For some strange reason, hateful people spend a great deal of their time explaining to people that they’re not hateful, really, just misunderstood. Literal Klan members will swear up and down that they’re not racist; misogynists insist they don’t really hate women. And those who hate fat people will try to pretend that they’re just worried about said fat people’s health.
In the MGTOW2 subreddit — a supposedly non-hateful spinoff of the original MGTOW subreddit — one of these fat haters has announced to the world that he doesn’t “hate obese women. Feminists do.”
“The so-called fat acceptance movement claims that anyone who doesn’t rave about the alleged beauty of obese women hates them,” he wrote.
That’s not true. I don’t hate obese women. I just don’t think I’m obligated to lie to them.
… by telling them they look nice.
Furthermore, I think feminists are being cruel to obese women by lying to them that they look wonderful when they don’t. I don’t go all out of my way to insult fat women. I just leave them alone. I just won’t lie to them and give them false hope. I find that wrong.
The problem, as he sees it, is that all obese women are by definition ugly, so treating them as anything but ugly monsters is mean.
If a woman is obese, it’s impossible for her to look attractive. That’s just the way it is. I don’t think it’s being kind to her to hide that truth with some bogus narrative that says all women are beautiful.
How noble this fellow is for never giving a fat woman a compliment.
That’s bogus BS. If you tell her she can be super attractive with enough inner beauty even if she weighs 400 pounds and has cellulite, you’re just setting her up for failure. That’s how you would treat someone you hate.
How hateful it is to be nice to fat people!
Naturally, this bold truth-teller was recieved warmly by his fellow MGTOWs.
“I don’t hate fat woman,” wrote one,
but I do hate that they’re forced on us on tv shows. Not that I watch network tv but the occasional ad I catch that has a young fatty as a protagonist makes me feel bad about society.
He doesn’t hate fat women; he just hates seeing evidence that they exist on television.
“This is women jeopardizing women; nothing new lol,” wrote another.
Like how post-wall feminists convinced young women to cut their hair short because “it’s not their obligation to look a certain way for men” while I was just a simple guy that wants a long haired beautiful girl for myself then suddenly I was branded sexist/mysogynist like wtf lol. Just one of the things I realized when I went MGTOW
Ah yes, the well-known plot of older women sneakily convincing their younger rivals to cut their hair short. Definitely happened.
Then there was this guy, who didn’t even pretend that he wasn’t hateful.
The evil part of me wants to support the “beauty at any size” movement because that means more fat people dying.
What a lovely group of non-hateful men.
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@Naglfar
Since you specifically asked and I am a man, I will say that my preference is long hair in men, women, and non-binary people generally speaking. Short hair looks too much like The Man and his idea of corporatist rank-and-file sameness. Though occasionally I will see someone with a pixie cut that looks ferocious as hell, especially if they have an asym side-buzz. But I don’t think I represent most men, though I was raised in the United States by conservative parents so I am certainly thoroughly steeped in toxic masculinity, no question about it.
I might have missed it, because I’ve only skimmed so far, but this is a complete and utter misunderstanding of the fat acceptance movement. Unfortunately it’s a common one. It’s a way for fatphobic prats to hide their fear and hate of fat people. The fat acceptance movement is a social justice movement for the accommodation of fat people. Stop trying to make us smaller, stop bullying is, accommodate us the way other marginalised people are accommodated. I know that acceptance of disabled people is a long way off still, so I have limited hopes of fat people being accepted, but the point of fat acceptance is to try to get that.
And as someone who actually is over 400lbs, people usually don’t realise and disbelieve me when I tell them. It helps that I’m also 177cm (about 5 foot 9,5 inches). I have always been tall, broad and big, while my sisters are taller than average but slighter. I take after my dad, they take after my mum. I have photos of me at 6 with my sisters. If you squished my sisters together you’d make one me. I also used to be incredibly active (age, illness and lack of access has reduced my activity), I was still fat. At my most active, I was still classified as ‘obese’ – this is a weasel word with no static definition – it changes as society tells it to.
