The human race faces many dire threats. War, famine, disease, terrorism, giant asteroids, Donald Trump. But the ever-alert readers of the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit know that all these threats pale in comparison to the greatest threat of all. I am speaking, of course, of fat chicks.
In a post with the thoughtful title “Dear obese women I f*king hate you,” a Reddit MGTOW calling himself iamlikethewindbaby outlines his case against these horrible monsters. Speaking fluent SARCASM, he addresses fat chicks directly.
“Thanks for turning average chicks into supermodels and ugly chicks into average chicks,” he declares.
Thanks for filling up my newsfeed with memes about how beautiful fat chicks are. Do you even know how attractiveness is determined? The more healthy and fertile a woman is the more attractive she is. Being obese makes you unattractive, period. F*ck you.
Er, I’m pretty sure attractiveness is determined by whatever the hell people happen to think is attractive. Some people find skinny people attractive; some find fat people attractive; some people don’t pay much attention to weight. There are even a few perverse souls who find Donald Trump attractive, if you can believe that.
Thanks for making a generation of men feel bad about themselves because a fat chick is the best they can do, it’s not their fault 70% of you are overweight.
That’s actually not quite right. According to the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of American women classified as overweight or obese isn’t 70%; it’s 64%. The percentage of men classified as overweight or obese? 74%.
That’s right, fellas; there are more fat dudes than fat chicks in the US.
The percentage of American adults classified as obese? 36% — exactly the same for men and women.
Now, there may be legitimate reasons to wonder if these categories really make sense as they’re currently defined. But one thing is clear: for every fat chick out there fat chick-ing, there’s a fat dude to match.
Thanks for being 400lbs and yet somehow still unable to cook. That’s great. It’s a good thing we did away with those sexist home economics classes.
Dudes, given that you’re all devoted to GOING YOUR OWN WAY and all, shouldn’t you be learning how to cook your own damn dinner?
Thanks for being so fat that being 20lbs overweight isn’t even considered fat anymore. Nothing is sexier than a 5’3 150lb women.
According to some number I found on the internet, the 5’5″ tall Marilyn Monroe saw her weight fluctuate from 115-150 lbs at various points in her adult life. I don’t know why we know this, or if we should, but apparently we do. Here’s a picture of her at one of her more voluptuous moments, in Some Like it Hot.
What a hideous monster!
Thanks for having personalities that match your appearance. It’s important for people’s insides to match their outsides.
Based on iamlikethewindbaby’s personality, I can only assume he looks something like this:
I can’t wait until all your cold-giant-black-hearts explode.
What a lovely fellow.
Iamlikethewindbaby also blames obese women for rising insurance premiums, and snickers a little at the thought of obese women dying before retirement.
It’s true that obesity can increase health care costs and lower life expectancy. But you know what else increases health care costs and lowers life expectancy? Being an angry dickhead.
“There is a direct connection between being constantly angry, competitive, and aggressive, and early heart disease,” notes an article on the “health costs of anger” on mentalhelp.net.
[R]ecent research suggests that men who have poor anger management skills are more likely to suffer a heart attack before age 55 than their more emotionally controlled peers. A separate study indicated that older male subject’s hostility ratings (how hostile and irritable they tend to act towards others) predicted heart disease more accurately than other known risk factors including cholesterol, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking and being overweight. …
The evidence from numerous studies is clear: constant chronic anger, hostility, and aggression raise your risk of developing various deadly forms of heart disease by as much as five times the normal rate. The more hostility you tend to express, the more prone to heart disease you are likely to be.
And the lovely iamlikethewindbaby is hardly the only Reddit MGTOW who fits the angry dickhead profile, as a quick skim through the comments on his post reveals.
Indeed, the lovely fellow who calls himself lordjedi may have cut several weeks off his life expectancy with all the anger in this comment alone:
Not that I haven’t tried a couple times, but my policy for many years has been my bedroom is off limits to fats.
I’m sure the “fats” of the world feel just awful they don’t get to partake of lordjedi’s charms. He continues:
That means no easy money for fatties either. Get a f*cking job, Porkins, if you want to sleep indoors. Every dollar you spend in your short worthless life will be earned by you with your fine arts/wymyn’s studies degree and your $90K student loan debt, while stocking shelves on the 3 AM Walmart shift. Enjoy your Cool Ranch Doritos. Why don’t you f*cking marry them if you love them so much?
