Kate Harding has a commenter who, to paraphrase, said that fatties ought to just TRY to lose weight because then we wouldn’t be fat.And also that s/he is disgusted by the fat acceptance movement because, hey, we just won’t admit that we are lazy and that is why we are fat.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
A friend of mine on livejournal related a Margaret Cho bit; apparently when Cho saw a racial slur on a bumper sticker it made her so mad she just pulled up beside the car and screamed AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! at them.
That is pretty much my response to Kate’s commenter. Also, this:
I think the larger (ha, I crack me up) point that njnjnj misses is this:
I DON’T HAVE TO PLEASE YOU!
ZOMG, I don’t CARE if you don’t like how I look as long as *I* am happy with my body. I don’t CARE if you believe I am fat because of genetics or because I am a lazy lard ass. I don’t CARE if you think I ought to be spending all my time exercising.
RARGH!
It is none of your goddamn business and it’s just another way to justify hatred.
SERIOUSLY. This is the thing that gets me every single time. Someone, for whatever reason, doesn’t like looking at fat people and so they think that opinion ought to mean something more than it does. They think that opinion defines reality.
Let me tell you, if opinion defined reality, there would be a LOT more rhinestones all over everything. Because I think rhinestones make just about everything better.
If opinion defined reality, we would be born with pink hair and we’d be able to pee in different colors just because it would be cool.
If opinion defined reality, Bush would not be our president here in the U.S.
If opinion defined reality, I’d be able to make a living making things into other things.
The fat acceptance movement, from my perspective, has a really simple goal: to help people realize that fat people? ARE PEOPLE. And, as such, deserve just as much respect and consideration as any other person.
It’s not anti-thin. It’s not about convincing everyone that fatties are hot. It’s not about “justifying” why it’s okay to be fat.
Because you know what? Even if fat were the death sentence people want us to believe it is, even if it WERE a moral indicator of badness, even if it were based solely on someone being a lazy glutton, it still wouldn’t be okay to target fat people for discrimination.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
20 Comments
well put rotund. it is no one’s fucking business, and acting like it is is a way to make the fatphobic feel superior. if that is what you need, get a fucking submissive for your dominant role play. leave my fat ass alone.
Oh, jeez. Way for that person to just universally assume that everyone who is fat is fat because duh, they’ve never tried to lose weight.
Sooo. I’m fat because I was just MAKING UP those four years I exercised for an hour to two hours a day? And I was LYING when I said I only ate about a thousand calories a day (because we all know that fat people are a bunch of lying, gluttonous pigs).
How is it possible for these people to so consistently ignore reality? What color is the sky on their planet?
And, more importantly, how can this person fit their foot in their mouth, what with their head being where it is?
A sideshow contortionist has nothing on this asshat.
Yeah, Amanda (and TR, and everyone else), don’t you love it when people tell you you don’t exist? Or that you must have dreamt that you ate that little and exercised that much and didn’t get thin? AAAAAAAAAAAA! is right.
Um…wthere’s little I can say that accurately sums it up except- What the blue fuck is wrong with people?
They aren’t the only one, Sarah. You’d be amazed at how many trolls think the problem with fat people is that they’ve never tried to lose weight. Really, its so widespread that its more than just easily dismissed trolls who pull that act. So many “authorities” basically say the same thing: “Say, what if fat people stopped trying to be so fat? Then they wouldn’t be fat, right?” Its a delusion so divorced from reality, one scarecely knows how to respond.
Ummmmm… but what I usually take from your commentary is that you ARE trying to justify and validate being fat. And I further extrapolate that you CHOOSE not to change, that maybe you could but you don’t want to and you don’t want anybody telling you they think you ought to. And “anybody” includes doctors.
As always, I enjoy your posts, and this topic is a big deal to me as I just dealt with one of my students saying he’d ran into his ex-girfriend and she was fat and ugly. And I stopped him and said, wait a minute, did she look any different in the face? He said no. So I point blank nailed his butt to the wall for making fat=ugly.
My point? Shit like this happens all the time because people don’t think.
by the by, I’d love to pee a rainbow of colors.
Actually, Some Lady, what I’m trying to do is say, you know what? It is bullshit when people treat me (and anyone else) like a bad person for being fat.
You know, I really want a big fucking blinking sign that says, “Everytime I try to lose weight, I wind up fatter. So I stopped and decided to just be healthy and accept my body as it is.”
And, you know, other people can think I ought to change all they want. But I don’t think it’s right to make that a social mandate – many people ought to change many things, in my opinion, and don’t and that’s fine.
Seriously, you come to my blog and leave a comment and don’t attach a name. So why, really, why should your opinion, your desire for me to change matter to me at all?
Researchers are finding that fat has nothingg to do with health. Meanwhile, doctors ignore real problems in order to harrangue patients about their weight. My fat does not cause me to be allergic to dust mites, for example, yet doctors ignored my allergies for years because it was much more important to them to tell me I was fat.
As if I don’t already know, right?
I’ve tried changing, Some Lady. The vast majority of fat people have tried and tried and tried. Some of us have made ourselves sick we’ve tried so hard. Some people have tried so hard it killed them. No amount of trying hard is going to make me thin.
Ah, you got a visit from the douchehound of the day yourself, TR! Congratulations!
To me, this is one of the clearest ways that fat acceptance is tied to feminism: my body does not exist for your benefit. Period. That’s true whether you want to ogle me or whether you want me to pop out millions of babies or whatever. My body is mine. Stay the fuck off it.
