One of the things activists get accused of, on a pretty regular basis by my observations, is not seeing/understanding/caring about “the other side.” What fails to be understood, there, is that it is entirely possible to see and understand and even sympathize with the other side while still utterly disagreeing and enforcing a standard in opposition to that side.
This gets demonstrated, time and again,on the fatshionista livejournal community (a post on my personal friends list started a discussion about this so there is no specific drama to link *grin*). I help mod the community. I call out body-hating language, issue warnings as appropriate, and otherwise uphold and enforce the community rules and standards.
There are many people (perhaps even many several!) who hate me as much as you can hate a person on the internet. I kind of hate that because, hey, I much prefer to be liked, but it boils down to the rules being the rules. It isn’t about my personal politics – it’s about this is the line and it is what it is.
Sure, I understand why someone might not like the line. But, in the context of my job as mod, that’s irrelevant. The rules are what they are – like it or not, just follow it.
Maybe it’s just human nature to bash your head against the same boundaries over and over again to see if they’ll change. That just seems to give everyone involved a headache, though.
Here, it’s generally trolls who say we don’t want to hear from the other side, the “healthy” side. They leave comments that wind up in my moderation queue about how I should hang myself but no rope is strong enough and, oh, yeah, we (well, in the case of this blog, I) are censoring the voices of the other side. If we just understood how easy it is to eat less and exercise more….
At the end of the day, the voices all sound remarkably similar, which is, perhaps, one reason I have given up a lot of trying to reason with people on Fats when they appear to just want to have a tantrum about how unfair it is for their pro-diet/language of body hate/name-calling to be silenced.
This also shows up when people post to blogs on the feed about, well, maybe one more diet will work. If a person is just starting out with fat acceptance, that’s totally different than if a long-time member of the community throws all accepted wisdom to the winds – much moreso if an activist does it. Then there starts a chorus of complaints about how person A was treated one way while they, person B, were treated a different way. People are treated as individuals; no one has identical circumstances. That shouldn’t be too much to understand; there are no community rules allowing some topics and disallowing others for the Fatosphere. Understanding the other side actually does mean something and go a long way toward helping people communicate. That’s the beauty of different settings.
Ultimately, it’s up to individuals to act like grown-ass adults no matter what the setting, to know that some things are negotiable and some other things aren’t, to use their critical thinking skills instead of responding like someone slapped them on the playground.
Because we aren’t on a playground. We aren’t picking sides based on who’s more popular. I want to understand your personal position because I care about people in general. But understanding doesn’t mean I’m going to cave for your position.
13 Comments
Thank you for writing this. I’ve noticed this a lot lately but you, as usual, manage to articulate everything I’ve seen in a way I couldn’t.
In particular, I’ve been running into this around the discussion of Prop. 8 and gay marriage – there is a segment of the population who equates “respecting their right to express their viewpoint” with “agreeing they have a valid point.”
I do not. I do not think pro-dieting or anti-gay-marriage stances are equally right to my own and things we, as a society, should agree to disagree on. This does not mean I don’t think they have every right to express their views. And these are not mutually inconsistent positions!
At least once every other day someone on my Livejournal friends list mentions dieting or wanting to lose weight. I wondered for a while if I should actively keep hitting them with the message of fat acceptance, but then I remember how I always reacted when people gave me ‘good advice’. In the end, it is your personal experience that brings you on a certain path. The advice people have given me have only pointed me in new directions, new ways in which to think; but I needed to do the thinking myself, and take the direction I wanted.
Whenever I read about a friend wanting to lose weight, or people in my presence talk about it, I bring up fat/body acceptance; I point them towards The Rotund and Shapely Prose (because those are the only FA blogs I’ve gotten around to reading regularly). I tell them my experiences and my thoughts, and then, I let them make up their own minds.
In my experience it’s very difficult to change a person’s mind, unless they go through a process that forces them to alter the way they think about things, such as personal trauma of any kind. And if I can show someone a different path and a new way of thinking about fat and body image, then I will; but trying to push them down that road rarely works.
What these people don’t seem to realise is when it comes to fat acceptance, most of us have been on the other side. So yeah, we understand it quite intimately. We just reject it.
Heh.
As a part of recent (and long-coming) drama in my own little lj world, I was removed (oh the horror!) from a weight-loss-not-really-we’re-just-trying-to-get-HEALTHIER community created by an acquaintance and frequented by many folks I was once internet friends with.