@Threp
After the 3 weeks of protesting with so much tear gas thrown my way I did have some lingering unhealthiness, but it’s hard to say exactly what symptoms might have been caused by the (expired) tear gas since I have a metabolic disorder which fucks with my bones & causes chronic pain & some other problems. I stopped going when my BFF had to go back to the east coast to visit her mom, so I didn’t even have her to compare symptoms with.
Which is to say that there were almost certainly some lingering effects, but I’m not assuming I know exactly what they were or exactly how long they lasted without any ability to cross-reference my experience with others.
Since the most widely reported side effect of exposure to expired tear gas was fucked up fertility & menstrual cycles, though, I can at least say that the gas didn’t cause any periods to come early or late, and I didn’t have a harder time getting pregnant during those weeks.
The most beautiful woman I have ever known personally is overweight.
@Crip Dyke
Good! Sounds like you’ll be none the worse for it – far as I remember there’s no real long term effects unless you dive in a vat of the stuff and go for a swim.
(Might still have the book somewhere in the loft, I’ll double check later. The Army honestly doesn’t give much of a shit about long term stuff with us since it doesn’t reduce our capability in the present, but we do still get studied – we’re handy guinea pigs if nothing else!)
My best friend in high school was “over”weight. She could out-hike me, and was very active just in general.
I’m thin. I actually get (unwanted and weird) compliments about that, from older women though not from men. But I also catch colds all the time, and while I’m active I have not much stamina. The healthiest I’ve been was when I was about 6-7 kg/15lbs heavier.
I’d also like to add (maybe it’s been said here already), what’s up with equating good health and morality? Obviously it feels nicer in one’s own body to be healthy, but shaming people for bad health is also messed up, even before we get into declaring that being fat automatically means being unhealthy.
Yep. That’s some seriously awful shit right there.
There’s lots of causes for that. Off the top of my head you’ve got:
All stupid. All basically designed to make the thinker feel special.
*I know there’s a lot more religions do this – most of them do to some extent, I think – but those two groups raised it to an art form while still being very influential outside their own communities.
There is a thin link between weight and morality in that some form of immorality can lead to weight gain. Since peoples cannot into logics, that become the opposite, that being “too” big according to random standard is immoral.
It’s such a striking image for profiteers. The Harkonnen Baron in Dune is the ur-example, and on a symbolic level he work extremely well. Even if, as noted, it’s the immorality the root cause for his body, and not the other way around. IIRC he even flaunt it, because he can afford to be so big he need sci-fi technology to not die, and few people can do that.
(note : while striking, there’s a ton to criticize in thoses book. In particular, one of the children of the Baron is said that “he won’t let himself get fat”. While that’s probably possible in the context of not weighting over a ton like his father, it’s not possible in general)
It’s also powerfully stupid because real-world villains actually don’t tend to get overweight, especially now since throwing endless banquets isn’t the way rich people show their wealths. Zuckerberg isn’t particulary fat, for example.
@Ohlmann
I’m trying to remember where I saw the quote about some villainous character being “a man of gross tastes and refined intellect” as opposed to of “gross intellect and refined tastes”? But yeah I feel like that second describes the bourgeois pretty well.
@Ohlmann
I think this might have more to do with the fact that modern wealthy people can afford foods and nutritionists that the less wealthy may not be able to afford.
The archetype of villains as fat is in a lot of other media as well, for instance Jabba the Hutt, a lot of depictions of 19th century industrialists, many Disney villains, etc.
Villainy (or indeed outright evil) doesn’t grant immunity to social perceptions/expectations. 😛
I do kinda feel like the having fat men as villains is… different from with fat women. Men, esp. wealthy and charismatic ones, can get away with being fat up to a point and it’s acceptable, even cool – “Oh he’s a bully, he’s confident, he takes what he wants.” For women, outside some pretty narrow contexts, we’re just expected to be thin – and those “narrow contexts” are about desirability at best, not respect, even in the queer community where softness is in. Being desired by other lesbians isn’t usually objectifying like from straight men but like. It’s not the same as respect. Nobody in this culture is trained to look at a fat woman and say: “She’s confident, she’s strong, she takes up space, she takes what she wants.”