If you love your hatred so much, lordjedi, why don’t you marry it? Oh, wait, I guess you have.
MTGOStark, who has clearly never spoken to a woman in the real world, offers this thought.
If being not obese is literally the only thing they have to do in their life to succeed, and they still fail at it (and complain on top), it’s just truly pitiful.
Aanarchist apparently spends much of his Going His Own Way time scanning through profiles on online dating sites.
i see those online profiles where the woman is like 50 lbs overweight and she puts down average. a few extra pounds means 100 lbs overweight. big and beautiful means THAR SHE BLOWS. the funny thing is they want you to ignore their weight, like it has nothing to do with who she is. it’s like she wants you to watch her eat an entire f*cking cake with her bare hands, and treat her as if she’s eating salad and a water.
Huh. That actually sounds like a fun date. Who doesn’t like cake?
@Jarnsaxa:
You and me both. I’ve always been more Mary Lou Retton than Nadia Comaneci – in other words, I’m stocky and sturdy. I have Graves’ disease, which causes hyperthyroidism and muscle wasting. For ten years, my legs were too weak to bound up stairs or ride a bicycle, very different from my teens and early twenties. Once I was diagnosed and started treatment, the first places to re-thicken were my arms and legs, because the muscles were rebuilding. I ended up having a total thyroidectomy, and in the years since have gained maybe 30 pounds. I’d much rather have some chub than the paranoia, tremors, fainting spells, and crushing chest pains of hyperthyroidism. My body is strong, I am active, and my “numbers” are good.
My father, like yours, tended towards heftiness, but he could lay off the ice cream for a month and drop four pants sizes. It was amazing.
I guess my comment from yesterday morning got eaten by the poor, starving blockquote mammoth!
My SIL passed Wednesday afternoon. I’m very sure that the stated reason for her death will not be “weight loss surgery” because she had her stomach stapled more than fifteen years ago. Just because her death was caused by extensive bleeding from ulcers in her distal stomach (the part that was cut off from use by the staples) doesn’t mean it was unrelated, though. Ulcers in WLS patients are far from uncommon.
Joekster – I think you sound like a thoughtful person and a doctor I wouldn’t mind seeing. But I’ve only been blown off for my weight once by a PA (I think I’ve been very lucky) so, of course, MMMV.
I clicked on the WLS link in one of your comments on page 3. The part that stood out to me was that the bulk of the cohort was only studied for 24 to 36 months. Many of the people on the WLS support group I read for three or four years or so didn’t start having bad problems until 5 yrs. out or more. Not necessarily related, but I wonder if anyone has studied the outcomes of the diets that WLS (bypass in particular with the limits on roughage) has on colon cancer?
@ hambeast
This is just one article but it’s interesting reading.
http://www.oncologypractice.com/single-view/colorectal-cancer-risk-increased-with-bariatric-surgery/1f79209ee25217c9832f1a4d36460f6d.html
Alan – Yeah, I had my suspicions, but the hypotheses about the causes were actually different. I think.
A lot of the people whose posts I read, plus the three people I personally know who had WLS said either that they were warned not to eat much fiber, or found out on their own that more than minuscule amounts of fiber were not (AT ALL) well-tolerated.
I’ve never even briefly considered any sort of WLS, but when I found out from my friend that anything carbonated was off-limits, I said “What? No beer?? OH, HELL NO!!!”
I have a friend with a lap band, and her insurance never pays for anything she needs due to complications from it, so she often just has to live with it. She exercises and follows the rules and doesn’t eat much but still put the weight back on. She has pcos, so it’s nearly impossible for her to lose weight.
Hambeast,
I’m so sorry about your SIL. Hugs if wanted.
…
Well, fuck…
Is this a thing for you? Are you actively trying to be a jerk? Cos otherwise, it’s just 2nd nature to you (TV suggests that doctors are just like that). Some advice: Whatever you write down, think about it. For a long time. Then delete that shit and start over. Then, maybe, don’t submit anyway. Works for me! We’ll call it rule #5. Dammit, man…
@cleverforagirl
Nah, you good. Mainly aimed at Chrys. Not like it matters anymore… Can we go 1 thread anymore without internal assholes/trolls lighting a dumpster fire. Can we try? Fuck!