What a relief.
I am now dreaming of a physical space for fat people to gather for moving and breathing and laughing and loving our bodies, somewhere near my house.
@kmd: I’d settle for an openly fat-friendly yoga studio.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle
Interesting that you should post this now. Less than a week ago i saw a post in the fatosphere that, the minute i read it, i thought, oh lord, she’s just opened up a huge can of worms; last time i talked about this, i got hell from all sides about it. What happened? “Oh, i couldn’t agree more!” “What an insightful post!” “Thank you for posting this.”
It kinda hurt my feefees for a few days, but you know what? In retrospect i think it’s actually kinda funny. It’s part “what you say”, and part “how you say it”, but also part “who you are”.
It’s not a popularity contest in the sense of running for homecoming queen; i think the phrase “popularity contest” is a bit condescending or mocking to/about those who feel that there is a definite hierarchy within the fatosphere. To say that the popularity aspect plays no part in the intra-fatosphere politics? I can’t say i agree. My personal experience goes completely against that. If yours doesn’t? I’m glad for you, and i honestly mean that.
I’ve let it get to me in the past, but at this point i’m relatively okay with it. If someone wants to just toss my words aside because of who it is that’s saying them? If someone wants to stay mad at me for something i didn’t understand a year ago? *shrug* I’m not interesting in shouting into the wind.
Lindsay, what’s interesting to me is that you think this is all about you. I saw your entry noting the different responses and just kept on because I didn’t want to get into it with you. Then I saw it in a couple of different places and actually had a conversation with another friend about it.
But that wasn’t what spurred this post into existence – that is a totally different conversation had with some someone else entirely that actually only tangentally touched on these topics.
But since you brought it up, here you go: Your post on the topic of weight loss and how you were considering it read along the lines of “well, I know I can lose weight this way so I plan to and I know it’ll piss everyone off but that’s just because they are narrow-minded and don’t like me anyway.” There are one or two people with whom you clashed a year or so ago (when, I will note, I wasn’t doing much reading so I missed the majority of the initial drama) but you are the only person who regards you as a Fatosphere pariah that I can find.
Meanwhile, the other post was in a personal blog from someone who was asking how that urge to diet would be addressed by FA. That’s entirely different.
And the responses weren’t all “Yay, diet!” You have better reading comprehension than that. There are more comments saying, hey, maybe it’s the years of dieting that have caused your health problems, hey, maybe you should concentrate on doing things for your health and not even bother with the scale.
Also, just a note: “feefees” is a repugnant term. If you don’t take your feelings seriously enough to not use a term designed to be snarky and dismissive, why should I take them seriously? Feelings are real things. They have value.
Lindsay, I like you. But your insistence on viewing yourself as an outcast who is regarded as super strange and weird and whatever gets really hard to deal with sometimes. If this post was about you, I’d have addressed it to you.
TR, i didn’t (and still don’t) think this post was about me. You specifically stated that it was on the fatshionista community, and i don’t hang out there. That’s why i thought it was an interesting coincidence. I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding regarding the posts in question, but that is another matter. I apologize for the misunderstanding, as well as any offense caused by my joking about my own feelings.
@caffeine
Me too, me too.
But alas, of the THREE yoga studios within a mile of my house? Not one is openly fat-friendly. I called them all, and they ranged in attitude from helpful and affirming to eh, whatever. I give them credit for being helpful and affirming, but I want a specifically and pointedly fat-friendly experience.
And I’ll create it iffen I have to.
I agree with you TR that seeing the other side doesn’t mean you melt for it. Like Becky said, most fat people were the ‘other’ side.
It is said people must be respected for their opinions and beliefs, but a belief is not a delusion and an opinion actually has to have some grasp of logic. People are entitled to pretend they do accept the patently obvious.
Or say they ‘believe’ in that which has been repeatedly disproven, but they cannot expect to be respected for it, that would actually be quite condescending.
Sorry, that should be ‘do not accept the patently obvious.’
, you are wonderful. as are you Tammy.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle
Yes!
You know, it’s funny but this just seems common sense to me in most areas of life. You have one opinion, someone else another and instead of actually logically seeing it from the other perspective and having a mature debate, inevedibally one, or the other, or both resorts to name calling, manipulation, and fear tactics to sway the other and come out triumphantly right.
Cause that’s realy helpful.
Mmmhhhhm.