Fat/Size Acceptance

[GothAnneGeddes]

I'm not sure if we have a thread on this yet, so apologies if we have and I've missed it.

I think of all the toxic, time-wasting shite women have to put up with, Diet Culture aka Be Thin and Win, is one of the most widespread. It is the unholy triumvirate of body policing, self hatred and bad science.

I thought this was a really interesting take on Jamie Oliver's new obesity campaign: shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-fat-hatred-and-eliminationism.html#disqus_thread

Would love to know what you all think

Better looking men earn more than worse ones though and height too and probably you are less likgly to hire an obese man. I am pretty sure from what I have seen.

However I certainly agree that the looks of women are in a sexist fashion given too much importance and too many girls as they grow up don't have as their role model leading bankers and surgeons who are female but instead thick as a plank reality stars or women who live off male earnings.

However feminists shouldn't con themselves that fat looks good or is healthy. It doesn't. Plenty of women my height which is average are now 18 stone not 9 stone. 18 stone is bad for you and looks awful. That's the end of the story.

But even so I would leave it to the parent (within reason) as too much interference in people's freedom is a bad thing. Obvio usy there might be a child who will die because it is very very fat but in most cases I would not intervene.

There is also amoral issue as regards your own weight if you use NHS services but that's not really a topic for this thread. As one of the 25% who pay m ore into the tax system than take out from it I would have to decide if being fat will kill them off sooner so I save in terms of their pensions or whether the cost in terms of their diabetes, joints, heart attack care is higher. I think it is apparently the latter so they are a net cost to the 25% of us who support the rest in the UK.

Many of the reasons our children (and many adults) are becoming obese are the result of recent cultural changes, not because of an epidemic of greed and laziness amongst kids, or crap parenting by adults.

"Good" parents don't allow their kids to be "free rangers", playing out of the house all day from the age of 6 or 7 as we were in the 60s and 70s, because of "stranger danger" and "peados". They drive them to school and back instead of expecting them to walk because of the dangers of heavy traffic to young pedestrians. Adults drive because public transport (outside big cities) is crap and cars are seen as a necessity, not a luxury. Alternative forms of exercise are expensive. Leisure centres, gyms, fitness classes, athletics and sports clubs - nearly all of these cost money and many require paying for transport to access them. This is why more poor people are fat than rich people. The better-off can afford the leisure time to cook properly and exercise regularly, and can pay for personal trainers.

If you are a mother who works shifts in a low-paid long-hours job, then cooking from scratch is not always going to be possible. When I was a kid, nearly ALL mothers, rich and poor, stayed at home. (Mine worked full time, but my gran lived with us and did most of the cooking).

SAF, some of my many nieces and nephews are midgets. I don't mean in a medical sense: they are perfectly formed, but small, young adults. They're about 5ft tall (don't know exactly), delicate and size 6 at a guess - they can wear children's clothes. This in a family where everybody else, on both sides of the family for at least 3 generations, is taller than average and sturdy of build.

Their mother, who was borderline anorexic and secretly bulimic, kept them on a fat-and-carbs restricted diet from infancy. These young people all have eating disorders of varying severity. At least one of them is going to have health problems in later life because of it. I feel it's quite likely that their physical development and mental health issues are consequences of the 'healthy' but inadequate diet they grew up on.

I see a lot of very skinny teenagers around now. Their stick-thin legs break my heart. Better for a child to be over-supplied with nutrients in development, surely, than to be marginally malnourished? A fat child can grow through the fat, and lose any extra later if they want. An underdeveloped one can't fix that in later life.

As well as what you've said above, MrsF, each generation is growing bigger than the last. Hence children - if adequately fed - are larger, because they're evolving that way.

As one of the 25% who pay more into the tax system - I'm a smoker, Xenia, so does that give me the right to decide whether fat people should be denied medical treatment?? (£10bn tax, £2bn smoking-related costs.)

As a non-driver, I don't understand why my taxes should go towards patching up people who've damaged themselves as a result of driving or riding in cars.

Weight acceptance is fine if its about people (particularly teenager girls) realising that a size 12 is fine, and a size 6 is unrealistic and unhealthy.

However, fat acceptance, when it leads to a failure of reposnsibility for one's own weight, is a problem.

I am a size 16. I used to be a size 10/12 prior to having children. I do very little exercise because I am quite lazy and uninspired by the thought of it. And I eat too much crap and have little willpower.

If I were just to accept my weight, and decide it wasn't really my fault, then the chances are my weight would balloon further, I would become obese with all the health implications that brings. I am GLAD that being fat is my fault, because it means I can do something about it, and the thought of getting bigger stops me from reaching for another chocolate bar.