@Axe
The thing about this thread, none of it was trolls. People just hate fat so damn much they have to attack it any chance they get.
@kupo
Internal assholes
I haven’t contributed to this conversation, because I don’t know useful sciency things, and I have no experience being a fat person/experiencing fatphobia. But I just want to chime in to let the commenters who have talked about their experiences know that I hear you, I adore you, you are perfect, and fatphobia is awful oppressive disgusting bullshit.
@Axe, actually I think this was a super productive conversation on fat. 🙂 It wasn’t ideal, but most of these conversations break down into people wishing horrible things on each other.
So umm good job guys! Sure this thread was a mess, but we did better than last time and we’ll do better next time!
What Viscaria said.
I’m late getting back to this, so you guys may not see my comment, which is my bad entirely.
I don’t think I articulated what I was trying to say very well (for an academic, I suck at communicating sometimes). I think I came off as taking sides and trying to protect Joekster, which he’s perfectly capable of doing all by himself anyway.
I thought the thread was getting nasty at some points and wanted that to stop because what was under discussion was amazing and fascinating. Everyone’s comments were a lesson for me, over and over.
Crys T, on reflection, I owe you an apology on one thing – it’s not my call whether you think someone is gaslighting you. I did reject that, because having read Joekster’s comments for some time now I believe that he’s always, consistently sincere and never a jerk (even when dear Axe goes all harsh on him!). But, still – not my call. I’m sorry about that.
Everyone, if I seemed to be condoning fat-shaming or fat-phobia in any way I apologise unreservedly. I wanted personal attacks to be left out of it and that was all I should have said 🙂
PS (unrelated to above ramble) Hambeast, I’m so sorry that you lost your sister-in-law. Hope your family is all right.
@Mish
Thanks. I did feel like it was dismissive to brush off Crys’s gaslighting comments, and kind of felt like people were taking Joekster’s “side” in this, but honestly I’m pretty used to a lot of “but health!” protests and gang-ups against the “bad fatties” (fat people who eat right and exercise are always excused from criticism), and, like Clever pointed out, this thread didn’t get as bad as the typical fat-related thread.
I do hope people have learned something from this thread.
@kupo, you’re unfailingly gracious and you make me feel ashamed. Productive shame, however, so thank you. I’m so sorry that I came across sounding like the same old, same old that you clearly hear all the freakin’ time. And I should know better; where I live, the whole “lose weight/exercise/good person” conflation is very entrenched and normalised and I’ve had my own struggles within that (plus, my partner is a personal trainer and rather zealous).
And you’re absolutely right about the gaslighting dismissal. Not worthy of me or this space.
@Mish Thanks for the apology, and I also apologise if I was harsh with you.
Fwiw, I think Joekster honestly believes he is doing the right thing by his patients. But a lot of people visit genuine atrocities on others in the sincere belief that they’re right.
And I’ll just leave that particular topic at that.
Just as a general note, for any of you who don’t get why this made me as angry as it did, just consider living for over 50 years being mostly considered a lump of symptoms & problems with no real human characteristics other than laziness, greed, lack of self-control, and a tendency to lie. According to this image, you have no feelings other than self-pity and no ambition other than getting that next Twinkie.
Now imagine that you do a lot of work learning facts to fight against that portrayal of yourself, but every time you bring them out, people refuse to look at them and just counter with their own “facts” that, if they’d only look, they’d see have addressed and debunked.
Think that would make you somewhat cranky?
Hello everyone, I just got back from Kansas. My wife and I drove over there Friday afternoon to look for someplace for me to live in September, and between the 8-9 hour drive between Chicago and Kansas city (one way) and all the time spent driving around looking at stuff, I’ve spent the majority of this weekend in a moving vehicle.
Heads up: this is going to be a double post, and they will both be massive. They will, however, be my last long threads on this post.
The sad thing is, this isn’t even close to the most sleep deprived I’ve ever been. The prize for that goes to my fourth 30 hour shift in my third year of medical school. About 3-4 AM, I looked so pale that the trauma fellow working on the case with us had one of the OR techs roll a stool behind me, so I could sit down before I could black out and plant my face in the patient we were operating on (which would have broken the sterile field).
