It's time to reconsider calling 911

In light of Eric Garner and Mike Brown and Tamir Rice and Aiyana Stanley-Jones and so many others- black people killed by the police with no consequences and little hope that there ever will be, a lot of people are saying, what can we do?

I have been sickened by the grand juries refusing to even have a trial, and I have been thinking a lot.

What can we do?  How can we confront and push back at the racism in America? What can we do? What can we do?

So. I have a suggestion for us, the white people who care about justice. 

We have to stop calling 911. Or at least, we have to understand that we need to be very careful about how we get the police involved in a situation.

We- the white people of America- need to stop treating the police like we think they're gonna show up sweet as pie like Andy Griffith, when we can see them brutalizing black people on TV and in thousands of YouTube videos.

We need to treat calling 911 for anything involving a black person with the same care as a rattlesnake or a gun.  Because calling the cops could be fatal for that person.

You see something questionable? Hang back for a minute and let it play out for a second. It's probably nothing.  

Or you could go up to the black person and say- hey, what's going on? Are you ok? Do you need help?  And if they don't want help, then you leave.

Look, I don't like talking to people I don't know, and I am not great with in-person situations that feel like they may be or get aggressive, so if I think something weird is going on, I really favor the hang back and wait method.  

And I am not trying to say that there haven't been times when I've called the cops or told someone else they should call the cops.  As white people, that's what we're taught and told to do.

But we have to be honest about the reality of the anti-black racism in America and what that means for black people.

It means that if we (white people) blithely call 911 to have the cops 'check out' a situation involving a black person, we could be setting in motion a situation that gets that person killed.

We are offloading our racial discomfort and our fear of black people onto the police and asking them to deal with it. And then the police show up and deal with it by killing the black person, because they see black people as criminals. Which I guess we do too, or else why are we calling the cops?

Cops are not social workers. They are not the kindly mediators of low level disputes.  

They choked Eric Garner to death for loose cigarettes. They shot Mike Brown to death for jaywalking.

We need to be more careful. We need to be conscious of the damage our desire for colorblindness causes- because we are the people it blinds. 

You want to do something? Well, that's a thing you could do. 

You can also search Twitter for direct action protests in your area, where you could support the black people leading the protests.  That's another thing.

This is not a solution to centuries of racism. It is a suggestion for harm reduction.

Please note, I am clearly not saying there is never a reason to call the police. I am leaving the comments open for now. If I get a bunch of fuckery, I'm closing them.  Don't even bother sending me troll comments, b/c I will never publish them.

Why body positive isn't enough

People will often ask- why does fat acceptance need to be a separate movement when there is already a body positive movement?  

Ok, so what's going on here is- the original quote is from my fat positive account- Ok2BeFat- the Tumblr version.  So that's me, and all the fuckshittery underneath is other people.

It's just an example of something that is incredibly common- the idea that it's ok to love your body or be body positive, but not if you're 'too fat'.  Then you definitely should not love yourself.

Also, the mainstream body positive 'movement' isn't political at all. It's a bunch of 'you go girl' platitude bullshit that addresses none of the underlying causes of why so many people (especially women) are having such terrible issues with their bodies in the first place.

Body positive isn't intersectional.  Body positive doesn't seem to care about racism or poverty or trans rights or anything else. Body positive engages in huge amounts of fat hatred. 

Body positive is useless. Body positive is like telling women that if they just Lean In at their jobs, they might be the token cis white woman executive, without bothering to acknowledge the institutional discrimination inherent in such a system.

That's not good enough.  

I'm all for trying to help individual people feel better about themselves. That is one of the purposes of Ok2BeFat in the first place.

There are some notable exceptions to this.  Body positive people who are committed to including fat people, like Melissa Fabello of Everyday Feminism. But the majority of people who talk the body positive talk- they will tell me flat out that I have no business being positive about my fat body.  And continue to do so, over and over and over. 

But without an intersectional understanding of the real issues- without a commitment to dismantling the entire power structure that is actually causing the problems-- making individual people feel better is not going to change anything.

---

And I'll also just comment again on the extreme fat hatred by people with eating disorders, and how they can't conceive that a fat person could possibly have an eating disorder.  

When in actual reality, almost every fat women is probably going to suffer from some form of disordered eating- because what is ED for a thin person is what doctors prescribe for fat people.  Because families push eating disorders onto their fat children.

