over thinking this.
I think it is unironically very funny to assert something is real just because it’s normalized in medicine. As we all know, medsci is historically very conscious of social and material conditions and is not subject to the distortions of the classes of people who have access to that authority, and no new research is relevant ever. I guess that means black women really do feel less pain, trans people only started existing forty years ago, and skulls can actually teach us about racial intelligence (people were arguing for phrenology until the late twentieth century). That you’re arguing this during a period where eating disorders are very visible in popular culture is also just too perfect. Could you then, cite any articles or studies you’ve engaged with to build your oh-so-well-informed-and-underthought worldview? I have just a few off the top of my list:
The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to your Health, Campos, 2004.
Yamawaki, Niwako, Christina Riley, Claudia Rasmussen, and Mary Cook, “The Effects of Obesity Myths on Perceptions of Sexual Assault Victims and Perpetrators’ Credibility,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 33 (4): 662-85, 2018.
Ramos, Salas, X, M Forhan, and A. M Sharma, “Diffusing Obesity Myths,” Clinical Obesity, 4(3), 2014.
Pollack, Catherine C, “Characterizing the Prevalence of Obesity Misinformation, Factual Content, Stigma, and Positivity on the Social Media Platform Reddit Between 2011 and 2019: Infodemiology Study,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24 (12), 2022.
Lindeman, Tracey, Bleed: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care, 2024.
https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/a23-refcomm-d-annotated.pdf (2023 American Medical Association House of Delegates statement against the use of BMI).
There’s some social and medical criticisms of the concept of obesity as well as how it is measured and medicalized.
This is all of course besides the fact that, regardless of whether obesity is understood properly, its presence in this original joke is in fact still fascist and still functions to normalize the fundamental values of fatphobia as they intersect with transphobia, racism, misogyny, and ableism. “I think you’re over thinking this,” is a staple phrase of fascism. Maybe you should fucking think a bit.
You’re right. We shouldn’t make jokes at their expanse.
Okay chud. Let’s see your audience’s reaction:
(See how you can make fun of them without making fun of vulnerable groups? its so easy when you aren’t a bigot)