Anyhow.
First, erratum: I think I wrote in my last post that 2011 was the year before I started medical school. That was a typo; I meant to write ‘residency’. I started medical school in 2007, and finished in 2012. If anyone is curious, I had to repeat second year after failing pathology while my psychiatrist was sorting out the best way to manage my ADHD. It turned out to be a good thing, because that gave me a lot of free time the second time around to work on my Special Qualification in Nutrition (SQiN), where I spent a lot of time reviewing the current literature, working with various dietitians, put together three different presentations, and put together a small project on the correlations between nutrition and various forms of cancer. Fun times. Well suited to a future internist.
Second:
It appears I need to clarify my position on bariatric surgery. I’ve tried to address the subject as little as possible, mostly as I am not a surgeon. Regarding surgical issues, I really don’t know much more than what I learned in medical school. However, that is more than most lay people know, so here goes.
Bariatric procedures are invasive abdominal surgeries. All of these are high risk, and some of the older ones (most notably the roux-en-y) are among the more complex procedures in modern surgery. Therefore, they should only be considered if there is a high likelihood that the patient will have a major benefit from the procedure. In the four years since I finished medical school, I have only sent one patient for consideration of a bariatric procedure. He was an elderly veteran with degenerative arthritis of both knees so severe that he could hardly walk. When I sent him to the orthopedic surgeons for knee replacements (which is the only real cure for OA that advanced), they refused to operate because they felt his weight put him at too high a risk of complications (for the record, I don’t know where they were getting that information. Weight alone does not play a significant role in how internists risk-stratify patients prior to surgery, but like I said, I don’t follow the surgical literature).
On the few occasions when one of my patients has requested referral to the bariatric surgeons, I have always insisted that they meet with both physical therapy and a nutritionist first, and I have never had a patient continue requesting bariatric surgery following these meetings. Invariably, they decide that they are OK with their current weight, or they find they can lose whatever weight they want without surgical aid.
I think I may have given the impression that I favor bariatric surgery when I wrote in my first post that ‘Bariatric surgery ‘cures’ type II diabetes’. I can see how that could be interpreted as an endorsement of bariatric surgery as a treatment for type II diabetes mellitus. I do not. As has been mentioned by other posters, there are high-risk surgeries, and many, if not most, patients wind up re-gaining the weight. I was speaking strictly in the context of determining if there is a causal relationship between type II diabetes and obesity: when patients with type II diabetes on medications get a bariatric surgery, they no longer require the medications after loosing the weight, and do require medications again when they re-gain it. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that there is a causal link between obesity and type II diabetes.
Some of the posters here may be interested in a discussion of how the field of diabetes mellitus has evolved in the past two decades (if not, feel free to skip). Up to about 15 years ago, DM was split into ‘juvenile-onset diabetes’ and ‘adult onset diabetes’. The assumption was that juvenile diabetes was caused by the pancreas being unable to produce insulin (this has since been found to be cause by the patient’s immune system attacking their own pancreatic beta-cells), while adult onset diabetes was believed to be caused by insulin resistance caused by signals sent from overloaded adipose tissue. The difficulty was, a small subset of people who develop diabetes later in life acted far more similarly to what was called ‘juvenile diabetes’: they did not benefit from the oral medications given in ‘adult diabetes’, they did not benefit from weight loss, and they were more likely to have the complications of diabetes seen in the juvenile form rather than the adult form.
When I was in medical school (that’s about 7-9 years ago), we had started referring to ‘Insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM)’ and ‘Non-Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus’ (NIDDM) to recognize this discrepancy. In this system, those individuals who developed what acted like juvenile diabetes in adulthood were labelled ‘IDDM’ rather than ‘NIDDM’, and this classification allowed us to jump straight to insulin in these patients.
Now, we recognize at least five types of diabetes. Type I roughly correlates to ‘Juvenile diabetes’ and ‘IDDM’. Type II is what used to be called ‘Adult diabetes’ or ‘NIDDM’. In addition to these, we have recognized two other, distinct diseases: Mature Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY) and Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA), sometimes termed ‘Diabetes 1.5’. MODY is a genetic disorder in which pancreatic beta cells do not produce insulin. LADA is very similar to type I diabetes, but it hits later in life rather than as a juvenile. MODY can be diagnosed by a genetic test, and LADA is diagnosed by screening for the relevant antibodies.