There is a sick lack of compassion from a lot of people who have suffered through eating disorders. I am very tired of it.  

I am tired of my eating disorder being completely erased because I'm fat, so it doesn't count. I am tired of my trauma and pain being erased and disregarded and treated like a joke.

Having an eating disorder doesn't mean you get a free pass to be an asshole (fuck you).

And I will repeat again- if you react to the idea that fat people should be treated like human beings- YOU are the one with a problem. If you hate and fear fat people, you haven't recovered from ED at all.

It makes fun of itself.

When an account called "I'm an anti feminist" represented by a photo of a fedora starts demanding 'proof' from me- I feel like I'm doing a great job of feminisms.

You can't even make fun of this guy. He's already doing such an amazing job of it himself.

Josh has mentioned that I might want to slow down on the overwhelming number of riots I've been starting lately. 

I'm so lucky to have so very many people looking out for my well being- even total strangers!

Fat rights are reproductive rights.

Fatphobia and fat rights are very much a reproductive rights issue.

For one thing, the entire support structure of the right to choose to end a pregnancy or to not have a child or to only have as many children as you choose to-- this is based on the idea that your body is yours.  That no one, and especially not the government, has a right to interfere with someone's body autonomy.

That's why anti-choice arguments never fly. No one has the right to force you to let them use your body. If someone will die because you don't give blood- that's not ideal, but no one supports the government strapping people down and taking their blood through force.

Well, I'm here to tell you that fat bodies have rights too.  That the same body autonomy argument holds true for the idea that no one has any business trying to force people below a certain weight. 

Fat women get subpar gynecological care that they have to pay more to access. I'd also be willing to bet cash money that the extreme amounts of medical fatphobia is also a barrier for fat trans people who need access to gynecological care. 

Fat women are denied access to fertility treatments until they lose weight. 

Fat people are less likely to be seen as good candidates for adoption.

Some doctors won't do pap smears on fat women, which could lead to a missed cervical cancer diagnosis.

Fat women have more unplanned pregnancies because the birth control dosages were never tested on fat women, and the dosages are not adjusted for fat people.  Plan B does not work reliably on fat bodies. 

Doctors miss the pregnancies of fat women b/c they refuse to believe we are sexually active so we can miss deadlines for abortion care.

Doctors prescribe weight loss surgery for fat women who want to become pregnant, which leads to undernourished fetuses and underweight babies. Then the women who had the surgery are much much more likely to die from the surgery and malnutrition. So their children lose their mother. 

The children of a fat woman are more likely to be removed from her care by the state because of assumptions that she can't be a good parent.  

Lawyers will also use a woman's fatness against her in divorce proceedings to force a less equitable settlement through the threat that a judge will see her as an unfit parent.

Fat rights are reproductive rights.  

Information mostly from the book Tipping the Scales of Justice where you can read all about this and many other completely depressing topics about how fat people are legally subject to discrimination.

Eating disorders and fatphobia.

I have all the empathy for people with eating disorders. Eating disorders (ED) are incredibly serious. They are the most deadly form of mental illness.  

We have to make sure that people with eating disorders have access to the help they need to recover. We have to destigmatize ED. 

But while I am incredibly sympathetic to the suffering of people with eating disorders- I will not tolerate being used as a punching bag. It is NOT ok for people with ED to lash out and attack fat people and then try to excuse their attacks by saying they have ED.

I do not consent to be the punching bag or negative motivation (thinspo) of people with ED. I do not consent for you to take my photos and add derogatory captions to remind yourself not to eat so you don't look like me.

Fat people get eating disorders too. And your ED is not a pass to treat fat people like garbage.

It says to me that you are not in any kind of real recovery if you still loathe fat people and find them repulsive. Get into recovery and treat it seriously.

If you can get over your fear of being fat- then you will have conquered your ED.

Being the walking embodiment of your terror is kind of a drag for me.

A story

The was a girl.

Well... she was really too old in her thirties to keep calling herself a girl, but the word 'WOMAN' seemed too weighty and ponderous and capable and adult to apply to herself. So she still thought of herself as a girl.

Let's call this girl- Sally.

Sally had a hard childhood. She had so many bad things all crammed inside her head and shoved way down because life doesn't just stop happening because horrible things happen to you and because you have an awful family.