Some of the fat acceptance goes a bit too far. All these very obese women suggest ing they look beautiful when hardly anyone except very strange people think they do. I also think women under 8 stone rarely look very good either by the way. I'm not sexist over it either. Fat men look disgusting (and very skinny ones).

I think the aim with our daughters is to ensure they have very full lives where they can see a great fun career ahead of them and heaps of hobbies and what they might wear or how they l ook being a very minor part of that life. That is the road to happiness.

(I was just very surprised when I read that statistic this week. I would have guessed about 25% of people were net beneficiaries of tax, the leeches and those fallen on hard times and 75% contributors. In fact it is totally reversed. It amazed me that 25% of us work very very hard to keep the other 75%, what a burden and what little thanks we get)

The benefits argument goes on all the time in AIBU, no need to do it here too, surely?

Not having read any fat-positive stuff, I assume it's going for the pendulum effect necessary for all big social changes. Actually, forget 'big social changes', it's necessary for most changes on every scale. I'm being fat, unkempt and slatternly in order to recalibrate my self-judgement meter. Campaigners for racial equality have to start off thinking "Black Power". Women in abusive relationships have to see their partner as their enemy before being able to negotiate ... etc.

I would thank you, Xenia, but I still haven't received as much from the national coffers as I paid in. I'll get back to you when I have.

May be for some fat is like putting on a cloak or dungarees so men aren't attracted to them. I suppose it might then be seen as a kind of feminist act or I don't care how I look sort of thing but it's a bit short sighted because it's not very good for your health and things become harder in life like squeezing into small seat and getting up and down playing with children.

This topic keeps bothering me, so am trying a bit of a thought dump. It may be garbled.

The thing that's bothering me is the issue of societal control over women. Some societies control women by saying they're too damn sexy, they must cover themselves and stay away from men so as not to inflame the poor things. In our society, we're veering towards the opposite. We say women are so damn sexy, they brighten up chaps' lives and make them feel like kings. So every woman is burdened with meeting the men's idea of what is sexy. In both cases, the women are required to control themselves, their bodies and their actions in order to make the men feel powerful.

That hasn't come out quite right. I'd appreciate further input.

Looking at Xenia's post above, maybe we need to agree what we're talking about when we say fat? I'm a size 18-ish, Xenia, I don't need special seats or lifting gear! I'm on the very edge between overweight/obese, BMI wise. (I think BMI's a rotten tool but, as I'm unfit, it's probably right in my case.)

I think your assumption that slim = sexually-attractive betrays unconscious patriarchal (Western version) values.

In most cultures (bar a few African tribes where they fatten women up in huts with cow's milk) so fat you're unhealthy is not attractive. Also if fat means healthy and thin means dying of a diseases then in those societies you'd go for the fatter one because she's stay alive long enough to bear your children. I often think the head of North Korea operates on that principle. The book I read last summer about life there bore that out. However that is rare.

I think men and women tend to prefer a partner of a healthy weight. I certainly don't find fat men attractive.

I accept that there is much more emphasis on female looks than men. I was at a work thing this week where one man was commenting on appearance of a woman. I didn't intervene and I knew I was the most successful highest paid person at that event so there to the men.... laughing as I type... but certainly those attitudes exist. Mind you the first thing I thought about him when I saw him, not having done so for about 8 years was gosh what a lot of weight you've put on so perhaps women are at it as well as men.

I think it's not too hard to opt out of the norms if you want to in the UK. I like it that we aren't as fussy over looks as American women in NY and that we're fairly relaxed about it compared say to French women. I could do what I do and double my weight and wear less sexy clothes and leave my hair to go grey. A lot of what I do is behind a PC. However sometimes it's fun to play the game and if you have erotic capital you might as well use it.

Are men not attracted to women in cloaks? Or dungarees? I believe that sex happened in the 70s?

The sizing thing is a red herring as well.

A woman a little under 5 feet tall with say Japanese origins will not necessarily be too thin if she is below a size 8.

A strapping 6'3 woman in the nordic style might well not be too large when over a size 16.

Sizes vary between shops and between decades.

They are a bum steer, I'm afraid.

Which is why using dress size alone is not a good enough indication or if your going to use it then you should say your height as well.

But even so we can clearly see when someone is an unhealthy weight (both thin and fat) so we should not pretend that just because there is no 100% accurate method for determing a healthy weight that there is no such thing as an unhealthy weight.

coldtruth I wasn't pretending anything

I was simply pointing out that Xenia's "rules" about too fat/too thin are inappropriate for large tracts of the worlds population.

It's hard to keep this thread away from judgements on other people's bodies, isn't it? Too fat, too thin, healthy weight, attractive size, etc, etc. To me, that says we're looking at a real and pressing problem.