And once again, a woman complains that a fat-accepting body-positive space is not accepting enough of her because she thinks she’s disgustingly fat, and wants to lose 12-17 pounds. (The piece by Daisy is at xoJane, a site I have less and less patience with, but which proclaims itself to be body-positive.) Fat-positive people are so mean (read: don’t rush to tell her how awesome and inspiring she is for wanting to go on a diet) to her because she wants to improve her body. (Improve, huh? So skinny bodies are better than fat ones?) We should just support her, by encouraging her to lose weight and telling her how much prettier she’ll be when she loses less than 20 pounds. She’ll be able to do all those things she can’t do now because she’s too fat! She’ll be able to wear strapless dresses and tank tops again! She won’t feel disgusting letting her friends see her in a bikini at their ski rental in Tahoe! She won’t be (o! horror of horrors!) the fattest girl at her spin class at the gym anymore, because there’s nothing worse than that. (No, really, she literally does say, “And, sorry, but there’s nothing worse than going to a class at the gym and realizing you’re the biggest girl there.” Because we all know that being just a little heavier than all the other thin people is worse than being waterboarded.) But she’s not fat-shaming! Oh, no! She’d never do that! xoJane has educated her on the horrors of fat shaming! She knows better! She just wants people to support her, too!

And she’s making herself so vulnerable! After all, she’s admitting she’s fat, and that means she’s admitting she’s weak! (Because fat people are weak, right? Right?) And she’s opening herself up to criticism, because there’s just no room on xoJane for people who aren’t happy with the way they look. (You mean, like there’s no room in the vast majority of the world for those of use who are?)

But it’s not her fault she’s so hung up on this! Her mom was sooooooo obsessed with looks! She had to rebel and not care, but her destiny of being self-conscious about her butt has finally caught up with her! She’s just soooooo tired of everybody in her family tell her her butt is too big! She can’t take it anymore.

She just wants everybody to know that it’s OK to want to improve (there’s that word again) one’s body. She thinks xoJane doesn’t represent that point of view enough, but they’re making “an admittedly noble attempt to make us all feel equal and beautiful.” (Because we aren’t actually all beautiful and equal, so they have to make an oh-so-noble attempt to make us fatties feel better.) And she just wants it to be OK with everybody that it matters to her! She just wants everyone to tell her it’s fine if she goes on a diet to look good in a bikini! Self-acceptance isn’t OK if it’s accepting things she hates about herself! (Er, does she understand what the word fucking means?) And not everybody who does accept themselves should! (Literally. She says, “That being said, there are probably some of you who are OK with your weight, but maybe shouldn’t be.” And I managed to block out the awfulness of that sentence, and had to come back and add it to my post.)

Fuck you, Daisy, you fat-shaming piece of shit.

I keep hearing this goddamn refrain from skinny people on the edges of FA circles: By not dieting and not encouraging dieting, you’re diet-shaming! By not saying thin is prettiest, you’re thin-shaming!

And no. Fuck no. Thin shaming is not a thing in the same way that misandry is not a thing. Are there real examples of people body-shaming thin people? Yes. Absolutely. And that’s tied up in misogyny and other societal problems, and fuck a bunch of that. But there are also real examples of people hating on men for being men. But misandry is still not a force in society the way misogyny is, it doesn’t go around damaging huge groups of people’s lives day-to-day. And the same is true for thin-shaming, and for diet-shaming. This bullshit is the BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ of FA. We need spaces that are safe for us. Thin people and people on diets have many spaces that are safe for them. If they want someone to praise them for dieting, they can go find one of those, and stop trying to make our body-positive spaces unsafe for us. This is what privilege fucking well does: It looks at what it has, and says, “No, that’s not enough, I must have everything. Everything must be about me!”

I don’t fucking care if she wants to diet, but I’m not going to play cheerleader for her, or anyone, while she does it.

It’s not ok to body-shame anybody, ever. It’s not. I won’t allow it here, not even the relatively mild “go eat a sandwich” and “real women have curves.” It’s not ok to say that people who can lose weight and keep it off by dieting are “freaks of nature,” either. I won’t have it here. But I also won’t have this kind of self-serving, whining, thinly-veiled fat-shaming bullshit here.

You wanna lose weight, Daisy? Fine. Have fun. But I don’t want to hear about it here, or in any body-positive space (which xoJane professes to be). It’s triggering for some of us. You have the whole fucking world where you can talk about your diet and how fat and ugly you feel because you put on 15 pounds after you turned 30, Daisy. I, meanwhile, have been dealing with the whole goddamn world telling me how fat and ugly I am since I was goddamn fucking twelve. I have finally gotten to a place where I think I am beautiful, and I am comfortable in my body most of the time, despite being inundated with this same crap constantly every goddamn day. And I have done it, in part, by finding fat-positive spaces, online and off. And when you try to get people in fat-positive spaces to be your diet cheerleaders, and tell us how fat bodies are worse than thin ones, and it’s noble to try to make us fatties think we’re equal to thin people and still beautiful anyway, you are destroying the safety of that space by fat-shaming. So fuck you for that.

My sweetie is of the opinion that Daisy is trolling. Me, I think she just needs to go find a place where she’ll fit in better.

So Daisy, take note: