But it doesn't always correlate
When
we moved to Canada in the summer of 2001, I learned that many things on
this side of Atlantic were not like they were depicted in the movies.
For example, I was disappointed to learn that people in Chinatowns
don't really march around as giant dragons and bang drums and shoot
fireworks. (They serve good food, though, that part was right.) The
local universities don't even have fraternities that would entertain us
with their inventive pranks and delightful antics.
One more surprise was that the people here don't seem to be any fatter than back in Finland. I have seen only a few people who are so morbidly obese that they can't walk on their own but have to move around in those little carts. I've been to United States only twice myself around the Niagara area, and it didn't seem that different to the extent that I can recall, but I remember my wife going deeper in and then reporting that people there were a lot fatter than in Canada. It is no wonder that the fat acceptance movement is such an American phenomenon, virtually nonexistent in other parts of the world.
By fat acceptance, I refer to the doctrine that there is nothing wrong about being morbidly obese, and any problems that such people have are due to the bigoted attitudes of other people, and obesity is not in any sense an objectively worse condition than being slender. The doctrine also claims that nobody can really control their weight, since your weight has no connection to how much you eat or exercise. I consider the fat acceptance movement to be roughly morally equal to a movement that tells alcoholics that they should just keep drinking, since none of their problems are really due to alcohol but result from the bigoted attitudes of other people. Or perhaps a movement that tried to advocate smoking for teenagers.
I wrote more about fat acceptance and fat acceptors in my earlier posting "Happy eatings", but to recap, as an anti-feminist and anti-leftist, I am extremely happy about the fat acceptance movement and wish that it becomes more powerful, visible and prominent instead of the obscure internet joke most people probably still imagine it to be, that is, some kind of absurdist parody of political correctness. In this light, I applaud the creation of Big Fat Carnival. Although it's unlikely that anything I write will ever appear there, it will be a handy place to link to easily illustrate the real nature of the movement. After all, few things are as fun as linking to clueless losers to reveal and mock them.
The fat acceptance movement has already taken over the feminist movement so that it is no longer possible to a feminist and in any way against the fat acceptance. (Go on, try it and see what happens.) I would really like the connection between feminism and fat acceptance to become common knowledge, since it would vastly hinder the recruiting efforts of feminism and better reveal them as the joke that they are. Inside the movement, feminism has no real resistance against various even-more-oppressed subgroups taking control over it, since its more normal members can't prevent the policies and goals of these subgroups to become the official policies and goals of the whole movement without revealing themselves as agents of patriarchy. The consequences of this dynamic were vividly illustrated in the comedy of the Feminist Initiative Party in Sweden. Never be the first one to stop applauding, sister.
In the blog of the proprietor of the Big Fat Carnival, the comment thread "Fatsuits, Blackface, and Comparing Oppressions" became an illustrative microcosm of the whole movement when two commentors "d" and "Nona" tried to talk common sense to a bunch of deeply narcissistic people who cannot, despite all the evidence and real-world experience, tolerate even the slightest suggestion from the non-enablers that there might be something wrong with them or that they need to change. These two silly women obviously didn't know that it is the other people who must change their preferences, while the fatties get to group hug in their artificial 100% fat-positive environment to pat each other on the back and yell "You go, grrl!" whenever one of them displays a particularly emotionally satisfying denial of reality.
The responses that "d" and "Nona" received conveniently sum up the general beliefs of the fat acceptance movement. For starters, fat acceptors are such total social constructivists that they don't believe that even the laws of physics really constrain them. This makes them claim, in all apparent seriousness, that fat people don't eat any more than slender people, on average. Don't laugh: they really do claim this. According to this belief, the popular stereotype of fat people being gluttons is completely wrong, and many obese people can be seen to write how they eat only 1500 calories a day, which probably wouldn't be enough to even maintain their normal body temperature.