When you pick up the shattered pieces of yourself and try to make them into a life- you can't stop and put bandages on your cut up places.  There's no time to stop.  So Sally tried REALLY HARD not to think about the things she couldn't let herself think about, and she had nightmares all the time but she couldn't think about that either. 

Sally made a couple of good friends who cared about her. She fell in love with a man who cared about her even more. And for the first time, Sally started to feel safe.  But then, of course, all the things she'd been shoving down and away started to come back and Sally had to begin the hard work of dealing with these things.  She got a therapist. Her boyfriend listened to her. She cried a lot.

And Sally found people on the internet who had been through some of the same things she had and it made her feel less alone. She wrote and wrote and it really helped.  And it began to feel like her life was real and had really happened, instead of a shameful nightmare she could never quite get away from.

One day... one day Sally visited her parents, even though they didn't have a good relationship. It was going to be her mother 70th birthday and Father's Day in the same weekend.  Sally desperately wanted to have some kind of normal relationship with her parents, even though she always dreaded every single visit, for months and months beforehand.

Sally's father always looks at her like he hates her. Like he's not sure who made the horrible mistake that left him with this fat failure of a daughter. 

Sally's father did NOT want a fat daughter.  And he has spent her entire life making sure that she knows it.

Sally's therapist thinks her father could be a narcissist. And living with a narcissist is extremely unpleasant.

Sally's parents spent the entire weekend in hateful silence. Sally's parents ignored her and her boyfriend for an entire weekend.  Sally's parents have always trafficked in emotional abuse, among other kinds.

Right before Sally was supposed to go back home (like 10 minutes), Sally's father broke his angry silence to tell her that he had found and read her blog.  That everything she said was a lie. Because she was a liar, ever since she was a child. 

Sally's father is big into gaslighting as a form of emotional abuse. Sally is never sure if she remembers her memories, because her whole family says that all her memories are lies.

Sally's father told her she BETTER NOT EVER write anything about him again. 

This has proved EXTREMELY difficult for Sally.  She went back home. Where she decided that enough is enough.  That it's finally safe enough to refuse to be abused anymore.  So she doesn't speak to her family. This is a very good thing.

But writing and talking to people on the internet is a big part of how Sally has dealt/is dealing with the fallout of all the bad things coming out.  

Sometimes Sally feels like is so full of feelings that the merest brush against her skin will cause the feelings to come squashing out her pores. 

This is not really a nice way to feel.

Sally wondered if there was a way to write about her distress.  

Because Sally has been having nightmares every night for weeks.  Sally dreams that she is still a teenager, still in high school, still trapped in her parents house. She wakes up gasping, crying.  She wakes up frightened and furious.  

She would very much like to stop having these nightmares.  She thinks that writing about them might help, but... how?

She is afraid of her father.  He was the demon monster of her childhood. He was not to be crossed. He was the one thing she was always most afraid of. Was/is. Am.

And Sally thought... What if I write a story? What if I take my most painful memories and make them into stories?

Would that help the sinking feelings of despair these awful nightmares bring, every night, around 2AM?

And you know... It did. A bit. And Sally thought- is this good writing, who knows? But maybe I should keep doing this.  Maybe it could keep helping.

Ferguson

Property damage isn't violence.

Killing an unarmed kid is violence.

Darren Wilson didn't see Mike Brown as a person, and his testimony proves that.

Darren Wilson is a racist and a liar.

If you think justice was served in Ferguson, or you are happy that Wilson wasn't indicted- please leave. Go away. Do not speak to me.

I will not tolerate that kind of shit on my webpage, and you are free to go away.

Fat is worse than war

YEAH RIGHT.  I'm sorry, my eyes hurt because I'm rolling them so hard.

Ok, so here's what happened.  Yesterday, a 'report' comes out from this global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. It's picked up by the BBC, Fortune, The Washington Post, Vox, The Economist, The LA Times, and on and on.

So, I wonder-- who is McKinsey & Company?  I wonder if they might have some vested interest in making up a completely ridiculous number like 2 trillion dollars and saying fat people are worse than WAR and TERRORISM.

And lo and fucking behold-- look what 5 minutes of googling brought up--

Well, what do we have here?  It looks like a Michael Echenberg- the Chief Strategy Officer at Weight Watchers used to work for McKinsey & Company. 

From the Weight Watchers website. Jonas M. Fajgenbaum, director at Weight Watchers, also worked for McKinsey.

