Thin privilege is not having to realize that your people, your fellow HAES disciples, are, unknowingly and subconsciously, suffering internalized fatphobia. The most recent posts to this blog have tossed around triggering, fat-shaming words like “fatty” and “gross” with impunity. They keep stressing their active lives, their 1200-calorie meals, like they’re badges of honor, completely missing the point of body acceptance. Some are even mention biking and going to the gym, obviously to lose the weight they inwardly find so abhorrent. How are we supposed to sympathize with your experiences and celebrate body positivity when you’ve already been brainwashed by biased science to hate our body type?

Mod response:

Y'know, we get “But FAT/FATTY/[anything about fat] is negative, you shouldn’t use it, you’re just making things worse!” quite a bit. Not constantly, but quite a bit. And I, for one, am fucking sick of it.



The mods at TITP like the word fat. Pretty sure – not checking because it’s the middle of the night, but pretty sure – we all like the word fatty, too, or at least are ok with it. There’s thing phenomenon known as “reclaiming slurs.” That’s what we’re doing. Personally, I also reclaim queer and dyke as a queer woman, mad as a mentally ill person (and btw, there’s an actual Mad Pride movement, I’m not alone in this), bitch as a woman, cunt for my bits, and a few other things. I am personally very much in favor of reclaiming slurs.



You don’t have to jump on this bandwagon. Not any of you. You don’t have to use the words fat or fatty or whatever. We won’t use them about you personally if you don’t want us to. But this blog runs on submissions, and if submitters want to refer to themselves as fatties, they fucking get to do it, and since you don’t fucking know where their heads are at about it, kindly don’t slap “self-hating” on them. Maybe they’re reclaiming the slur, ok? So maybe get off your fucking high horse.



Yes, we get an awful lot of submissions in which the submitters talk about how healthy they or someone else are. I think our regular readers all know that the mods here do not think that health is a single thing, do not think that it is limited to size or diet or exercise, do not think that it conveys any superior worth or moral standing, or generally have much use for the fucking concept. We are against healthism. We do not think that fat people have to be healthy in order to justify their fat. We are pretty clear that fat people deserve to be treated like full and actual people, regardless of health. So does everyone else. No one is required to be healthy. No one is obligated to be healthy. Certainly no one is superior for being healthy.



We do, however, also think that it is important to educate the public on the simple fact that fat is not automatically UNhealthy. It’s not going to kill us all by the age of thirty. We think it’s important both because fat people in general need to be better educated about about our bodies and what they can do so that we can make informed choices, and because we would actually like to take that club away from the haters, because seriously they don’t need another one.



We wish that our submitters did not feel it necessary to attempt to justify their fat by proclaiming their health. But we acknowledge that everyone is at a different place in their journey with their fat bodies, and we are actually dedicated to letting fat people talk about their experiences with their bodies. And for some people that includes the need to be really certain and really clear about their health, however they define that.



If you can’t fucking sympathize with other people because they aren’t at the same place you are with their bodies, especially when all of us have been marinating in a sea of fat hate since birth and all of us have had to struggle with that, and fucking all of us have to keep on struggling with it at least occasionally, then there is, frankly, something wrong with you.



Does it get frustrating to see that same fucking line about how healthy a submitter is? Of course it does. I roll my eyes every time I see it. (I do more than roll my eyes every time I see someone insist that they ABSOLUTELY eat healthy BECAUSE THEY’RE VEGETARIAN/VEGAN. People, vegetarian and vegan diets are not ipso facto more healthy than omnivorous diets. Veg* diets do not work for every single body. Some bodies need meat. And it is absolutely possible to eat a veg* diet that is nothing but junk food. Twinkies are, or were, vegetarian. JFC.) But we’re letting people tell their own stories in their own words here, and that means letting them describe their own bodies, from the place that they’re at with them.



So maybe back off some, ok?



-MadGastronomer