The reality is, of course, that fat people simply tend to lie about their food consumption, and the fatter they are, the bigger these lies also become. The lying might not be conscious, since the glutton perhaps lives in denial, successfully lying to even him- or herself. People can be funny about their socially relevant deficiencies. But let's be slightly real. If I was offered a bet in which ten randomly chosen morbidly obese people and ten randomly chosen slender people were carefully followed for a month recording each bite, and I win if the former group together eats more than the latter group, I would jump to take that bet immediately and put as much money on it as I possibly can. And I don't think I would be the only one to do so. Just go to any supermarket and observe the contents of the shopping carts of different people, and see if you notice any trend.
As a humorous side note, a while back I watched a documentary on A&E about a man who had fattened up to 1200 pounds. After a medical intervention, he had slendered down to 500 pounds. At one point, the interviewer ask the wife of this Sport Utility Human (from what I saw in the documentary, she must have been practically a saint in her unselfishness) how much the man ate while he was gaining weight. The man almost went ape and started telling his wife how these people expect her to say how he eats humongous amounts of food, even though he has never eaten any more than an average person. That scene improved my perspective on such claims of other morbidly obese people.
But it's not like being fat is a health risk, of course, according to the fat acceptors. For starters, don't you know that the really muscular guys tend to have a high BMI? Clearly the whole concept of BMI is therefore invalid, and some guy having a BMI of 50 doesn't really tell or predict anything about him. In a humorous analogy to the debate on IQ, the weight doesn't predict anything about anybody, since there are some fat people who are healthy and some slender people who are sick. As in, there is nothing bad in obesity and no changes in the average health will emerge even if people get fatter on average, because I know a fat guy and a thin guy, and the fat guy is healthier in better shape than the thin guy. I have to wonder if these obviously prenumerical thinkers (like that one tribe that only has words "zero", "one" and "many") would accept the same logic to "prove" that women are not discriminated against in the workplace, since I know a woman who has a good job and makes good money, and a man who does a lot worse.
Since the fat acceptance movement claims that eating more than other people isn't what makes the fat people fat, it naturally follows that eating less wouldn't make a fat person lose their weight. (Side note: since we know from feederism that the implication works to the other direction, it would be rational to conclude that many non-feedee obese people have gained their fat for eating too much.) Consequently we hear the song about how "97% of diets fail", even though it's not really the diet that fails, but the obese glutton fails to control his gluttony. Perhaps the producers of "The Biggest Loser" should reveal how they are able to consistently select contestants who will lose weight by eating less and exercising more, the odds being stacked so immensely against them.
The fat acceptor can now counter by saying that dieting only works in the short term, but not in the long term, and most people eventually gain back what they lost when they gradually return to gluttony. True, but two can play this game. Since the fat acceptors like to say that no diet has passed a scientific study to establish that it works in the long term, very well, where is the scientific study that says that fat rejectors can become fat acceptors and maintain this mental attitude in the long term? In the absense of such study, since the fatties are too weak or just plain don't want to eat less in the long run, they don't really get to complain when fat rejectors are too weak or just plain don't want to become fat acceptors.
But to sum up, if it's not eating too much and moving too little that causes obesity, then what is this cause? And why don't other nations than America seem to have much problem with this cause, nor did the Americans themselves fifty years ago? (Rhetorical.)
Modern medicine and technology can somewhat alleviate the practical effects of obesity. (Just think of "reach implements".) But they don't have any real effect on the social attitudes, which is why the vast majority of fat acceptance activism is centered on saying that other people are bad and must change to be more to the liking of fat acceptors. You see, those other people don't really know what they like and want, so they need the fat acceptors to tell them this. Perhaps my female readers can now think of certain other groups whose members tend to rank lower than average in the important social hierarchies, and then make a similar effort to denigrate others for their preferences.
