By David Futrelle
Alt-rightish YouTube “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux doesn’t much like fat people or women who don’t have babies when they’re, by his standards, sufficiently young. So I guess it’s not altogether surprising that he’s managed to work both of these bugaboos into a conspiracy theory suggesting that the fat acceptance movement is part of a nefarious plot to lower (white) birthrates in the west.
At least that’s my reading of this recent tweet of his:
Molyneux has not (yet) elaborated on this suggestive tweet, but presumably the, er, “logic” behind it is that
- obesity can lower fertility
- nefarious cultural marxists want to lower the white birth rate because reasons
- fat acceptance leads to more obesity
- therefore the fat acceptance movement is a plot by these nefarious cultural marxists to lower fertility
This “logic” is not actually logic — the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, and the premises themselves are dubious as hell. Yes. there is some evidence suggesting that obesity can lower fertility, but the other premises are nonsense. “Cultural Marxism” is an imaginary movement invented by antisemites to make their antisemitism sound more intellectual. And there’s evidence that fat shaming, not fat acceptance, can lead to weight gain.
I looked around online to see if I could find others putting forth similar conspiracy theories about fat acceptance and fertility, but I couldn’t find anyone. So this may be a Stefan Molyneux Original.
Not that people in and around the manosphere aren’t coming up with their own equally crackpotty conspiracy theories about fat acceptance. Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer, predictably, thinks that fat acceptance is
part of a propaganda campaign of the Jews … Instead of looking at fatness as a form of sick degeneracy – not to mention a dangerous health hazard – which should be shamed, fat accepters believe that fatties should love their fatness, and force it on everyone else …
[T]his embracing of degeneracy is par for the course. It is part of the whole equality doctrine of the Marxist Jews.
In an old video, Matt Forney — remember him? — railed against fat acceptance as
basically an extremely retarded version of identity politics, [which] is one of the biggest legacies of cultural marxism and one of the the biggest reasons why our society is falling apart at the seams. ..
And yeah, I’m overweight. … yeah, I know I have fucked up. I have not worked as hard as I should have to lose weight. That’s not the issue, that’s not, that’s not the issue here.
Then there’s the gal on Reddit’s PurplePillDebate who thinks that fat acceptance “serves as a way for women to gain power over men … .” And there’s the guy on Reddit’s PurplePillDebate who thinks that the
fat acceptance movement is cultural marxism supersized. This is about using bad science and laziness to justify their disgusting lifestyles and bodies. This movement will have consequences in lifespan and depression.
I also notice how these fat acceptance bullshit is 99 percent about women, cause these fat princesses won’t accept anything lower than a sex god because they start believing their own lies about being beautiful.
Weird how all of those coming up with conspiracy theories about fat acceptance are terrible human beings, if not actual neo-Nazis.
At some point, presumably, all these conspiracy theories will join together into one big messy mega-theory, like a fatphobic Nazi version of Voltron. I can’t wait.
H/T — All the people on Twitter who helped me remember the old cartoon I was thinking of.
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opposablethumbs – I’m not quite brave enough to try to put together earring combos like that, but it sounds neat!
I like beadweaving, though, and maybe I’ll design something like that if I can make it look deliberate.
Weird Eddie said
I think this is a beautiful analogy because the end result is something that makes no sense and is really ugly!
@Frederic Bourgault-Christie : I think “fertility” for them is a codename for “white blue-eyed babies from meek, self-loathing women”. So women who are fat and accept it are more or less automatically out.
While they don’t say it out loud, thoses bozos are strongly into eugenism, and not one even remotely up to scientific standard, so preventing “sinners” of any stripe from reproducing is actually a big goal. Because we’re not yet to the point where the E word can be said in polite company, they use “fertility” and a variety of other euphemism to mean that a category should not reproduce according to them.
One of the funny thing is that when a women is heavily undernourished for a time, she will on average give birth to childrens who will be smaller and more likely to be underweight. That’s actually transmissible to grandchildren and above, so their efforts to have paper thin wives could very well make their descendance permanently smaller, which I find hilarious given their fantasm of an ethnie of tall white vikings.
@Ohlmann
That happened on my mothers side of the family. My maternal great-great-grandparents who grew up in eastern Europe were very short from malnutrition, and my mother 3 generations later is still significantly shorter than average. I’m also shorter than average, but not by as much.
@Ohlmann, Naglfar:
This is very much a known thing amongst people who study population genetics. To my understanding, pretty much every mammal has something similar: under low food conditions, the next generation will generally be born smaller so they don’t need as much food and the group as a whole is less likely to die off. The last mammoths in the world were all dwarf mammoths up on a Siberian island.
The actual genetic/epigenetic/biochemical details differ between species, which can have some odd side effects. This is believed to be why the liger is the largest of the cats, because it ends up not properly inheriting the ‘growth suppression’ effects from either parent.
@Jenora Feuer
IIRC the Wrangell Island mammoths existed until 1600 BCE, which is shockingly recent. We didn’t hunt them though, I think they died for other reasons.
@Naglfar:
The actual dates are a matter of debate, of course, but yes, there were still living mammoths when the pyramids were being built at Giza. On an evolutionary timescale that is very much ‘shockingly recent’.
Well, being on island tend to provoke gigantism or dwarfism quite often, and quite fast. Same thing happened to elephants in mediteranean islands. Interesting hypothesis for ligers indeed !
If memory serve well, it’s unclear whether hunting was a significant factor, both for the mainland mammoth extinction and for the Wrangell Islands. It’s certainly possible, but there’s little definite proof that hunting was significant enough. The fact the mammoth of Wrangell disappeared almost at the same time as human settled certainly make it suspicious.
(of course, humans are also very good at killing species by driving them out of their habitats)
All this talk about mammoths and whether or not we hunted them to extinction in a somewhat scientifically sound way on this site in particular gives me the giggles.