- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
Whoa. She's really giving Anna a run for her money with those candy juicy thighs. This is supposed to be empowering, right?
Fat Acceptance Movement / Fat Girlcows
- Thread starter AtroposHeart
- Start date
GrumbleBum2
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2020
Well, yeah? An unbelievably obnoxious anorexic acquaintance of mine likes to post these sort of “I’m fat and HAWT” trainwrecks on Facebook with condescending comments about how fats are totally beautiful too stop laughing at the landwhales every time their backs are turned you guys, no wonder they’re insecure and hate themselves! Her bff is fat, codependent af and hates herself.
So, yeah, they empower the shit out of nasty bitchy anachans. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2019
It's almost a smile except she's wrinkling her nose up into a classic speak-to-the-manager grimace. Does she think she looks happy in this pic? Because she looks like she's two seconds from forcing some hapless retail worker to call the police.
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
Why is everything about "feeling good?" Because you actually do feel good when you eat healthy foods and nourish yourself and don't binge on carbs and sugar.
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2019
Nothing wrong with feeling good. A big mistake they make is confusing short term gratification with an overall feeling of long term well being you feel when you live moderately or correct yourself after periods of excess.
The pandemic has changed life in many meaningful ways for a great many of us. Some have gained some weight, fitness levels have dropped, substances may have been overused & mental health may have dropped off a bit.
As restrictions have loosened, most have pulled themselves up, said 'no' to that extra slice of cheesecake & laced up their running shoes again, dusted off their weights & resumed healthier habits. Is it fun when you restart? no. But it only takes some weeks, a few months, for genuine 'feel good' to return.
The pandemic has changed life in many meaningful ways for a great many of us. Some have gained some weight, fitness levels have dropped, substances may have been overused & mental health may have dropped off a bit.
As restrictions have loosened, most have pulled themselves up, said 'no' to that extra slice of cheesecake & laced up their running shoes again, dusted off their weights & resumed healthier habits. Is it fun when you restart? no. But it only takes some weeks, a few months, for genuine 'feel good' to return.
- Joined
- May 15, 2018
It seems like some of these zealots think the artificial rush and overly stuffed sensation of satiety that many people get from sugar/carbs and fatty junk are forms of "feeling good," neglecting to mention the cravings, crashes, headaches, heartburn, GI issues, low energy, mood swings, etc. that follow. Instant gratification at its worst.
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
This. I think most of these women don't realize that feeling good and feeling happy and content isn't 24/7. A happy content human will have a range emotions - sometimes you're feeling meh, sometimes you have a great day. Getting high from food and dealing with boredom or depression that way.... yeah, don't fucking normalize that shit.
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2020
Plus if they REALLY wanted to feel good, they'd do some daily cardio and weight-training exercises, which honestly provides a better and longer-lasting endorphin rush than any sweet or bowl of pasta. Food is great and you should enjoy it, but over-indulging just makes you sick and then you crave more and more to get that same rush.
It's all just an excuse to not feel guilty about binging, or not feel AS guilty.
Speaking of binge-eating and lack of cardio, here's some updates from Jewelz (bonus vomit emoji comment in the third screenshot):
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
Jesus take the wheel. Morbidly obese, tattoos, dangerhair and an attitude problem. The next generation Karens.
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
Yeah, it's a good thing that obese people don't have a higher risk of complications and dying if they get covid. Oh wait, they fucking do!
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
If this thread KF was an Aussie YouTuber...
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
This is what I dont understand. What feels good isn’t always what IS good. It feels good to do heroin. It feels good to smoke and it feels good to drink. But it doesn’t feel good to have an addiction to heroin, or fags, or have a drinking problem. Almost all addictive substances ‘feel good’ because that is the mechanism behind addiction.
They deliberately mix ‘feels good’ with ‘is good.’ The two are not the same.
Feels good plus is good - go for it
Feels good plus isn’t great (cakes) - moderation
Feels good plus actively bad (heroin) - avoid.
Feels argh but is good (starting exercising or diet after a long break) - go forbit.
the ‘if it it feels good it is good’ mantra is just a way to control people. By demonising self control , moderation, consideration, you create a society of people who need instant gratification. Basically those rats who will keep on pressing the lever To stimulate themselves until they die of exhaustion or hunger.You remove people’s resilience and grit. You create consumers.
