[Hello, I Am Fat re: to dan savage’s fatphobia] by LINDY WEST

Hello, I Am Fat

posted by LINDY WEST on FRI, FEB 11, 2011 at 3:53 PM

You asked me for links, Dan, so here are some links for you. There are plenty more, but if you want me to go through each one and explain to you how these words and implications hurt and shame people, you’re going to have to pay me overtime (in Doritos!!!!!). I get that you think you’re actually helping people and society by contributing to the fucking Alp of shame that crushes every fat person every day of their lives—the same shame that makes it a radical act for me to post a picture of my body and tell you how much it weighs. But you’re not helping. Shame doesn’t work. Diets don’t work. Shame is a tool of oppression, not change.

Fat people already are ashamed. It’s taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front, thx. I am not concerned with whether or not fat people canchange their bodies through self-discipline and “choices.” Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat forever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they’re trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it’s because of their own moral failure, andon top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don’t even have yet? You know what’s shameful? A complete lack of empathy.

And if you really claim to still be confused—”Nu uh! I never said anything u guyz srsly!”—there can be no misunderstanding shit like this:

I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact—being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly—characterized as “hate speech.”

1. “Rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly” is in no way a “tame statement of fact.” It is not a fact at all—it is an incredibly cruel, subjective opinion that reinforces destructive, paternalistic, oppressive beauty ideals. I am not unsightly. No one deserves to be told that they’re unsightly. But this is what’s behind this entire thing—it’s not about “health,” it’s about “eeeewwwww.” You think fat people are icky. Eeeewww, a fat person might touch you on a plane. With their fat! Eeeeewww! Coincidentally, that’s the same feeling that drives anti-gay bigots, no matter what excuses they drum up about “family values” and, yes, “health.” It’s all “eeeewwwww.” And sorry, I reject your eeeeeewwww.

continued & read more here.

[“Go and read Food Matters because it won’t make you bristle at the thought of your unconscious participation in the bullshit that is post-racial America as you bask in the privilege of your whiteness. Instead, go on and allow yourself that warm, fuzzy feeling that at the end of the day, everything is right in your world because you spent $5 on an organic heirloom tomato.”]

—melissa danielle, excerpted quote on breeze harper’s post.

in response to a white feminist social justice food thinker & critic’s review
of Sistah Vegan. found here: 

Sistah Vegan: A bunch of inarticulate black women vegans?