I hope “Some Lady” is prepared to “justify and validate” why she’s a brunette (or a blonde or a redhead), why she wears the shoe size she does, why she’s as tall as she is, why her nose looks that way. Why doesn’t she just *choose* to change her body till she looks just like Angelina Jolie?
Some lady is Some kind of irrelevant, really.
Actually I just tried to state my question in a very straightforward way and didn’t inject it with any value judgments. I was hoping for some clarification, not snarky attitude.
Your posts and responses always seem very angry and snarky and I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to do here. From my perspective, you seem to make value judgments against people you criticize for making value judgments. I guess there’s something I don’t understand here. I’d ask you a question or two but I prefer not to get picked on or called names.
I prefer not to post my name and information on the Internet.
Is Some Lady even reading the same blog? I’ve never gotten “angry” from TR, except maybe when, you know, things are really effing infuriating. Like the comment that sparked this entry.
Anger can be appropriate. Too bad it’s considered just as unseemly for a person to be justifiably angry as it is for her to be . . . well . . . fat.
I guess I’ll just go on being fat, angry, and unseemly, rather than hush and play nice and lose some effing weight. You know, I really get more done that way.
And, to Sweet Machine, re: your first paragraph . . . YES, thank you for articulating that.
I am under no obligation to please the world with my body. Whether that means having six kids or losing sixty pounds, others’ expectations concerning aspects of my life that do not involve or affect them are all irrelevant bullshit. The intrusive nature of the thin=good/fat=bad argument is, indeed, closely linked to the bias that has made feminism a necessity. Our bodies are our own, not a public commodity.
I hope that was at least a little articulate; I’m going on about three hours’ sleep here.
Some Lady, what you need to understand is that, while you might not intend something, in the context you are writing – a fat acceptance blog as an anonymous commenter – your words will be interpretted a certain way. If you truly aren’t intending any sort of value judgment, then I’m sorry you are being caught up in that net, but please consider things from our perspective – that is, as a group of people who have, over the years, been everything from mildly mistreated to horrifically abused because of our weight and our position on body politics issues.
For the record, also, I haven’t picked on you or called you names.
And I don’t sit around and assume that people who hate fat people are, oh, insert adjective of choice here. I look at their actions and say, oh, they have these misconceptions. Rarely do I believe anyone is behaving in both and aware and malicious fashion.
Our culture, on the other hand, is a different matter. Because, yeah, I look at how fat is perceived in our culture and I see something wrong. And that IS a value judgement. Determining that anything is right or wrong is a value judgement.
As for snark, I generally shy away from trying to deliberately be mean, which is what I interpret snark to be. I’m much more concerned with building people up than tearing other people down. I have stated time and again, and will continue to do so, that no one ought to build their own self-image on the backs of other people. Judge yourself for what you are, not for what you aren’t and not for what someone else is or isn’t. Freedom built on the oppression of other people is not freedom.
And as for angry, well, I AM angry. And that’s okay. But the majority of my entries aren’t about that. If anything, I’m often sad because something incredibly sad has happened. I think it’s sad when people are mistreated because of their weight and I am sad when people are mean to me.
Perhaps you are mistaking confidence and positive self-image for snark and anger – often times when a woman is the former she is accused of the latter because women are supposed to be soft-spoken and meek.
If you genuinely have questions, ask them. But don’t make assumptions about the answers.
I was just trying to sort out your general position on things and I tried to lay it out straight. I was called a “douchehound” in comment #10. And yes I get an overall tone of anger from this blog. I’ve only visited a few times but I’m going to stop. Seems like all you do is bitch about people who make you mad and cut down anybody who doesn’t exactly match your opinion.
Some Lady, it is supposed that you are the same person that left the original offending comment in Kate’s blog. Hence the using of the name to link you to that. If that isn’t so, say so and I’m sure you’ll receive apologies from the person/people who dubbed you thus.
As for the rest, though you’ve only visited a few times, I think you have not been reading. Because this blog is absolutely not about bitching about people. We talk fashion, make up, social activism, cultural trends…. I’ve even offered up a review of a television show. It’s a many-layered parfait, here at The Rotund.
As for the rest… if you don’t believe fat people are people, too, well, frankly, yeah, you don’t belong here. That’s the only opinion that I even begin to hope we all share.
Just a comment in defense on SomeLady (sort of). If you change her semantics a tad, she is not that far off from what i take from your site. She misses the fact that you don’t think being fat has to be justified or validated and takes it as you justifying and validating. She misses the fact that you choose not to kill your self changing what can’t be changed. But she is right that you don’t want anybody to tell you to change.
Maybe she was particularly bad at explaining herself?
Also, I would just like to say I love reading your blog. Sometime you are sad and sometimes you are mad. But I only see you mad when any reasonable person would be mad. And I count on you and all your lovely cohorts to keep me sane. As much as i agree with all of you, i sometimes still fight that inner voice saying “but YOU should be thinner” and it helps to drown that bitch out with your and the other’s posts.
What you said about having rhinestones all over everything in your reality, reminded me of the episode of Say it Ain’t Sew on Foster’s. Where Madame Foster is walking around a sewing store, and she goes down an isle and excitedly yells “Bedazzlers!”.
Heh, I *got* fat by dieting. I started trying to lose those 25 pounds I gained in college (10 of which I really, really needed) and ended up, guess what? Losing a few pounds, then gaining those back, plus some.
I’m now (at 30) a full 60 pounds heavier than I was when I first started dieting at 23, and, due to eating a normal, healthy amount of food (i.e., until I’m full but not overfull) and having a more strenuous job, I’m feeling better (and sexier and sometimes thinner) than when I was 16 and 127 lbs.
So, basically, thanks for ALL of this. ^^