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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@Cyborgette
I hear you. And all the times they claim to be pro-Jewish because they like Netanyahu, or the condescending explaining (goysplaining?) of why Trump/the GOP/Evangelicalism is good for Jews, actually. And then there’s the Jews for Jesus who tell us they’re the real members of our own people and that they somehow know us better than we do.
It’s even more complicated for me because although I was raised Jewish my father comes from a Christian background and even though he isn’t practicing, his side of the family does all the stuff you’ve described. At any family reunion I have to be very careful not to bring up my religion lest I unleash it all.
@Naglfar
Oh oof, my sympathies re family. Jewish family stuff is hard enough by itself. 😉
@ Cyborgette,
I second you (third you? With Naglfar seconding?). Would add as well, the blaming of you for your own dehumanization at their hands. They do that to us too; I suppose it is how they justify their evil.
Would you say a feeling of powerlessness about this is also common among Jews? I know that for Muslims, we often seem to feel sort of hopeless about it… like, there is so much bad, what can I even do?
Maybe we should team up to form our own league of superheros to address this. We could have the coolest costumes. (Sarcastic humour = coping mechanism ?)
@Bookworm
Thanks, and my sympathies. 🙁
Re: powerlessness. Oh dear gods yes, feeling powerless and helpless is super common for us. We’ve internalized it to the point it’s almost cultural TBH; I didn’t learn that Jews fought back during the Holocaust in any way until I was in my 20s. And it goes back a long way; in medieval Europe we were mostly forbidden from owning weapons or serving in militaries. (Because Jews, including the ones working as financiers, were literal property of the gentile nobility – we lived entirely at their mercy, so obviously any tools of rebellion had to be taken away.)
The counterbalance to this obviously being Israeli military machismo, which… is even more toxic. I’m hoping resurgent Jewish leftism provides a less toxic alternative, with strength in collectivism and mutual support instead of individualism and military prowess.
(And IDK if that’s exactly what you were talking about, but like… yeah, TBH I feel like the learned helplessness of being Jewish has been as big in my life as that of being queer and that of being a woman.)
Re superheroes: I feel like there’s definitely a joke in there about police being unkosher. 🙂
@Bookworm
Yes, I would say it is. We are a tiny minority in America and most of the world, conspiracy theories notwithstanding, so it occasionally does feel like we have no control.
Well, since so many superheroes were invented by Jewish comic book artists (Superman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and at least a dozen others) I’d say we’ve at least got a starting point for a league of superheroes. Superman in particular has some interesting Jewish allegories in his backstory, to the point that the Nazis actually issued a statement denouncing him. Superman also may have been loosely inspired by Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart, who toured America a few years before the first Superman comic under the name “The Superman of the Ages.” Come to think of it, the number of superheroes created by Jewish authors might be a response to the persecution that Jews have faced over the years.
I don’t know off the top of my head any superheroes created by Muslim authors, though I’m sure there are some.
This is true for us Jews as well, at least half of Jewish humor is a coping mechanism for dealing with our struggles.
@Cyborgette
This is a big one for me. In my years of education there was little to no mention of this, and all the books seemed to show Jews as passive rather than fighting back. I don’t want to draw a comparison between antisemitism and racism, but I will say that I find this aspect similar to how slave rebellions in the Americas are often erased from history books.
And that feeds all the way back into us being blamed for our own situation. The stereotype of Jews as greedy is from our history as money-lenders, so society comes in and DARVOs the situation to paint it all as our fault.
At this point I only tend to want to work with leftists who are PoC, minority religions, LGBTQIPA+, disabled, or some combination thereof. Rather disillusioned with many cishet white leftists at this point.
Speaking of Muslim super-heroes, there was an academic guy who was researching that very topic a couple of years ago, and found what seems to be the first ever Muslim hero in US comics, whose adventures were first published back in 1944. He was charmed by the fours issues the character was in, found he was in the public domain, then went ‘guess who’s getting a revival this decade’. 😀
https://www.comicsbeat.com/interview-a-david-lewis-embraces-kismet/?amp=1
This looks like an interesting take on the ‘WWII person gets revived in the modern era’ trope, if nothing else.
I remember when I was a wee child and I was explained Jerusalem and Israel.
The moment that stuck with me was the explanation of the powder keg that is Jerusalem and the fact there’s severals important muslim building that would need to get demolished if the temple were to be rebuild. But since the temple isn’t slated to be rebuilt in the foreseeable future, there’s not problem !
And then, the teacher described how some evangelicals were trying to genetically engineer a ginger cow that would fit the description for one of the prerequisite of rebuilding the temple. Because they want to trigger the end of the world. I think it’s where I started losing faith in mankind.
@Ohlmann
The genetically engineered cow is news to me, but yes, that’s Evangelicals for you. I’ve had my faith in humanity back for a while, but I never recovered my faith in Christians, and to this day I refuse to date practicing ones. (And yes, that very much includes the “Jesus was nonbinary though!” trans crowd.)
