Fat acceptance

[karen2205]

A friend of mine wrote a (friends' locked) post in which she talked about fat acceptance (Sizeism on Wikipedia is a good place to start reading) and what it means. I'm quite interested in seeing what the skeptics have to say about it/why they think it's wrong.

My starting point with fat acceptance is a liberal/individualistic view point: each of us has autonomy over our own bodies, our appearance/fatness/thinness/weight/BMI is no one else's business. I have no moral or legal right to tell a thin person she ought to gain weight and no one else has the moral or legal right to tell me I ought to lose weight.

Unlike smoking, which can make other people ill, someone's weight/appearance etc does not affect other people's health (even if it does affect their own - and the evidence as to the relationship between weight and health problems is patchy and conflicting).

Following on from this, it's easy for me to agree with statements like:

I'm not better than someone because I'm thinner than them
Someone's appearance is not a good guide to how they choose to eat and exercise
My experience is not universally applicable - what works for some people in terms of the weight/appearance at which they feel comfortable won't be the same for other people.

I don't consider that there's anything virtuous about maintaining a BMI between 18.5-25.

I'm not sure what supportable arguments there are against fat acceptance - anyone care to enlighten me?

[This is a busy kitchen, if you can't stand the heat then go elsewhere. I don't police or stop flame wars - anything goes, though remember that there are a lot of very articulate people reading this journal and if you say something stupid you will be called on it, probably not too kindly.]

Comments

[lizzip.livejournal.com]

Er, sorry, yes. It would have helped if I'd remembered the "C" - "compulsive over-eating disorder". (The main eating disorders are anorexia, bulimia and COED; then there's ED-NOS, "eating disorder - not otherwise specified", which by my understanding covers e.g. an overlap between anorexic and bulimic behaviours. Sorry if I'm teaching my proverbial grandmother to suck eggs.)

I did ponder mentioning fat fetishism but wasn't sure how I'd fit it in (partly because it tends to involve *other people* doing the fetishising, rather than the fat individual, where that's decidedly not the case with anroexia?). Thanks for telling me the term, at any rate :)

[kake]

Thanks — I did wonder afterwards if that was what you meant!

Good point about other people doing the fetishising — though I'm fairly sure that there is often fetishising/desire on the part of the person being fattened.

The main parallel I had in mind was that both feederism and anorexia seem to be very focused on the process of change. That is, the feeder is only happy as long as their — er, not sure what the word would be, partner? — continues to gain. This is of course unsustainable. (It may also not be entirely true — all I know is what I've seen on the internet and on the telly.) Similarly I had the idea that anorexia involves the desire to continue losing weight rather than to get to a certain point and stay there — or am I completely off base there? (Please tell me if I am — I don't know that much about anorexia either.)

[lizzip.livejournal.com]

Hrmm.

Yes, AFAIK (and from watching friends, etc), anorexia does tend to involve people deciding that actually, their target weight isn't good enough.

Feederism I've not investigated much. I'm happy to accept the premise that both are focussed on change, but I think I'm still a little leery of the comparison - precisely because one is a fetish and the other seems to have very little [direct] involvement with sex (hmm: except possibly the "not pretty enough" issue). Feederism and pro-anorexia is certainly a comparison I'm happier with than fat acceptance and pro-anorexia, though. :)