Peter Attia used to work at McKinsey and now he's flogging the keto diet. He's also a cofounder of the Nutrition Science Institute, which the linked NPR article creepily calls a 'Manhattan Project for Nutrition and Obesity'.

Murali Naidu worked for McKinsey and was also a director of a bariatric surgery

I found these these guys with about 5 minutes of googling. What does this mean? It means that the so-called journalism around 'obesity' is disgustingly incompetent.

This consulting company-- who they fuck are they? 

Well, here's an article about how this company signed off on Enron being super duper ok! right before they collapsed. 

"McKinsey, the global consulting firm, has created dubious strategies for all manners of companies ranging from Enron to General Electric. Indeed, where ever there has been a financial disaster in the world, if you look around, somewhere in the background, McKinsey & Co. is nearby."

Do I need to keep digging through Google, or are we all on the same page now?

The diet industry is a over 60 billion* dollar industry, per year, in the US alone. 

Please read media articles about the SCARY FAT PEOPLES with a little skepticism, because unfortunately, what passes for journalism these days is pretty shitty.

*Edited to correct the per year annual income of the diet industry in the US from $20 billion to over $60 billion. Thanks to Marilyn Wann for the updated information!

Where's the solidarity?

I just finished reading Tipping the Scales of Justice by Sondra Solovay, which is about weight discrimination and the law, and I have to tell you-- I am pretty upset.

I am upset because discrimination against fat people is fully legal. And I am upset that no one (outside of fat activism) seems to care.  Because you can fire someone for being fat. You can 'prove' that they are a bad parent because they are fat and take their kids away. 

The Centers for Disease Control was offering an 'obesity cost calculator' (via Shakesville) that will lead to even more of a wage gap for fat people, or fat people being outright fired- which is totally legal. The BMI penalty that is included in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) also increases the pay gap for fat people.

(Y'all, it's time to rethink the idea that being poor and having no access to food is what makes you fat. Being fat can make you poorer. It's a complicated issue.)

This is not to mention the articles saying fat people are worse than war and terrorism (check out my debunking), that say we are causing climate change (fuck you), and that fat kids are a threat to national security b/c they're too fat to fight (creepy and gross). 

I'm not going to play the 'waah, yer health' derailing game again, either, so don't even start it.  Fat doesn't kill people, but fat hatred sure as shit does.

What I have been increasingly frustrated over is-- where is the solidarity?

I saw someone say (Skepchick)*-

The Left treats food like the Right treats sex.

And that is the god's honest truth, because progressive, lefty people are the first ones to preach that there should be an end to fat people, through dieting or surgery or who cares as long as the fat people are eliminated.  

That those of us who refuse to comply should be punished, financially or otherwise.  If the process of eliminating fat people by forcibly turning them into thin people hurts the fat people, who gives a shit? Not the Left. 

They refuse to believe the truth that people come in all sizes and some people are naturally fat.  That those people may not be able to change their natural state, no matter how much they may want to. No matter how hard they try.

Lefty people want 'purity' in their food- clean eating. Pure, whole foods. And this desire for bodily purity has rebounded into an astonishing amount of fat hatred. 

Please believe me when I tell you that fatphobia is completely common on the Left. Fatphobia, with a huge dose of disablism and classism.  

And I'll tell you something else too-- It's hurtful AS FUCK when people that I thought were on my side- who I see defending other marginalized groups- when these people are the ones openly hating on fat people.

Making fat jokes and jokes about diabetes. Mocking and ignoring requests to stop using fatphobic language. Redefining 'fat shaming' to mean 'not what I do', instead of what it actually means, which is anything that contributes to fat hatred in general.

When I see queer people and people fighting for racial justice- people who say they want to make the world a better place- engage in thoughtless fat hatred, it breaks my heart.

It especially hurts me when queer people are fatphobic. All of the rhetoric that's pushed down on fat people-- that our bodies are diseases, that there's something perverse and wrong about our 'lifestyle', that we are subject to fundamentally unnatural desires, that we can't control ourselves, that we could change if we really tried hard enough...  it sounds pretty similar to me to the language the Right uses to try to stigmatize queer people.

Where are the progressives? Either silent or joining in on the hate-filled rhetoric. 

The same people who will be skeptical about every other source of information, are happy to accept the media's shoddy-ass reporting when it comes to weight-related topics. The same trick conservatives pull about climate change- believing the media when it tells them what they want to hear and disregarding everything else- that's what liberals do when it comes to fat people.