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
This fucking profile Fat Positive fertility
It's a shame she doesn't believe in science that has shown how risky it is to carry a child and give birth when the mother is morbidly obese. These idiots really think, that it's just the doctors being fatphobic when they tell their patients to lose weight if they're obese.
This lady is basically promoting high-risk pregnancies. Risking lives of babies and mothers. What a piece of trash.
It's a shame she doesn't believe in science that has shown how risky it is to carry a child and give birth when the mother is morbidly obese. These idiots really think, that it's just the doctors being fatphobic when they tell their patients to lose weight if they're obese.
This lady is basically promoting high-risk pregnancies. Risking lives of babies and mothers. What a piece of trash.
LetThemEatCake
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2019
20 million cases (which means 20 million positive tests, of which most never needed hospital admission and many had no symptoms at all) out of a world population of 7 billion. Hold my pearls.
As for the death toll, given the death-counting methodology has been different in every country and region, and seriously shady to say the very least, with for example, Public Health England counting anyone whoever tesed positive for COVID19 and dies a any point even months after discharge from hospital as a COVID death, even if they were hit by a speeding car, had a heart attack, self-terminated by hanging due to clinical depression or succumbed to their pre-existing terminal cancer, or simply died of old age, I'm at the point where I'd even treat those numbers with immense skepticism given some at least of the counts are deliberately exaggerated and in other places, minimized, both for political gain.
SO Becca can fuck off. A normal 22 year-old in Scotland needn't be terrified of the infection at all and is probably unlikely to even contract it in the first place. A morbidly obese one only has herself to blame for the fact if she did get it she'll suffer more, and should be more worried about the health risks carrying 100lb exra of lard on her body presented long before the current panic.
As for the death toll, given the death-counting methodology has been different in every country and region, and seriously shady to say the very least, with for example, Public Health England counting anyone whoever tesed positive for COVID19 and dies a any point even months after discharge from hospital as a COVID death, even if they were hit by a speeding car, had a heart attack, self-terminated by hanging due to clinical depression or succumbed to their pre-existing terminal cancer, or simply died of old age, I'm at the point where I'd even treat those numbers with immense skepticism given some at least of the counts are deliberately exaggerated and in other places, minimized, both for political gain.
SO Becca can fuck off. A normal 22 year-old in Scotland needn't be terrified of the infection at all and is probably unlikely to even contract it in the first place. A morbidly obese one only has herself to blame for the fact if she did get it she'll suffer more, and should be more worried about the health risks carrying 100lb exra of lard on her body presented long before the current panic.
DumbDude42
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2019
i didnt put weight at all during the pandemic and nobody i know did either, except one person who was already fat and has been constantly gaining weight for years anyway
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
Megan is really starting to look rough.
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2019
Oof. That thigh skin is giving up the ghost.
- Joined
- May 15, 2018
She's finally morphed into an actually-fat fat activist instead of just an annoying, attention-seeking chubster with only 35 or so pounds to lose.
Good job, Megan. You've gone from one extreme (anorexia) to another (obesity). Balance and moderation are never viable options, huh.
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2019
Eight Signs of White Supremacy in HAES (Health at Every Size) and Ideas for Action
medium.com
Recent coverage of racist killings by police and civilians and racialized death rates from Covid have reignited awareness of the need for ideological integrity and strategy.
If your work dismantling diet culture stopped feeling relevant as part of the call to prioritise anti-racist action then the work you are doing is not actually dismantling diet culture. Because dismantling diet culture, truly undoing the logic of the binary and replacing it with an entirely different logic, is also the work of dismantling the intellectual regimes, systems of thought and feeling, and social structures, that interact to reproduce white supremacy.
HAES might have saved you, it might be saving your clients. It might be your entire business. It can still be flawed, yes?
I am not disputing the fact that HAES impacts people’s lives and thinking in profoundly significant ways. I’m saying white supremacy is everywhere. It lives in the practices and institutions we benefit from and believe in, including those we imagine are anti-oppressive. Including HAES.
I’m a radical dietitian and poet. I used to advocate for HAES, so I’ve been part of the harm. I mean, really advocate. I co-founded HAESUK, introduced HAES to the NHS, and wrote heaps. My published writing was mainly collaborative and with critical scholars I unpicked weight science, and we took on HAES lite. With HAES author Lindo Bacon I co-authored an article arguing for HAES that has over 358K hits plus the book Body Respect. I’m just saying, I’ve been around. I know the score.