I hope I didn’t try anyone’s patience too much, but I felt a need to explain myself.
Now, for individual responses:
@Little lurker: Your story is too common, especially among the older generation of physicians. I did receive a great deal of sensitivity training in med school and residency, and I suspect it is in response to stories such as yours. One bit of advice I recall from medical school (and share with my colleagues) is this: ‘don’t ever blame your patient for their disease. Even if there is a lifestyle component, blaming the patient doesn’t get you anywhere’
As a side-note, that’s an interesting comparison between fat-shaming and ableism. I know we typically see fat-shaming as a form of appearance shaming, but I wonder if it would be at all useful to discuss it in terms of ableism instead? Both have distinct health components, and both are (in part) propagated by physicians. Also, there is increasing support in the literature for a psychosocial component to obesity. Food for thought.
@Hambeast: I would like to add my sympathies about your sister-in-law. I think I mentioned this earlier, but it’s terrible when people go to physicians to get well, and we wind up making the problem worse. It’s never OK.
Also, thanks for reading my sources. You are correct, the data for either bariatric surgery or more traditional weight loss is not great, and that’s in large part because the studies always seem to run out of money before they go long enough to be really useful (evidence based medicine in a capitalist system. Fun times). The main point I was getting at is that there isn’t any data looking at outcomes past that point. For those unfamiliar with Cochrane reviews, they are considered the gold standard when it comes to systematic meta-analysis. If they don’t find a study, it either doesn’t exist, was done in the third world (there are sufficient social differences between the West and everywhere else that a lot of studies done outside the West don’t translate), or has significant methodological issues. The ’90-95%’ number dates back to the early nineties, when (so I’ve been told) the medical community was really pushing crash diets with really severe calorie restrictions, and also before we understood the multitude of other medical problems that can make it impossible to lose weight (so the number was including people who couldn’t lose weight in the first place). Today, if a patient desires to lose weight (some do), or if weight loss is desired to alleviate some medical condition, we encourage a much more gradual approach (I get worried if one of my patient’s looses more than 5 pounds in a month), and as I indicated above, I prefer a weight-neutral approach. That approach can take years to get down to whatever weight the patient wants to achieve, but it’s also more sustainable. However, that is based only on my experience. As I said, there isn’t any solid data to back that up.
@Kupo: sorry for not discussing the discussion between you, Schildfreja, and Ohlman. By the time I noticed this post, that discussion had wrapped up, and I didn’t have much to add to it. My comment was meant as no more than an expression of sympathy. As medicine (in the US) is a self-regulating profession, each physician shares some responsibility for the mis-deeds of the rest of us. While there was nothing I could do about how you were treated, I do share some responsibility for making sure such things do not happen again. Also, thank you for pointing out how my earlier posts appeared. I hope my above comment helps address those concerns.
One other thing: you’ve always engaged honestly with me, so I think I can ask you this: what exactly is meant by ‘gaslighting’? I’ve only heard the term used in the context of domestic abuse, where the abuser attempts to convince the abused that the abuse didn’t happen. Was Crys T attempting to imply that I was trying to convince her that the fat-shaming she’s suffered hadn’t happened?
@Misha: You are correct in that I don’t need protecting. More importantly, it’s not your job to stand up for me. I’m quite capable of getting myself out of anything I manage to get myself into 🙂 However, it’s nice to know that I’m managing to not come off as a jerk most of the time 🙂 I actually do not mind when Axecalibur goes harsh on me. I think it was Einstein who said, ‘when I was a young man, my mind was a blunt instrument. But I kept sticking it out at people, and they kept beating on it, until it was a sharp as a razor’ (or something like that), and I appreciate that Axe is willing to beat on my mind.
@Axe: I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I was trying, very hard, to remain professional. What I posted above was actually the third edit (my first two versions were much more inflammatory). I find it quite frustrating when someone continually attacks me for views I do not hold and have never expressed. In addition, I’ve spent almost a decade earning my medical education. It’s been a serious struggle, it’s pushed me beyond limits I never knew I had, and it’s forced me to re-evaluate myself at every level multiple times. So, I take it personally when people say things like, ‘doctors don’t do science’ and ‘simplified stuff handed out to practitioners’. I may take that more personally then most because of my own educational struggles.
