How do fat acceptance activist rationalize the detriments of being obese?
This is a difficult subject to approach with the majority of society because it’s often met with disbelief due to the lifetime of inaccurate information we’ve been fed. Everything you think you know? Rethink it.
It’s important to note that the creation of our health and fat concern was initially called the “Obesity Parasite.” This started in the late 1800’s and was concocted by the upper class in order to differentiate themselves and reclaim their social power over the lower classes. This wasn’t endorsed by physicians (in fact, they fought it) until the concept became so popular that they caved from the peer pressure. It was created by the people; not the doctors. Did ya hear that? People. Not doctors. Wanna know more about the history behind why we hate ourselves? Well, GOOD NEWS! I’ve compiled it and resources here.
What we believe about health and fat bodies is often inaccurate. Here. Let me blow your mind: Skinny bodies can be unhealthy. Fat bodies can be unhealthy. Skinny bodies can be healthy. And fat bodies can be healthy.What does this mean? It means we must remove weight from the health equation. Period. That leaves us to look at the other signifiers of health. So, check out this list of symptoms compiled in a 2007 UCLA study: “Increased all-cause mortality and to increased mortality from cardiovascular disease. Increased risk for myocardial infarction, stroke, and diabetes, increased high density lipoprotein cholesterol, increased systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and even suppressed immune function.”
Sounds an awful lot like what we get all shamey about and pin onto fat bodies, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll tell ya what: it’s not a list correlated with obesity, but rather a list of symptoms that comes from weight cycling.
Its a well-known fact that most diets don’t work. We all know this, and there is a ridiculous amount of research to back it up. This “yo-yo dieting” (and all diets are yo-yo diets) is also called Weight Cycling and has those huge physical ramifications listed above. I find it SO odd that we have decided to shame large bodies without knowing their health and then applaud anyone who diets when doing so can be as dangerous as anything else. All while claiming that it’s because we care. It’s backwards as f*ck, y’all.
If we’re REALLY concerned about someone else’s health (and why are we so concerned with someone else’s health again?) we wouldn’t emphatically encourage dieting like we do. Seeing that 75% of women have disordered eating, 116 million American adults are dieting at any given time (Journal of American Medical Association, 2000) and 80% of 10-year-olds have already started dieting, I’d say it’s time we stop congratulating others for harming their bodies in pursuit of fabricated perfection.
But I’ll tell ya what: in the end, a person’s body is none o’ your concern. Bodies are not public property, and not Society’s to diagnose. What humans do with their life and body rests solely on their decisions and our culture needs to stop assuming that we are entitled to commentary.
“ZOMG BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE FAT PEOPLE THAT HAVE UNHEALTHY VITALS ZOMG” you ask? Allow me to repeat myself; it’s none of your concern. Their body. Their rules.
And ya know what? Loving yourself isn’t just for those who fit our standard created by the media; it’s not something you have to earn. Every single person on the planet deserves the opportunity to feel good about themselves regardless of their size. Not opinion. Fact.
Relevant Viewing: Enough with the fear of fat – Kelli Jean Drinkwater
What’s is life like as a woman living under Sharia Law?
I lived in Saudi Arabia most of my life. Not Saudi myself, and am a woman and left Islam. I hate that place with a passion.
I had to wear a headscarf at the age of nine, lived a segregated life style and in fear of half of the population. I was deprived of my own childhood, and the moment I started wearing a headscarf was the moment I stopped going outside to play because other kids and local imams and religious police would give me shit when they saw a girl in a headscarf at the playground or in the street rollerblading. That’s also when my depression started.
I had to have my male guardian’s permission to get an education, get a job and even get paid for my job. For my BA I wanted to major in graphic design, which wasn’t available in Saudi Arabia. I told my parents that I wanted to go study abroad where my brother was. My papers were ready for submission, but my father went ahead and got me admitted into a public university while I was prepared to study abroad. Neither my permission nor presence were needed. I was at least luckier than two of my friends whose parents didn’t allow to go to uni and forced them to marry men twice their age.
I really struggled with freedom of movement. We didn’t have a driver, and my brother hated driving me around, so I ended up not leaving the house for months at a time expect for school, uni or work. When I started saving up and later earning money, I would take taxis after I kept going late to work because of my brother. I got sexually harassed by a taxi driver a few times, and I always made sure I’d write down the car plate number, registration number, and if possible the driver’s name and phone number. One time was pretty bad that I called the police and told them what had happened. I told them I knew the driver’s details, but all I was given was “for your own sake, keep this to yourself.” I later made the mistake of telling my mom what happened, minus the police incident and that I had the driver’s details. I made her promise not to tell any of my brothers, but she went ahead and told them. They treated me like a gullible idiot for not taking down the driver’s details, and ever since then, I wasn’t allowed to take taxis or be with a driver by myself, which resulted in my forced isolation at home again. Thing is, I didn’t give them the driver’s details because I knew they would have just gone and beat him up, and I didn’t want that bullshit, but I dug own grave by trusting my mother.
