It may surprise you to learn that I follow Clementine Ford on Facebook. She's a feminist writer- and the way she writes.... Well, she writes about men the same way Richard Dawkins writes about religion. I've spoken my piece about "feminism" before, and I do remember writing regarding how much I hate the word itself. If you ever read any of the posts written by Ford, you'll see where I got all my negativity for the word from. Well, it wasn't all from her, but in my mind "feminist" represented a woman who wallowed in the grief of societal injustices and believed that lashing out at opposition was the best way to go. I thought they were irrationally angry at a lot of things, and too quick to assign blame, without realizing that people were likely to take offense, whether or not they were at fault. And some will like to say, "oh we can't say anything straight in this society any more, everyone and their delicate feelings-" well you see, unless you're psychopathic, and actually, even IF you were psychopathic, you still have feelings and people saying certain things will be offensive.
Anyway, today she posted something about body-image. How it was good to be positive about your body. She shared her story about how she struggled with anorexia- and you know, I'm all for mental-health awareness, so I'm grateful that people are willing to come out and share their struggles with mental health issues. Except all that was to promote the theme of "you can love your body even if you're fat" and to condemn those who tell people to lose weight, because apparently as a society we're trying to shove everyone into a narrow frame.
I'm not trying to be a dick, even though I'll inevitably come across as one, but being underweight and overweight are both bad. Society accepts those who are underweight slightly more, but not if they're severely underweight. We tend to shake our heads and go "damn those evil media people ruining the self-esteems of our women". Then if I see someone overweight- I do on a daily basis (because I live in Australia), my mind jumps to all sorts of negative things. Like how they're more likely to get heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, joint problems... So many things, costing our economy so much money, and there is not much you can do to convince me that someone has a better quality of life being overweight as opposed to not.
I believe people are mistaken when they say you can be healthy are every size. No, no you fucking can't. This promotion of mental health should NOT be used as an excuse to normalize the epidemic of obesity that is rife in this country. I'd rather obese people be happy rather than depressed, but at the same time I'd rather if nobody was obese. I don't believe obesity is an inevitability- there will be some with rare endocrine or neurological disorders, but they are rare and obesity is not. By law of physics you cannot gain more weight than what you put into your mouth, and I am more inclined to believe that people just make terribly food choices. Yeah, 1 sausage roll is not a lot of food, and personally I could eat 5-6 before I felt sated. The point is, I wouldn't eat 5-6 sausage rolls if I had the choice, an most of us DO have the choice in this country. It's not like sausage rolls are the cheapest foods around, either.
No she clearly doesn't run fucking marathons. Are you fucking retarded. Smoking is not beautiful either. WTF is this picture trying to tell me.
There's a fallacy in the argument that we're making a trade-off, that by promoting weight loss we're shaming people and driving them into depression, that they'll weigh less but be less happy. Look, if you're going to be depressed, you can be depressed regardless of your weight. If you want to be body-positive and love your body, love it at a size and shape that doesn't make your blood pressure shoot through the roof, that doesn't make climbing a flight a stairs take the effort of a 15km run. I don't believe anyone enjoys the feeling of taking up 2 seats on public transport, feeling like they're in a way when sharing a lift, and knowing that they'll be the first to go if a zombie apocalypse arrives.
Sure, as a society we over-enforce what the "ideal" man and woman should look like. I mean, ideals are different depending on culture, but in Western cultures it generally involves a thin but curvy woman and a tall, muscular man. Then everyone goes crazy trying to attain that image, while telling each other that "yes this is what we should aspire to" and then their behaviors enforce the issue. I mean, I get that it's all kind of silly, and not everyone was built to look exactly the same. It's fine to accept your differences, I'm just saying it's not fine to accept obesity. People like to dance around the topic, "bigger", "plus sized", "curvier"... yeah that's fine, but being obese is none of those things. If we normalize obesity we're inviting a health crisis with open arms, and that's something I can't tolerate. We've come a long way in terms of acceptance of differences, but there is no fucking way that 60% of people are inherently overweight or obese. There's the odd genetic disease, endocrine disorder, brain tumor--- and that does not account for over 60% of our fucking population. There's something wrong, and we're trying to do something about it, and "health at all sizes" is not how you fucking go about it.
In relation to how attitudes like mine are causing people to be depressed and driving people towards anorexia nervosa- well, treating their depression and helping them regain motivation to lose weight would be the more sensible thing to do, isn't it? It baffles me how anyone can think it's justifiable to just "let them be happy", assume that they could be happy if everyone stopped shaming being overweight--- if only we lived in a different world. That's one huge-ass social experiment we can't carry out, it would probably be unethical to carry out, because really being overweight or obese means you're more likely to suffer other conditions.
And anorexia nervosa? For fuck's sake that's a disorder that definitely cannot be explained by "media influence" alone. I mean, there is a rigid standard in what is "perfect", but the patient themselves often starve beyond the weight of a "perfect body". There's something morbid about how they deal with food and exercise, and pride themselves in "control". Fucking hell anorexia nervosa is about LACK OF FUCKING CONTROL. They can't make themselves eat without all these negative feelings, they HAVE to keep dieting and exercising. They can't feel satisfied enough with how their body looks, and they keep going and going and going. That's something complex and difficult to understand, and it's absurd to say "telling overweight people to lose weight drives anorexia". The evidence is, try as we fucking might, there's faaaar more overweight and obese people than there are people suffering anorexia nervosa, right? I mean, I feel like we're making two separate cases here, and it does not make sense in ANY case for us to withhold our efforts in combating obesity.
People are willing to do anything to feel good. I get that. "Health at every size" won't make people feel good, not in the short term, and definitely not in the long term when they're on the hospital bed, inoperable because they're obese and diabetic, trying to recover from a heart attack. So can people please wake the fuck up and direct their energy to a campaign that makes more fucking sense.