@Crys T: Once again, I do not think people are fat because of a lack of will, or because they are lazy, or because they don’t care. I’ve never said that, and I don’t believe it. I also, once again, do not feel that weight loss should be pushed for it’s own sake. I am acquainted with physicians who believe both these things, but I am not one of them, and the notions are falling out of favor. There are some, very specific, diseases that may benefit from weight loss as part of a combined approach, but that should never be the primary goal. That is all.
Final thought: I do not consider myself a ‘fat ally’ or a ‘male ally’, a ‘straight ally’ or a ‘white ally’. These are labels, and I find labels make it far too easy to pigeonhole people What I am is a person who seeks to understand the difficulties faced by people in situations distinct from my own, and to do what I can to ameliorate those difficulties. If that makes me an ‘ally’, so be it. Of course, it IS every doctor’s responsibility to be an ally and advocate for their patient, but that is different.
I have asked my wife (who is in her second year of rheumatology fellowship) and one of my classmates from residency doing an endocrinology fellowship (and is, thus, as close to an expert in weight loss as anyone) to fact-check my posts on this thread. If they find anything I’ve said that is factually incorrect, they will either post themselves, r let me know so I can post it. Otherwise, I think I’ve run out of useful things to say here.
I third this motion 🙂
@Joekster
You asked me, “what exactly is meant by ‘gaslighting’?”
I’m extremely emotionally drained from this whole discussion. I do not have the energy to explain it to you. Maybe someone else will be willing to do so, but it’s a very well known phenomenon and I suggest you look it up and understand it well, as doctors tend to do it without realizing it and it would behoove you to learn what to avoid. It originates from the play/movie Gas Light if that helps.
David: I’m rather angry right now (there actually is a bit of red fringe to my vision), so please delete this comment if it includes something you find offensive.
Ok, I know I promised that would be the end of my long posts, but I took Kupo’s advice to read up on ‘gaslighting’, and now I’m angry.
To begin with, I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what, exactly, ‘gaslighting’ is. Almost all the posts I was able to find on the subject speak of the phenomenon in the context of domestic abuse and narcissism, where a narcissistic abuser convinces the abused individual that they are imagining all the abuse, and attempts to convince their associates that that person is delusional.
Then, I found a number of similar but varying definitions on everydayfeminism:
This one says, (http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/08/things-wish-known-gaslighting/): ‘Gaslighting is the attempt of one person to overwrite another person’s reality’. The article does speak of gaslighting specifically in the context of abusive relationships, and states that this is accomplished by the abuser saying/doing things to the abused and then attempting to convince them that something else happened.
This one states: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/gaslighting-is-an-abuse-tactic/: ‘gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse “in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity.”’ This definition is more applicable to the internet, but the focus remains on convincing people that their own experiences DID NOT HAPPEN, with the goal of getting them to accept an alternate version of reality.
Finally, this article (http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/gaslighting-silence-feminism/) describes gaslighting as ‘the gaslighter tries to induce in someone the sense that their reactions, perceptions, memories, and beliefs are not only mistaken but utterly without grounds’, and ‘gaslighting is used to confuse people into thinking that the reactions are so off-base or overreactive that they’re “crazy” and to be dismissed’.
All of these descriptions include this behavior: the attempt to convince a person that their experience did not happen in an effort to make them appear delusional.
I have serious issues with applying this definition to internet conversations. First, everything on this site is archived, so a person can’t exactly say something, and then pretend that they didn’t (well, they could, but they’d look fairly silly). Second, someone attempting to convince you that you are wrong is not the same thing as someone attempting to convince you that you are delusional. The latter is a form of abuse. The first is called ‘debate’. I’m still fairly new to the concept of ‘ableism’, but I’m pretty sure that conflating the two is a form of ableism, and not a subtle one at that. Finally, accusing people of domestic abuse to win points in internet arguments is not only incendiary, but runs the real risk of trivializing domestic abuse (I’ve noticed, for example, that many manospherians use ‘rape’ to describe everything except actual rape).
However, this isn’t why I’m angry.