Because you find us disgusting and repulsive.  And you WANT a reason to hate us.  Liberals love hating fat people so much they will fight to keep being able to do it. 

It has to stop. It's time for people to step forward. It's time for fat activism to be included in the diversity on the Left. Left media needs to start covering our issues, and they need to have fat activists on their shows and webpages.

Otherwise, I'm gonna call it like I see it, and say that the Left hates fat people.

Prove me wrong.

*Edited to add the link to Julia Burke of Skepchick for the paraphrased line 'The Left treats food like the Right treats sex.' Thanks to Rainbow Pope World on Tumblr for sending me the link when I couldn't remember.

Forcing kids to diet is child abuse

I know this is going to be controversial, and I could get lots more clicks and atta girls if I was willing to just blog about clothes more, but I can't stress how strongly I feel about this. So I'll say it again-

Forcing children to diet is child abuse.

Ok, now let's talk about it.

I am immediately disqualifying all arguments about 'health'. Please read this article by Kate Harding about fat and health, and read every single one of the links, if you are sincerely concerned about health and fatness.  

I realize that there are some well-intentioned people who are very worried about fat people in general and about our health. I understand how this happens- we live in a world where the proposition that fat = unhealthy = bad is taken as the gospel truth.  It's so ingrained that people don't even think to question it.

But I would like to propose two ideas to blow your minds (in addition to the linked article)--

-Mental health is just as important as physical health.  I don't know if you've ever been in the position to have someone (everyone) tell you that your body and your very existence is unwanted and bad and wrong, but it does a number on the mind.

-Other people's health is not your problem to worry about. Back off and mind your own business. 

If you want to encourage kids to eat a variety of foods and to enjoy exercise, what we are doing as a culture- this ain't fucking it, y'all.  It's not working, because what this breaks out to in actual practice is that there is a group of kids who are singled out and tormented- simply for what they look like.

Michelle Obama proposes reforms to have kids eat 'healthy' lunches and exercise more, and all of that I could agree to with a smile, but she has to hang it on this rhetoric of the danger of fat kids.

Oh, so many fat kids. Got to get rid of the fat kids. 

If it's good for kids to exercise- why can't we just have them all do it? Are we really proposing that thin kids could eat nothing but candy bars all day long, as long as they stay thin? 

We truly live in an eating disordered culture.

Here's what we're actually doing- increasing the number of eating disorders. Per Regan Chastain-

"The American Academy of Pediatrics reported that hospitalizations of children younger than 12 years for eating disorders rose by 119% from 1999 to 2006." 

There is a lot of floofy, junk science around fatness causing disease (inevitably conflating correlation and causation), but goddammit!  Eating disorders are the MOST DEADLY form of mental illness. In our pursuit of the eradication of fat people as a group- to solve what are almost certainly imaginary links to disease, we are causing a substantial increase in deadly illness in children UNDER 12.

Please excuse me while I bang my head into this desk for a bit and scream-cry a little.  

HOW CAN THIS BE ALLOWED???

Not to mention that fat kids are more likely to commit suicide. People mostly don't seem to care, but yeah. There you go. 

But what I most want to talk about is how so many fat kids aren't even safe in their own homes. Because their parents are in on the shaming and abuse.

If you were to take away anything else from a child that they needed to live, you could be prosecuted for abuse. Take food away from a fat child- everyone applauds.  You would never get in trouble for sending your chubby kid to bed hungry.  

Eliminate that fat kid!  Have the thin kid you REALLY want.

Break all bonds of trust with your child. Make sure they know that you are not on their side. Tell them that no one will love them unless they can get that weight off. 

No one will stop you. Abuse away.

When I was eight years old, I came home from the new school I had just started (in the middle of a school year because we kept moving), and I was crying.  "No one likes me at school," I told my parents.

"Well that's because you're fat," my father answered. And he monitored every piece of food I would put in my mouth until the day I left that house, as best as he could.  

He made sure I knew that I was shameful. That he didn't want a disobedient, fat daughter. Who could ever love a fat child?  Who could care for something so worthless as a fat girl? 

When you force your children to diet, you teach them that they can't trust you. You teach them to hate themselves.  You make them furious and resentful. 

You break the bonds of love, because forcing a child to diet is a betrayal. 

Don't do it.