Like some of this is just personal and me being an angry kvetchy Jewish girl, but like. Christians, including cultural Christians, and most especially practicing white Christians, are going to need to grapple with a LOT of shit about how hypocritical and systematically antisemitic their religion and culture are before we can really have the cultural sea change we need.
For starters: as a Jewish woman, Jesus to me is not only the icon of the oppressor, he is the personification of the Male Savior. Think about it: it is literally assumed that a woman can be nothing, is worth nothing, deserves nothing, unless she submits entirely to this beautiful and all-powerful man. Officially (in most cases) that’s not sexual or romantic submission, but like… Can you see it? Can you see how fucked up it is? The reason “Jesus was nonbinary!” doesn’t ride with me is that baggage – Christianity says that we’re supposed to make ourselves literally the brides of this ancient religious leader. His foreskin is a sacred relic FFS. It’s patriarchy all the way down.
@Ohlmann
Of course, notably absent from this plan is the input of Jewish people. I’m sure there are a few Ultra-Orthodox folks out there who would favor it, but most of us don’t want to rebuild the temple or have a ginger cow.
Evangelical Zionism was never about the Jewish people. We, like the cow, are sacrificial animals for them. According to their own beliefs, when their beloved rapture is brought about by things they made us do, we will be sent to Hell.
@Cyborgette
Is this something people actually say? I haven’t heard that argument before, but it sounds very suspect because although I lack much knowledge about the New Testament, IIRC Jesus was a cis man. I’ve heard a few people comment that he may have been gay or bisexual, referencing “The Disciple Jesus Loved,” but I don’t know enough to weigh in on that either and it still wouldn’t change the reality we face as Jews in a Christian dominated world.
The thing that annoys me the most is when some supposedly progressive Christians (and even some Jews, e.g. my mother) tell me I shouldn’t criticize Jesus because “he had good intentions.” It’s not about his intentions 2000 years ago, it’s about how his followers are behaving in the modern day. Or when some progressive Christians say that Trump supporting Evangelicals aren’t “Real Christians” and make a No True Scotsman of it. We’ve internalized all this to the point where we can’t even say this without including some disclaimer about “not all Christians.”
BTW: Sorry if I’m getting too ranty, it’s just that it’s Rosh Hashanah and I feel like I need to vent a bit.
@Snowberry:
Oh, that’s already happened. By Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/schumer-ruth-bader-ginsburg-mcconnell-confirm-senate_n_5f654b55c5b6b9795b108afe?ri18n=true
@Naglfar:
I always liked the quote from John Brunner’s ‘The Sheep Look Up’, where the original founder of the ecoterrorist movement says “I am no more responsible for the actions of my followers than Christ is responsible for those upon whom Paul of Tarsos projected his own personal neuroses.”
@Jenora Feuer
Now there’s a book that’s feeling a bit more relevant by the day.
I know where I’ve recently heard this smarmy, pathetic attempt at “compassion” and “pity” that drains all meaning from the words: Sean Hannity.
Overheard a few nights ago from my R family member watching Fox: Hannity concern trollin’ it up with his worries about Biden’s mental faculties.
A bunch of junior Sean Hannities?! Ewww.
@ Naglfar, you said
I have felt this way too. Sometimes I feel guilty for thinking it. But too often I’ve been friends with/working with someone who seems like they “get” it, and then they say something that just…proves they don’t.
I often feel like leftists only accept me, as a Muslim, to the degree that I can be their token “one of the good ones”. If my Islam is too overt – if it becomes obvious that I do in fact take it seriously, beyond just, say, wearing cute headscarves – they get very uncomfortable and aaaaaaaalllll their underlying Islamophobia starts emerging. It means I find it hard to trust people who claim to be open-minded. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
@Bookworm
Can relate. So many people who think they’re progressive allies to a group, but then the instant someone from that group calls them out they double down and get angry at that person. It seems a lot of cishet white male leftists really don’t like having to check their privilege.
The biggest red flag to me at this point is how many white male leftists claim to be “deradicalizing” the alt right while using all the alt right’s language. This kind of behavior doesn’t make the alt right less dangerous, it just makes the left more toxic.
@ Naglfar,
Sometimes not even because of a call-out. Sometimes it’s just spontaneous.
@Naglfar:
Considering at the end of the book, they’re seeing and smelling the smoke from America over in Ireland… yeah.
Also, the source of the title is very apropos as well, and deliberately so; Brunner knew exactly what he was referencing. From Lycidus, by John Milton, and which was quoted in the epilogue of the novel:
It can very much be taken as a rant about how the common people are ignored and not provided for by those in power… and given the time and place of Milton, ‘those in power’ almost certainly included religious power, especially given how often sheep and related words are used as a metaphor for the church and its members.
@Jenora Fuer
Unfortunately,
that’s real now.
@Dalillama:
I was, sadly, aware of that already. But it definitely bears repeating.
As the wife of a man whose favorite spank material is plus-sized lingerie sites, I can attest that not all men feel this way.