HAES is exclusionary and colonial despite itself because it maps out the world to reductionist, Eurocentric contours. In this way, it relies on the supremacist values it is committed to fighting.
The core problem is a failure in praxis. HAES earnestly promises one thing, mistakenly enacts another.
HAES grew out of marginalised fat folks’ radical collective thought, action, and lived experience and provided a powerful alternative to fat people’s very real medical oppression. I know there’s different ways of practicing HAES. It might be that your way is still radical. The HAES I know through the actions, sensibilities, and scholarship of a community and its canon isn’t true to these radical roots**.
HAES is supremacist in ways I was not always conscious of. Here’s eight examples and suggestions for action. I’ve not gone trawling for errors. If it’s on the list it’s a hallmark, not a one-off slip. It might be an idea I previously relied on myself.
Action: Use the hallmarks of of supremacist thinking for collective critique of the deep roots of supremacy in this classic article. Explore ontological approaches that provide decolonial alternatives.
Why? Exalting western science represses other cosmovisions, which is incompatible with liberation. The infrastructure of EBP strongly aligns with the values and practices of supremacist thinking. Fat liberation, health-justice, and a world free from racism, will draw on EBP critically — and as one way of knowing among many — and name subjugated knowledges.
2. Colonial Imperative
Presenting HAES as The Answer to healthist oppression removes alterity and resistance from the public imaginary. It implies the speaker knows everything important that there is to know.
Action: Cultural humility. Train ourselves to identify and undo binary thinking. Understand how colonial logic shapes thought and speech.
Why? e.g. ‘If your nutrition approach/eating disorder treatment isn’t HAES it’s not social justice’ and framing ‘HAES naysayers’ as necessarily misguided, embrace an arrogating colonial imperative of imposing One Right Way. This stance also entrenches binary logic of right vs not-right, a template that reproduces racism by cementing the oppositional hierarchy black/white.
3. Healthism
The HAES phrase ‘Health is not a moral obligation’ emerges from a divisive worldview that omits collective health and pays homage to individualism and lifestylism.
Action: Find ways to communicate that our personal health status isn’t a measure of our moral virtue and isn’t just down to lifestyle, that also frame health as collective*. Read more here.
Why? The slogan collapses ‘health’ to personal practices. There’s no way of incorporating the fact that racism harms health. It removes power and relationship and denies we have any moral accountability for each other’s wellbeing. Adding riders about health being multi-dimensional doesn’t repair the core problem with the paradigm.
*Well Now examples include ‘There is no inherent virtue in being healthy or thin, and social factors hugely impact health outcomes’. And to open conversation on the old slogan: ‘But hey racism is a health hazard, and if tackling racism isn’t a moral obligation then cripes — what is?!’
4. Erasing the Body Politic, Erasing an Indigenous Paradigm of the Unified Self in a Pluriverse
Intuitive and Mindful Eating’s (I/ME) mechanistic model side-steps the extent to which abiding psychological, social, spiritual, and other contextual experiences inform the process that leads us to generate and name body signals. As a result, its narrative constructs fear of blackness and white fragility as normal, inevitable, justifiable, and immutable.
Action: Read more here. Use conversations on body signals and eating to raise awareness that our embodiment is culturally constituted and explain what this means for white fear, white fragility, black lives and the trauma response. Use a discourse that frames eating as relational and embraces many ways of knowing e.g. Connected Eating. Get to grips with ontology. Talk about unified cosmovisions that do frame us as co-constituted Beings: like Indigenous science and an African Centred Perspective.
Why? The foundational premise of I/ME can’t capture a reality in which body responses — that register individually — are culturally curated and perpetuated. In other words, they don’t incorporate the fact that family and social norms shape the development of our body signals. We live with supremacist values, such as anti-fatness and anti-blackness. So we are collectively taught to feel disgust at fatness, taught to feel specific ways about whiteness and blackness . We need theories that integrate these dynamics. The ontological stance used by HAES and I/ME can’t do this. I/ME can’t eliminate the infrastructure of supremacist thought because they employ it.
5. Doublethink
George Orwell’s term describes a process where people say two things that are mutually incompatible, and also say things they know to be false as if they were true. The authorities recognised that clear thinking was vital to freedom, and doublethink was part of an arsenal of tactics conceived to extinguish people’s critical faculties.
HAES scholars assert the practice is grounded in social justice but the research they use to corroborate the benefits of HAES is not concerned with social justice [see image below].
