Feminists Starting XI discussion

"But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women’s bodies are not our own but society’s, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community."

Just going to leave this here...
"The proof that the One Stone Solution is political lies in what women feel when they eat “too much”: guilt. Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat be a moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture’s fixation on female fatness or thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself. Public debate would be far more hysterically focused on male fat than on female, since more men (40 percent) are medically overweight than women (32 percent) and too much fat is far more dangerous for men than for women. In fact, “there is very little evidence to support the claim that fatness causes poor health among women…. The results of recent studies have suggested that women may in fact live longer and be generally healthier if they weigh ten to fifteen percent above the life-insurance figures and they refrain from dieting,” asserts Radiance; when poor health is correlated to fatness in women, it is due to chronic dieting and the emotional stress of self-hatred. The National Institutes of Health studies that linked obesity to heart disease and stroke were based on male subjects; when a study of females was finally published in 1990, it showed that weight made only a fraction of the difference for women that it made for men. The film The Famine Within cites a sixteen-country study that fails to correlate fatness to ill health. Female fat is not in itself unhealthy."

Fat Is a Feminist Issue

Susie Orbach's interview on "Why Fat is a Feminist Issue"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01...

There's a body positivity campaign by JCPenney "Here I am"
Check it :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJlvt...

My body is not an apology. Whether we want to or not, fat women take up more space. The societal mindset telling most of us that fat people are sinful means that we are bothersome. We are not following societal expectations because we are refusing to be good (where ‘good’ in this case means ‘thin’). We are also, by and large, seen as ugly. Because we are seen as taking up more space than we should be, as being more bothersome than we should be, and as being uglier than we should be, fat women are an embodiment of exactly what patriarchal society does not want women to be: visible. And so patriarchy has taken it upon itself to make sure that fat women are discredited and made to feel as ashamed and as unfeminine as possible. This is not to say that fat men do not also feel the burn of fat discrimination. However, men are not expected to be invisible. Men are expected to take up as much space as they want or need to. Men are expected to speak up and be heard if something is bothering them. And, perhaps most tellingly of all, men are not expected to look aesthetically pleasing to the world around them. Which bring us back to the beauty myth.
I've struggled with my own weight. I've heard my father say "Fat women look stupid. How do you just let yourself go?" & he's not the slimmest person himself, btw. But somehow, you do what it takes to find it i yourself to love yourself. To love your doughiness and your softness and the extra bits because there is more of you to love. :D

Nanania wrote: "Just going to leave this here...
"The proof that the One Stone Solution is political lies in what women feel when they eat “too much”: guilt. Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female f..."

Exactly. And female bodies just store fay differently from men. It is what it is. Also harder for us to lose it. And should we have to?

"Exactly. And female bodies just store fay differently from men. It is what it is. Also harder for us to lose it. And should we have to?"

I was just recently thinking about this last part. Why do we chastise fat people uninterested in losing the weight? We expect fat people to prioritise their fatness the way we have prioritised their fatness. We've managed to rob fat people of a wholesome humanity and reduced them to their fatness. As though fat people don't have other things that they would like to accomplish, things they prioritise before fatness. I suppose the conflation of fatness with ill-health plays a part in this, but we have already established that fatness does not always equal ill health. As a fat person I have experienced a lot of my achievements being reduced because my greatest achievement would be to achieve thinness- something I am yet to accomplish. "Oh you were top of the class, good. But you're still fat soooooo" lol. Anyway, what do you guys think about this?

Also, RE: male vs female fatness, I see fatness in men interpreted as strength, greater ability to protect e.t.c (generally positive reception) while female fatness is received negatively. I actually know plenty men who want to achieve fatness- like, that's how different it is. That really blows my mind.

Leyla wrote: " RE: male vs female fatness, I see fatness in men interpreted as strength, greater ability to protect e.t.c (generally positive reception) while female fatness is received negatively..."

I've seen this too with my family. Nobody ever questions the fatness of men. It's always a "your mother/ aunt needs to lose weight" despite a family history of hypertension where the men are more affected because of their weight.


Leyla also wrote, "As a fat person I have experienced a lot of my achievements being reduced because my greatest achievement would be to achieve thinness- something I am yet to accomplish"

This reminds me of the time Nazizi and Kalekye lost so much weight and that's all people talked about. All their achievements were reduced to their newly acquired thinness which was seen as their 'greatest' achievement. And fat women were asked to emulate them.
Which got me thinking, if Madtraxx lost some weight would he still be considered a 'Big shot, big man,big deal ...typical African man'? Would fat men be asked to follow his example?
Naaah.
This is such an obedience thing for women.

This Fatness thing isn't something I regularly like commenting on because it makes me have to face my own demons. for the past few months, I've gained a lot of weight & I resent that. by me wanting to look like a certain body type and thinking a certain weight is unattractive does that mean self hate? Personally I don't really care about other people's weight. if you are happy in your size or comfortable or indifferent. cheers to you. but are my own issues with my body type an extension of what we've been fed. or?