And besides, I don't think that the obese people really crave acceptance. Or at least they crave it a lot less than they crave food. Everything in life is a tradeoff for us finite beings. The morbidly obese fat acceptors also seem to be curiously ambivalent in their claims about how accepted they really are. As a free hint, anyone who really is "fabulous" or "beautiful" (or "rich" or "intelligent" or "mature" or "wise" or many other things) never actually has to say that they are, because it is already obvious to everyone. For the progressives of all stripes, fat acceptance is of course a standard act, as natural as water is to fish. It gets really funny when the progressives first make it clear to the people around them what practical results the expressions of fat rejectance would have, and then consider the fact that they don't hear many expressions of fat rejectance around them to be evidence that most people really are fat acceptors.
The important problem of fat acceptance is that in a society where food is so very abundant, one just can't be a fat acceptor or even a fat neutral, because even a "neutral" attitude will eventually make you fat. And once you have gained the first extra 20 pounds or so, the mechanism for gaining the next 20 pounds is already in place. And certain people would like it very much if you did. The morbidly obese differ from other oppressed minorities in one important respect in that there is no real limit to how much they could grow their ranks by recruitment. You can't really change anyone's sexual orientation or skin colour, but almost anybody can become fat. Right now, millions of people teeter on the brink, and if the fat acceptance movement could make them let go and start gaining, the movement would become more powerful. And as we know, misery always loves company. And since the fat acceptance movement has the powerful food and restaurant lobbies fighting alongside them, this doesn't exactly make them a minor threat.
In the United States, already about a third of the whole population is obese, that nation being well on the way of becoming a Fatopia where the obese people are a majority. Now, you might think that 100 million people who live the wealthiest nation on Earth could essentially form their own "nation" in which they could be happy and fat and eat as much as they want without judgement or looks. The problem is, the obese people don't seem to like each other very much either, but crave the acceptance of slender people. For example, most fat dudes still keep dreaming of slender women, as is obvious by their typical choices of porn (I agree with the old feminist slogan that says that porn tells the truth about men), and settle for an obese woman only when they have come to finally accept that the slender women consider them to be defective and disgusting. When a fat guy gets hitched, he rarely leaves behind any slender women with a broken heart.
Feminists, of course, understand this dynamic well, as is evident in their endless complaints about the fat sitcom husbands who are married to slender and attractive wives. This is slightly curious, since according to feminists, if I have now understood this correctly, the laws of the mating marketplace apply to men, but not to women. It is especially oppressive to deny that all women are entitled to find and monopolize a good man (assuming that they even want one, since most women need a man as a fish needs a bicycle) from the top 20% or so of all men without having to compete with other women for attractiveness, personality and attitude. Or the body mass, which surprisingly few men who the women consider to be most attractive and who therefore themselves have a lot of choice in women ever seem to choose. Wonder why? (Rhetorical again.)
One more surprise was that the people here don't seem to be any fatter than back in Finland. I have seen only a few people who are so morbidly obese that they can't walk on their own but have to move around in those little carts. I've been to United States only twice myself around the Niagara area, and it didn't seem that different to the extent that I can recall, but I remember my wife going deeper in and then reporting that people there were a lot fatter than in Canada. It is no wonder that the fat acceptance movement is such an American phenomenon, virtually nonexistent in other parts of the world.
By fat acceptance, I refer to the doctrine that there is nothing wrong about being morbidly obese, and any problems that such people have are due to the bigoted attitudes of other people, and obesity is not in any sense an objectively worse condition than being slender. The doctrine also claims that nobody can really control their weight, since your weight has no connection to how much you eat or exercise. I consider the fat acceptance movement to be roughly morally equal to a movement that tells alcoholics that they should just keep drinking, since none of their problems are really due to alcohol but result from the bigoted attitudes of other people. Or perhaps a movement that tried to advocate smoking for teenagers.
I wrote more about fat acceptance and fat acceptors in my earlier posting "Happy eatings", but to recap, as an anti-feminist and anti-leftist, I am extremely happy about the fat acceptance movement and wish that it becomes more powerful, visible and prominent instead of the obscure internet joke most people probably still imagine it to be, that is, some kind of absurdist parody of political correctness. In this light, I applaud the creation of Big Fat Carnival. Although it's unlikely that anything I write will ever appear there, it will be a handy place to link to easily illustrate the real nature of the movement. After all, few things are as fun as linking to clueless losers to reveal and mock them.