Action: Wise up to doublethink. Get clear about what socially just healthcare looks like. Practice explaining pathways from oppression to poorer health and what to do. Is it possible to rewrite this classic HAES paper without the doublethink. If not, what does that mean?
Why? Acting as if social justice and teaching size acceptance are one and the same is politically regressive. It does nothing to get us past racism. It relocates health in individual behaviours and attitudes, away from collective accountability and systemic change. This is not a liberatory praxis..
Research cited to support HAES from ASDAH doesn’t mention social justice .
6. Biomedical Ethics
Uncritical use of western ethics constrains health and accountability to the narrow arena of medical care. Do No Harm misses the point that harm has already been done.
Action: Read more here. Have community conversations that explore why this passed unchallenged for so long. What can you put in place to uncover other ideas that don’t align with your goals?
Why? Do no harm entrenches an ontology that hinders futurity and absolves us of collective responsibility for historical harm. Do no more harm tells a different version of history that generates different possible responses.
7. Epistemic Injustice
As an imperial strategy, settler colonialists eradicated Indigenous wisdom and voices and destroyed entire systems of knowledge. Black people continue to be written out of intellectual traditions. Knowledge communities, like HAES, that don’t take epistemic justice seriously reproduce this supremacist habit and mindset.
Action: Read up on epistemicide and other forms of epistemic injustice. Spot supremacist norms in knowledge production. Check out Cite Black Women.
Why? HAES folk manipulate representation to hide lineage. For example, my co-authored book (with Lindo Bacon), Body Respect, is a celebrated HAES text that’s mainly presented as having one author- Bacon, not Aphramor. Omission could be unconsciously or strategically done, either way, I can’t help wondering if it’s related to the direction my work has taken: I rejected HAES (whereas Lindo supports it still). Dropping a dissenting co-author erases critical scholarship and protects a theoretical canon from challenge. The danger to praxis-based action is not the ego of the dismissable but the morals of those controlling the party-line. Nepotism corrupts justice whether or not the excluded are narked at your complicity
8. White feminism
Paradigms and communities that read Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique as ‘a searing critique of the cultural norms that kept too many women unhappily stuck in the role of ‘50s suburban housewife’ [see Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet book] without qualification uphold white feminism.
Action: Ask ‘where else does white feminism show up in our work’? Find British works here. Read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom, , Heavy by Kiese Laymon.
Why? The Feminine Mystique gave privileged white women new options, like meaningful careers. And it relied on and reinforced white feminist sensibilities by universalizing elitist lives and ignoring the structural sexism, racism, and classism required for these careers to happen. This is not a revolutionary love. You can read some of bell hooks’ critique of it here.
Each of these categories are ways HAES props up, and its people unconsciously participate in, the oppressive system of white supremacy. It’s not an exhausative list of categories and it’s sparing on examples. They point to why I walked away from HAES — which was a big deal for me at the time.
Racism is not mainly simple and straightforward but subtle and systemic, that’s not news. But this analysis might be, and is written as part of the collective work of ending supremacy.
I once argued that the core premise of HAES was wholesome, and there was work still to do at the periphery. Then I stopped pretending away my body signals of discontent, was honest with myself, tried humility, and took time to mull.
Dismantling internalised and institutionalised supremacy means we need to train ourselves to continually detect, expose, and alter the practices that reproduce it. But look, here are some of the ways HAES thinking and group dynamics condition its proponents to be racist and sincerely believe they are not.
Critical communities, you already have all the intellectual capacity you need to activate deep change. To develop your leaders differently. Insist on integrity. Transform together.
Liberatory praxis is anti-diatribe.
Lady who wrote it looks like linda bacon
Eight Signs of Supremacy in HAES (Health at Every Size) and Ideas for Action
Recent coverage of racist killings by police and civilians and racialized death rates from Covid have reignited awareness of the need for…
medium.com
Recent coverage of racist killings by police and civilians and racialized death rates from Covid have reignited awareness of the need for ideological integrity and strategy.
If your work dismantling diet culture stopped feeling relevant as part of the call to prioritise anti-racist action then the work you are doing is not actually dismantling diet culture. Because dismantling diet culture, truly undoing the logic of the binary and replacing it with an entirely different logic, is also the work of dismantling the intellectual regimes, systems of thought and feeling, and social structures, that interact to reproduce white supremacy.
HAES might have saved you, it might be saving your clients. It might be your entire business. It can still be flawed, yes?