Actually TBH if anyone thinks my post above is onto something, I’ll go and suggest reading “Meat Market” by Laurie Penny. It’s one of their older books, short and to the point, and covers this in more detail and with better prose than I can.
Yes, the baron Harkonnen as a woman would not sent the same vibe at all.
Powerful evil women are almost alway thin. Either because they are super pretty, or because they look like dry husk. One exception if my memory serve well is the principal in Mathilda (the book by Roal Dahl), where IIRC she is tall and big like an ogress.
@Cyborgette
Is that a pun?
As for your main point, I wasn’t trying to compare fat male villains to fat women at all, I was just pointing out that the idea of a fat villain is an established archetype in responsible to Ohlmann.
Looking back further historically, kings were often depicted as large which could, in addition to a signifier of power and taking up space, also show that they had as much food as they wanted.
@Ohlmann
I can think of a few fat female villains, mostly designed to be sexualized in a grotesque way. Anita Sarkeesian has a video about this:
https://youtu.be/1oXzWzMqarU
So I guess Husbeast has been lying to me (and his two girlfriends!) for years and years now? Huh. Who knew?
Bookworm in hijab said
In addition to what Threp said, it’s also a handy way to convince people that healthcare isn’t a right and something that has to be earned. It’s a double whammy for us fats because we’re still often treated badly by the medical establishment even if we can afford to buy healthcare.
I’ve been “heavy” for over 1/2 of my life. And I remember how while I was walking around 10 MILES a week and eating moderately, that I GAINED 60 pounds because of medication. Now, because I have only been able to shed 30 of those pounds over 4 years, my doctor wants me to consider bariatric surgery. And this is because my BMI is too high for knee surgery….
I know it’s off topic, and I suspect there will be an open thread on this, but RBG passed last night.
Every single reader who can vote in the US needs to verify their registration and vote. By November, SCOTUS will have a 6-3 conservative majority, and the only way to keep the court from striking down anything a democratic congress attempts to accomplish will be for the 2020 election to bring in a democratic congress and presidency by such a landslide that voter suppression and GOP cheating won’t matter (because SCOTUS will uphold whatever shenanigans the GOP comes up with), and then for that congress to expand the court to 13 justices- but that can only happen if the dems have the house, senate, and White House.
Bingo. Blind spot for me with us having the NHS, so it never even crossed my mind as a factor (such is health privilege). But it most definitely is one.
@Joekster
Can we do that? The court used to fluctuate in number of justices, but it’s been fairly static for the last few decades. Would it be constitutional to expand it? If so, it would be a good idea.
…and because it’s Rosh Hashanah, evangelicals are going off about the Rapture again.
https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1307356131728056322
@Naglfar
I wish more space were made for, like, Jewish anger about the way Christians (esp. white Christians) view us – the savior mentality, the fetishization, the dehumanization and hatred of our bodies, all of it. Pretty much my whole life I’ve been angered almost to the point of violence by people trotting out “Jesus loves you!” or “I bring Good News!”, and I had no idea until the last couple years that this is normal Jewish feelings. I swear the way Christian society views us, alienates us from our ability to see and understand our own anger at the religion that persecutes us.
This is the US we’re talking about. Everything that you do or have happen to you is a moral judgement upon you
Meant to reply to this earlier, but missus decided we’d do the shopping tonight instead of tomorrow (the rumblings of a London lockdown got her spooked some)
There’s nothing in the constitution to prevent the court being expanded – I know both parties have considered it over the years. Only thing that’s really prevented it happening is neither party have had both a bulletproof majority AND the presidency for decades.