The fat acceptance movement has already taken over the feminist movement so that it is no longer possible to a feminist and in any way against the fat acceptance. (Go on, try it and see what happens.) I would really like the connection between feminism and fat acceptance to become common knowledge, since it would vastly hinder the recruiting efforts of feminism and better reveal them as the joke that they are. Inside the movement, feminism has no real resistance against various even-more-oppressed subgroups taking control over it, since its more normal members can't prevent the policies and goals of these subgroups to become the official policies and goals of the whole movement without revealing themselves as agents of patriarchy. The consequences of this dynamic were vividly illustrated in the comedy of the Feminist Initiative Party in Sweden. Never be the first one to stop applauding, sister.
In the blog of the proprietor of the Big Fat Carnival, the comment thread "Fatsuits, Blackface, and Comparing Oppressions" became an illustrative microcosm of the whole movement when two commentors "d" and "Nona" tried to talk common sense to a bunch of deeply narcissistic people who cannot, despite all the evidence and real-world experience, tolerate even the slightest suggestion from the non-enablers that there might be something wrong with them or that they need to change. These two silly women obviously didn't know that it is the other people who must change their preferences, while the fatties get to group hug in their artificial 100% fat-positive environment to pat each other on the back and yell "You go, grrl!" whenever one of them displays a particularly emotionally satisfying denial of reality.
The responses that "d" and "Nona" received conveniently sum up the general beliefs of the fat acceptance movement. For starters, fat acceptors are such total social constructivists that they don't believe that even the laws of physics really constrain them. This makes them claim, in all apparent seriousness, that fat people don't eat any more than slender people, on average. Don't laugh: they really do claim this. According to this belief, the popular stereotype of fat people being gluttons is completely wrong, and many obese people can be seen to write how they eat only 1500 calories a day, which probably wouldn't be enough to even maintain their normal body temperature.
The reality is, of course, that fat people simply tend to lie about their food consumption, and the fatter they are, the bigger these lies also become. The lying might not be conscious, since the glutton perhaps lives in denial, successfully lying to even him- or herself. People can be funny about their socially relevant deficiencies. But let's be slightly real. If I was offered a bet in which ten randomly chosen morbidly obese people and ten randomly chosen slender people were carefully followed for a month recording each bite, and I win if the former group together eats more than the latter group, I would jump to take that bet immediately and put as much money on it as I possibly can. And I don't think I would be the only one to do so. Just go to any supermarket and observe the contents of the shopping carts of different people, and see if you notice any trend.
As a humorous side note, a while back I watched a documentary on A&E about a man who had fattened up to 1200 pounds. After a medical intervention, he had slendered down to 500 pounds. At one point, the interviewer ask the wife of this Sport Utility Human (from what I saw in the documentary, she must have been practically a saint in her unselfishness) how much the man ate while he was gaining weight. The man almost went ape and started telling his wife how these people expect her to say how he eats humongous amounts of food, even though he has never eaten any more than an average person. That scene improved my perspective on such claims of other morbidly obese people.
But it's not like being fat is a health risk, of course, according to the fat acceptors. For starters, don't you know that the really muscular guys tend to have a high BMI? Clearly the whole concept of BMI is therefore invalid, and some guy having a BMI of 50 doesn't really tell or predict anything about him. In a humorous analogy to the debate on IQ, the weight doesn't predict anything about anybody, since there are some fat people who are healthy and some slender people who are sick. As in, there is nothing bad in obesity and no changes in the average health will emerge even if people get fatter on average, because I know a fat guy and a thin guy, and the fat guy is healthier in better shape than the thin guy. I have to wonder if these obviously prenumerical thinkers (like that one tribe that only has words "zero", "one" and "many") would accept the same logic to "prove" that women are not discriminated against in the workplace, since I know a woman who has a good job and makes good money, and a man who does a lot worse.