I am not disputing the fact that HAES impacts people’s lives and thinking in profoundly significant ways. I’m saying white supremacy is everywhere. It lives in the practices and institutions we benefit from and believe in, including those we imagine are anti-oppressive. Including HAES.
I’m a radical dietitian and poet. I used to advocate for HAES, so I’ve been part of the harm. I mean, really advocate. I co-founded HAESUK, introduced HAES to the NHS, and wrote heaps. My published writing was mainly collaborative and with critical scholars I unpicked weight science, and we took on HAES lite. With HAES author Lindo Bacon I co-authored an article arguing for HAES that has over 358K hits plus the book Body Respect. I’m just saying, I’ve been around. I know the score.
HAES is exclusionary and colonial despite itself because it maps out the world to reductionist, Eurocentric contours. In this way, it relies on the supremacist values it is committed to fighting.
The core problem is a failure in praxis. HAES earnestly promises one thing, mistakenly enacts another.
HAES grew out of marginalised fat folks’ radical collective thought, action, and lived experience and provided a powerful alternative to fat people’s very real medical oppression. I know there’s different ways of practicing HAES. It might be that your way is still radical. The HAES I know through the actions, sensibilities, and scholarship of a community and its canon isn’t true to these radical roots**.
HAES is supremacist in ways I was not always conscious of. Here’s eight examples and suggestions for action. I’ve not gone trawling for errors. If it’s on the list it’s a hallmark, not a one-off slip. It might be an idea I previously relied on myself.
- Glorifying Western Science
Action: Use the hallmarks of of supremacist thinking for collective critique of the deep roots of supremacy in this classic article. Explore ontological approaches that provide decolonial alternatives.
Why? Exalting western science represses other cosmovisions, which is incompatible with liberation. The infrastructure of EBP strongly aligns with the values and practices of supremacist thinking. Fat liberation, health-justice, and a world free from racism, will draw on EBP critically — and as one way of knowing among many — and name subjugated knowledges.
2. Colonial Imperative
Presenting HAES as The Answer to healthist oppression removes alterity and resistance from the public imaginary. It implies the speaker knows everything important that there is to know.
Action: Cultural humility. Train ourselves to identify and undo binary thinking. Understand how colonial logic shapes thought and speech.
Why? e.g. ‘If your nutrition approach/eating disorder treatment isn’t HAES it’s not social justice’ and framing ‘HAES naysayers’ as necessarily misguided, embrace an arrogating colonial imperative of imposing One Right Way. This stance also entrenches binary logic of right vs not-right, a template that reproduces racism by cementing the oppositional hierarchy black/white.
3. Healthism
The HAES phrase ‘Health is not a moral obligation’ emerges from a divisive worldview that omits collective health and pays homage to individualism and lifestylism.
Action: Find ways to communicate that our personal health status isn’t a measure of our moral virtue and isn’t just down to lifestyle, that also frame health as collective*. Read more here.
Why? The slogan collapses ‘health’ to personal practices. There’s no way of incorporating the fact that racism harms health. It removes power and relationship and denies we have any moral accountability for each other’s wellbeing. Adding riders about health being multi-dimensional doesn’t repair the core problem with the paradigm.
*Well Now examples include ‘There is no inherent virtue in being healthy or thin, and social factors hugely impact health outcomes’. And to open conversation on the old slogan: ‘But hey racism is a health hazard, and if tackling racism isn’t a moral obligation then cripes — what is?!’
4. Erasing the Body Politic, Erasing an Indigenous Paradigm of the Unified Self in a Pluriverse
Intuitive and Mindful Eating’s (I/ME) mechanistic model side-steps the extent to which abiding psychological, social, spiritual, and other contextual experiences inform the process that leads us to generate and name body signals. As a result, its narrative constructs fear of blackness and white fragility as normal, inevitable, justifiable, and immutable.
Action: Read more here. Use conversations on body signals and eating to raise awareness that our embodiment is culturally constituted and explain what this means for white fear, white fragility, black lives and the trauma response. Use a discourse that frames eating as relational and embraces many ways of knowing e.g. Connected Eating. Get to grips with ontology. Talk about unified cosmovisions that do frame us as co-constituted Beings: like Indigenous science and an African Centred Perspective.
