Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
Documenting the meatiest, juiciest cuts of “fat acceptance” propaganda from corporate and social media.
Via The New York Post:
“The beauty giant has partnered with a Black Lives Matter activist to promote ‘fat liberation’…
Zyanha Bryant, a community organizer and student activist studying at the University of Virginia, made the announcement she was a ‘Dove ambassador’ on her Instagram page at the end of August, as she spoke about her goal of ending the stigma of being overweight.
‘My belief is that we should be centering the voices and the experiences of the most marginalized people and communities at all times,’ Bryant, 22, said in a video.
‘So when I think about what fat liberation looks like to me, I think about centering the voices of those who live in and who maneuver through spaces and institutions in a fat body.’
She captioned her video by saying, ‘Fat liberation is something we should all be talking about … Tell us what Fat Liberation means to you using the hashtag #SizeFreedom and tagging @dove to share your story.’”
She’s a real modern-day, diverse Marilyn Monroe-esque marketing juggernaut, this one, sure to move some soaps off the shelves with those lusty meat-flaps.
As an aside, as a bona fide domestic terrorist — although at Armageddon Prose we always unquestioningly celebrate Women of Color™ (WOCs) shattering White Supremacist™ glass ceilings — you might ask the obvious question (an act of hate speech): what in God’s name does “fat liberation” have to do with Black Lives Matter?
Oh, you naïve, sweet summer child!
Race hustlers have already written whole books on the matter!
For example, we have Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.
“I decided I would try to trace the transition in the Western world from valuing voluptuous figures to valuing slender ones. And what I found is that it had everything to do with the growth of the slave trade. In the early years of slavery, voluptuous physiques were prized because slavery and the Renaissance were coterminous. And by a couple of centuries on, in the middle of the 18th century, it was very common for race scientists to suggest that… race is not just about skin color. It’s also about behavior and appearance. We know that Europeans are the most superior, most disciplined, most rational of all the races. And that’s why they’re at the top of our racial hierarchies. But we also think that black people are overly sensuous. They love sex. They love food. And, as a result, they are chock full of veneral diseases, and they are overweight. So, from this, we have the seedlings of our current aesthetic system.”
That’s right: that whole time you were dreading sitting next to the quarter-ton heifer on the airplane, her moist arm rolls draped over you, inducing claustrophobic panic, you were actually just subconsciously exercising your deep-seated White Supremacy™.
Related: #BodyPositivity Propaganda Roundup: Fats vs. Airplanes
Via Vice:
“When I arrived in China for my senior year abroad, I had many expectations of what my home for the next year would be like. What I did not expect, however, was to become a public art installation, a metaphorical monument to China’s ‘outsiders.’…
I thought that my experiences in childhood would prepare me for my time in China. I did not expect, however, for my 20-year-old self to feel just as vulnerable as that chubby girl who would hold her breath in fear of a word about her weight. In China, it often felt like I was an Instagram post made real. I was public and accessible, open for strangers to comment and criticize as they saw fit. As I left my apartment, I could feel an uptick in views as heads swiveled my way and eyes tracked my trek across the city to work. I would be approached by strangers on the street, who would call me pang zi (fatty).
A close friend of mine told me of another experience that I didn’t even witness. It made me wonder how many anonymous comments I had racked up on my being that I would never be privy to. She was pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair outside the senior residence where we volunteered and the old woman was muttering to herself, grumbling, and saying over and over, about me, ‘So fat. That girl is so fat.’”
This is probably a thoughtcrime, and I denounce myself, but the imagery conjured of a Chinese grandmother pushed in a wheelchair — a veteran, probably, of unspeakable communist horrors, including the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward with minimal appetite for indulging in Social Justice™ bullshit — marveling at how a human being could possibly get so large really tickles me. I would pay good money to see a dramatic re-enactment.
Via Popular Science:
“Robin Epley, a California-based reporter… attempted to honor her mother’s wishes by enrolling her in a body donation program after her death in 2019. In a personal essay Epley wrote about the ordeal, she described the ‘ultimate fat-shaming experience’ as her mother’s body was turned away by program after program on the basis of her weight alone…
Body donation programs can run either through medical schools or independently and will have slightly different criteria for which donations they’re willing to accept, but it’s not uncommon for these limits to cap at 180 to 200 pounds. Even stricter still, some will look at a donor’s body mass index (BMI) alone to determine whether or not they’ll be accepted.
This means that in death, as in life, those who carry their weight ‘better’ may be more favorable and be accepted into donation programs, while those with a less lean appearance and higher BMI will not. This is a problem for a number of reasons, says Sabrina Strings, sociologist at the University of California, Irvine and author of the book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.
‘BMI is a problem because it was devised using something that is not a scientific method,’ Strings says. ‘Effectively, there were a handful of white American and white British doctors who were very concerned about what they considered to be the growing problem of obesity in the West. So they devised to set up their own limits on how much a person could weigh.’
After front-loading the accusations of “fatphobia,” the article goes on to cite actual reasons from actual medical school personnel explaining why medical programs can’t accommodate certain thresholds of beastliness, including “the load capacity and dimensions of medical tables used to hold donors’ bodies” and “staff safety in moving donors.”
But let’s not let physics get in the way of a good, sad violin ballad for the fats.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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