I was even more and more isolated because I wasn’t religious and couldn’t relate to people around me or even my friends, but I had to pretend to be religious because atheism is treated as terrorism and a threat to national security, and is punishable by death. I couldn’t talk about it even to my closest friends.
There was one time when I was in court, and I see a mother with at least 7 children. She came to me for help because she was illiterate and wanted me to fill out a complaint form for her. Her complaint? Her husband married a second wife and made them live in the same house together, and he beat her in front of her children and second wife. Her problem? In order to file a lawsuit, she needs consent from her male guardian, who also happens to be her abuser. She had no other male guardians alive.
So yeah, Saudi Arabia is a shit place for women, but whenever I protested to the people I knew, I was accused of being too westernized or that I was some oversensitive special snowflake and didn’t know my place.
What Was It Like To Be Gassed At A Nazi Concentration Camp
Filip Muller, is one of the rare survivors among those condemned to work in the Sonderkommando (The members of Sonderkommando, composed almost entirely of Jewish inmates, were forced under threat of death to do the most disturbing work for the SS: dispose of the countless corpses of the victims killed in the gas chambers.) . Born in 1922 in a small town (Sered) in Slovakia, Muller was only twenty years old when he was brought to Auschwitz in April 1942. After a short while, as punishment, he was assigned to dispose of the corpses of the victims. Many of them had wasted away to skin and bones in Auschwitz or in Polish ghettos; others had died of typhus and other diseases in the concentration camp; some had been brutally beaten and shot by the SS, others were hung to set an example for other prisoners, but by far most—hundreds of thousands of men, women, children and babies–were collectively massacred in the gas chambers. As Muller recalls, the sadism and brutality of the SS soldiers knew no bounds: “Shouting and wielding their truncheons, like beaters at a hunt, the remaining SS men chased the naked men, women and children into the large room inside the crematorium. All that was left in the yard were the pathetic heaps of clothing which we had to gather together to clear the yard for the second half of the transport”. Here he is describing a gassing:
As people reached the crematorium they saw everything – this horribly violent scene. The whole area was ringed with SS. Dogs barked – machine- guns. They all, mainly the Polish Jews, had misgivings.
They knew something was seriously amiss, but none of them had the faintest of notions that in three or four hours they’d be reduced to ashes.
When they reached the undressing room they saw that it looked like an International Information Centre. On the walls were hooks,and each hook had a number. Beneath the hooks were wooden benches. So people could undress more comfortably, it was said. alise his son lay beneath him”.
And on the numerous pillars that held up this underground undressing room, there were signs with slogans in several languages – “Clean is Good”,” Lice can kill”, “Wash Yourself”, “To the disinfection area”. All those signs were only there to lure people into the gas chambers already undressed – and to the left, at a right angle, was the gas chamber with its massive door.
In Crematoriums II and III, Zyklon B gas crystals were poured in by a so-called SS disinfection squad through the ceiling, and in Crematorium IV and V through side openings. With five or six canisters of gas they could kill around two thousand people.
This so-called disinfection squad arrived in a truck marked with a red cross and escorted people along to make them believe they were being led to take a bath. But the red cross was only a mask to hide the canisters of Zyklon B gas and the hammers to open them.
The gas took about fifteen minutes to kill. The most horrible thing was when the doors of the gas chambers were opened – the unbearable sight – people were packed together like basalt, like blocks of stone. How they tumbled out of the gas chamber.
I saw that several times- that was the toughest thing to take – you could never get used to that. It was impossible.
You see, once the gas was poured in, it worked like this: it rose from the ground upwards. And in the terrible struggle that followed – because it was a struggle – the lights were switched off in the gas chambers. It was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realised that the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better. That caused the struggle.
Secondly, most people tried to push their way to the door. It was psychological – they knew where the door was, maybe they could force their way out. It was instinctive, a death struggle. Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, always wound up at the bottom. The strongest were on top. Because in the death struggle, a father didn’t realise his son lay beneath him”.
And when the doors were opened?
“They fell out. People fell out like blocks of stone, like rocks falling out of a truck. But near the Zyklon B gas, there was a void. There was no one where the gas crystals went in – An empty space. Probably the victims realised that the gas worked strongest there. The people were battered – they struggled and fought in the darkness. They were covered in excrement, in blood, from ears and noses.”
“One also sometimes saw that the people lying on the ground, because of the pressure of the others, were unrecognizable. Children had their skulls crushed. It was awful, Vomit, Blood – from ears and noses, probably even menstrual fluid. I am sure of it.
There was everything in that struggle for life, that death struggle. It was terrible to see. That was the toughest part.”
“It was impossible to save people. One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium V, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the Sonderkommando saw a woman in the undressing room, who was the wife of a friend of his.
He came right out and told her – “You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes”. The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned the other women – “ We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed”.
Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders did not want to hear that.
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