Why? The foundational premise of I/ME can’t capture a reality in which body responses — that register individually — are culturally curated and perpetuated. In other words, they don’t incorporate the fact that family and social norms shape the development of our body signals. We live with supremacist values, such as anti-fatness and anti-blackness. So we are collectively taught to feel disgust at fatness, taught to feel specific ways about whiteness and blackness . We need theories that integrate these dynamics. The ontological stance used by HAES and I/ME can’t do this. I/ME can’t eliminate the infrastructure of supremacist thought because they employ it.
5. Doublethink
George Orwell’s term describes a process where people say two things that are mutually incompatible, and also say things they know to be false as if they were true. The authorities recognised that clear thinking was vital to freedom, and doublethink was part of an arsenal of tactics conceived to extinguish people’s critical faculties.
HAES scholars assert the practice is grounded in social justice but the research they use to corroborate the benefits of HAES is not concerned with social justice [see image below].
Action: Wise up to doublethink. Get clear about what socially just healthcare looks like. Practice explaining pathways from oppression to poorer health and what to do. Is it possible to rewrite this classic HAES paper without the doublethink. If not, what does that mean?
Why? Acting as if social justice and teaching size acceptance are one and the same is politically regressive. It does nothing to get us past racism. It relocates health in individual behaviours and attitudes, away from collective accountability and systemic change. This is not a liberatory praxis..
Research cited to support HAES from ASDAH doesn’t mention social justice .
6. Biomedical Ethics
Uncritical use of western ethics constrains health and accountability to the narrow arena of medical care. Do No Harm misses the point that harm has already been done.
Action: Read more here. Have community conversations that explore why this passed unchallenged for so long. What can you put in place to uncover other ideas that don’t align with your goals?
Why? Do no harm entrenches an ontology that hinders futurity and absolves us of collective responsibility for historical harm. Do no more harm tells a different version of history that generates different possible responses.
7. Epistemic Injustice
As an imperial strategy, settler colonialists eradicated Indigenous wisdom and voices and destroyed entire systems of knowledge. Black people continue to be written out of intellectual traditions. Knowledge communities, like HAES, that don’t take epistemic justice seriously reproduce this supremacist habit and mindset.
Action: Read up on epistemicide and other forms of epistemic injustice. Spot supremacist norms in knowledge production. Check out Cite Black Women.
Why? HAES folk manipulate representation to hide lineage. For example, my co-authored book (with Lindo Bacon), Body Respect, is a celebrated HAES text that’s mainly presented as having one author- Bacon, not Aphramor. Omission could be unconsciously or strategically done, either way, I can’t help wondering if it’s related to the direction my work has taken: I rejected HAES (whereas Lindo supports it still). Dropping a dissenting co-author erases critical scholarship and protects a theoretical canon from challenge. The danger to praxis-based action is not the ego of the dismissable but the morals of those controlling the party-line. Nepotism corrupts justice whether or not the excluded are narked at your complicity
8. White feminism
Paradigms and communities that read Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique as ‘a searing critique of the cultural norms that kept too many women unhappily stuck in the role of ‘50s suburban housewife’ [see Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet book] without qualification uphold white feminism.
Action: Ask ‘where else does white feminism show up in our work’? Find British works here. Read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom, , Heavy by Kiese Laymon.
Why? The Feminine Mystique gave privileged white women new options, like meaningful careers. And it relied on and reinforced white feminist sensibilities by universalizing elitist lives and ignoring the structural sexism, racism, and classism required for these careers to happen. This is not a revolutionary love. You can read some of bell hooks’ critique of it here.
Each of these categories are ways HAES props up, and its people unconsciously participate in, the oppressive system of white supremacy. It’s not an exhausative list of categories and it’s sparing on examples. They point to why I walked away from HAES — which was a big deal for me at the time.
Racism is not mainly simple and straightforward but subtle and systemic, that’s not news. But this analysis might be, and is written as part of the collective work of ending supremacy.
I once argued that the core premise of HAES was wholesome, and there was work still to do at the periphery. Then I stopped pretending away my body signals of discontent, was honest with myself, tried humility, and took time to mull.
Dismantling internalised and institutionalised supremacy means we need to train ourselves to continually detect, expose, and alter the practices that reproduce it. But look, here are some of the ways HAES thinking and group dynamics condition its proponents to be racist and sincerely believe they are not.
Critical communities, you already have all the intellectual capacity you need to activate deep change. To develop your leaders differently. Insist on integrity. Transform together.
Liberatory praxis is anti-diatribe.
Lady who wrote it looks like linda bacon
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
