Up until sometime last year, fat acceptance was a completely foreign concept to me. I thought just like popular culture taught me to; fat is bad, thin is good, must lose weight at any cost, my fat is all and entirely my fault regardless of any mitigating factors, and no matter what I did, I would never be attractive as long as I was fat. I questioned those beliefs, they felt wrong to me, but I figured I was crazy. Oh, and I was ridiculously miserable.
FA is by no means entirely responsible for my transformation from ridiculously miserable to ridiculously contented (that’s a God thing), but discovering and embracing the concepts of the fat acceptance movement have definitely helped. Just learning that there were other people in the world like me was a delight, and once I started to research and discover that I wasn’t crazy to question that cultural dogma, that maybe the world was wrong about fat and fat people, that discovery went from thrill to full-on world shifting revelation.
I must confess, I have become a bit of an FA evangelist (years in a Baptist church are good training) and despite my best efforts to not turn every conversation into a fat discussion, I may actually drive some people a little batty about it. For the most part though, the people in my life are happy enough that I no longer hate myself that they manage to put up with my zealotry, and so many of them struggle with body issues themselves that some are intrigued to hear a different point of view about the whole issue. The vast majority of people I talk to about FA are positive and accepting.
There are those people, however, so entrenched in body hatred and so enamored with the idea that thin=beautiful and fat=baddy baddy bad bad bad that they reject the idea of fat acceptance outright and are actually hostile about it, as if me accepting my body and encouraging others to do the same somehow hurts them. I would understand if these people were drug manufacturers or Jenny Craig franchise owners whose livelihood depends on keeping the fat woman down, but they are normal women who ostensibly would have no vested interest in keeping fat hatred alive.
I have been trying to understand that reaction — the thinly veiled or not veiled at all hostility, being called crazy or delusional or stupid or told that I am lying about being happy with my life or I would surely be happier if I were thinner or I am just trying to justify my own sloth by insisting fat is OK (since I am fat, I MUST be lazy, right?). I have decided that in most cases, that reaction comes out of either fear or willful ignorance. It’s hard to change a belief system you have embraced your entire life, and body hatred can, like any other destructive behavior, become such a comfortable state that it is hard to imagine life without it. One imagines herself suddenly without guilt about diet and without pressure to stay thin descending into a food madness wherein one exists exclusively on twix and ice cream and calls it healthy. To someone in bondage, the idea of freedom can be very frightening. I understand that fear, and I can respect it.
I cannot, however, respect the willfully ignorant. When the evidence is right in front of your face in clear language and you choose not to even read it before rejecting it and mocking it, that isn’t fear, that’s stupidity, like someone who still insists the world is flat. Perhaps I should pity those people, for choosing to live not only in bondage to body hatred but in ignorance too, but I don’t. If you want to live the unexamined life, that is your prerogative, but stay the heck out of mine, and for grief’s sake, don’t talk about things you choose not to understand.
the root of what you are getting at here is innate in everyone – not only self-acceptance, but turning that around and actually treating your body with respect because you believe it deserves it (not matter what it looks like). this is ESPECIALLY for all the people who LOOK like the ads say we should look, but walk around with a starbucks mug glued to their hands and eat only sugar – regardless of outward appearances, these people are also not respecting their bodies and therefore have not accepted themselves – fat or skinny.
this is a deep, deep issue. and what you’re fighting against is an entire mindset – a culture. fight on, sister!
We are threatening to some people. They’ve put most of their life into fearing and avoiding something. they’ve worked really, really hard at indoctrinating themselves with that fear. By coming along and telling them that it’s ok to be fat, they think we’re making all that fear and effort worthless. We’re threatening their paradigm, and the human mind will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain homeostasis of ideas. So they become angry and defensive, without realizing that they’re not defending truth, only defending the current arrangement of neurons in their brain. Re-arranging the connections requires work, even if it is unconscious. It’s natural to resist. Also, consider that being thin (or losing weight) is considered a moral victory over nature itself. Think Calvinist. The concept of fat=sinful has invaded our culture so subtly that people often do react to FA in the same way they would to the idea of accepting killers and rapists. That’s why you will NEVER convince some people. Just like you’ll never convince some people that the earth is round. There’s a lot of others, however, that are just waiting for someone to come along and introduce them to a revolutionary concept. You take the bad with the good. It doesn’t matter if nobody else accepts it, as long as you are happier in your own skin.
I’m just really glad God has helped you to become ridiculously contented. That’s pretty special.
I echo JoGeek that FA threatens people. Have you ever read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? It’s a perfect summation of why people are afraid of the radical notion of body size acceptance.
Ditto JoGeek. I completely agree that overweight women are viewed as uncontrollable — both by society and themselves. It’s like I’m scared to let myself to eat one donut or one cookie, because I’m afraid of getting obsessed with eating more.
And why are the two prevalent images of women the emaciated asexual boy and the busty oversexed centerfold? If you’re not pencil then, then whatever fat you do have must be strategically placed (or strategically placed silicone). Again, control issues.
Have you read Fat is a Feminist Issue by Suzie (sp?) Orbach? Great book on the topic.