Let’s recap the conversation between myself and Crys-T. All of this can be verified simply by reviewing the comment thread, and I’m sure someone will call me on it if I lie.
Crys-T made a claim: that 90-95% of people are unable to permanently lose a significant amount of weight. This not only directly contradicts my own medical education (although it may be true for those who meet criteria for ‘morbid obesity’), but also my own personal experience. I mentioned my aunt up above who had a lap band placed in my intern year, 2012 (if she’d asked my opinion, I’d have advised against it, but she didn’t). She has lost over 100 lbs since that surgery, and has successfully kept the weight off for, now, almost five years. In addition, my mother and my younger sister both joined weight watchers shortly after moving to Missoula in 2010. Each of them has lost 30-40 pounds since starting, and they have kept that weight off (not to mention driving me batty by talking about ‘points’ with everything). They both feel great.
I haven’t mentioned my mother and sister above because first, in evidence based medicine, anecdotal data is the absolute lowest form of data, to be considered only when no other data is available. Second, my entire family ranges from lower middle class to upper middle class, which means they do have access to more resources than many people do, and their results may be difficult to obtain for individuals in the lower socioeconomic class. But, it works for them, and lacking any systemized data to the contrary, it’s the best data available.
Anyhow, I did what any good physician, or any good scientist, for that matter, does when faced with an opinion that contradicts their knowledge based: I asked Crys-T to cite what information had so convinced Crys-T. I did not, at any time, question the abuse that Crys-T describes experiencing at the hands of my colleagues.
I did not attempt to convince Crys-T that none of it had happened, or that she ‘imagined’ it, or that she ‘misunderstood’ what had happened (which might fit the above descriptions of ‘gaslighting’, at least in a loose, almost-shifting-the-goalposts-but-not-quite kind of way).
The closest I came to the above definitions of ‘gas-lighting’ is the off-hand comment I made about Crys-T’s father’s tragedy, when I suggested to Crys-T that the father may have had a better chance of surviving his infection had his type II diabetes been better controlled (I should emphasize that it was Crys-T who stated the father’s diabetes was poorly controlled. I did not infer this, and I did not make that claim myself). I have already admitted that that was insensitive for me, and I have attempted to apologize repeatedly. Crys-T has ignored those attempts.
Crys-T could have responded to my question in any number of ways. Crys-T could have posted hyperlinks to journal abstracts (as WWTH did), or typed in an actual reference (as cleverforagirl did), or even just described this research she keeps talking about having done. Crys-T did none of this.
What Crys-T did was:
1: Denigrate my education (thereby attacking my own sense of self-worth)
2: Hand wave to both ‘common knowledge’ and cleverforagirl’s link (which, for the record, is a good resource, but the 90-95% number comes not from any data, but from the opinion of an expert panel convened by the NIH in 1992)
3: Accused me of gas-lighting. She literally accused me of narcissism and domestic abuse because I dared to trust my own education and experiences above the ‘research’ some person on the internet claimed to have performed, and cannot even cite.
Now, whom is gaslighting whom?
Come to think of it, some of my father in laws behaviors fit the above descriptions of gaslighting. That’s probably why my wife was nearly spitting with anger after reading through the above comment thread.
You guys might want to really think about if you want to throw around accusations of domestic abuse on the Internet. I’m pretty sure that’s not cool.
joekster, it’s not worth much since I’m no regular, but I didn’t think you were gaslighting, either. Your comments are well-written and thoughtful and I see you try very hard in this conversation. I did look up gaslighting again to be sure and I personally don’t think it fits here. Still going to try to stay out of this thread from now on. This isn’t good for me, sorry.
@Joekster
I recommend against posting when angry, because you need to remember that you’re the one coming from a place of privilege here. I also recommend re-reading the thread, since, as you pointed out, there’s a record of everything that was said. You seem to be conflating things some people said with things others said. For example, you asked me to explain what is meant by gaslighting when all I said on the topic was that I felt Mish was a bit dismissive of Crys’s concerns.
@kupo: I wasn’t angry at you. You seemed to have a handle on what exactly is meant by gaslighting, and I wanted an opinion.
That said, I’m privileged so I don’t get to have an opinion or get offended? I didn’t know that was a thing.
@littlelurker: thank you.