Since the fat acceptance movement claims that eating more than other people isn't what makes the fat people fat, it naturally follows that eating less wouldn't make a fat person lose their weight. (Side note: since we know from feederism that the implication works to the other direction, it would be rational to conclude that many non-feedee obese people have gained their fat for eating too much.) Consequently we hear the song about how "97% of diets fail", even though it's not really the diet that fails, but the obese glutton fails to control his gluttony. Perhaps the producers of "The Biggest Loser" should reveal how they are able to consistently select contestants who will lose weight by eating less and exercising more, the odds being stacked so immensely against them.
The fat acceptor can now counter by saying that dieting only works in the short term, but not in the long term, and most people eventually gain back what they lost when they gradually return to gluttony. True, but two can play this game. Since the fat acceptors like to say that no diet has passed a scientific study to establish that it works in the long term, very well, where is the scientific study that says that fat rejectors can become fat acceptors and maintain this mental attitude in the long term? In the absense of such study, since the fatties are too weak or just plain don't want to eat less in the long run, they don't really get to complain when fat rejectors are too weak or just plain don't want to become fat acceptors.
But to sum up, if it's not eating too much and moving too little that causes obesity, then what is this cause? And why don't other nations than America seem to have much problem with this cause, nor did the Americans themselves fifty years ago? (Rhetorical.)
Modern medicine and technology can somewhat alleviate the practical effects of obesity. (Just think of "reach implements".) But they don't have any real effect on the social attitudes, which is why the vast majority of fat acceptance activism is centered on saying that other people are bad and must change to be more to the liking of fat acceptors. You see, those other people don't really know what they like and want, so they need the fat acceptors to tell them this. Perhaps my female readers can now think of certain other groups whose members tend to rank lower than average in the important social hierarchies, and then make a similar effort to denigrate others for their preferences.
And besides, I don't think that the obese people really crave acceptance. Or at least they crave it a lot less than they crave food. Everything in life is a tradeoff for us finite beings. The morbidly obese fat acceptors also seem to be curiously ambivalent in their claims about how accepted they really are. As a free hint, anyone who really is "fabulous" or "beautiful" (or "rich" or "intelligent" or "mature" or "wise" or many other things) never actually has to say that they are, because it is already obvious to everyone. For the progressives of all stripes, fat acceptance is of course a standard act, as natural as water is to fish. It gets really funny when the progressives first make it clear to the people around them what practical results the expressions of fat rejectance would have, and then consider the fact that they don't hear many expressions of fat rejectance around them to be evidence that most people really are fat acceptors.
The important problem of fat acceptance is that in a society where food is so very abundant, one just can't be a fat acceptor or even a fat neutral, because even a "neutral" attitude will eventually make you fat. And once you have gained the first extra 20 pounds or so, the mechanism for gaining the next 20 pounds is already in place. And certain people would like it very much if you did. The morbidly obese differ from other oppressed minorities in one important respect in that there is no real limit to how much they could grow their ranks by recruitment. You can't really change anyone's sexual orientation or skin colour, but almost anybody can become fat. Right now, millions of people teeter on the brink, and if the fat acceptance movement could make them let go and start gaining, the movement would become more powerful. And as we know, misery always loves company. And since the fat acceptance movement has the powerful food and restaurant lobbies fighting alongside them, this doesn't exactly make them a minor threat.
In the United States, already about a third of the whole population is obese, that nation being well on the way of becoming a Fatopia where the obese people are a majority. Now, you might think that 100 million people who live the wealthiest nation on Earth could essentially form their own "nation" in which they could be happy and fat and eat as much as they want without judgement or looks. The problem is, the obese people don't seem to like each other very much either, but crave the acceptance of slender people. For example, most fat dudes still keep dreaming of slender women, as is obvious by their typical choices of porn (I agree with the old feminist slogan that says that porn tells the truth about men), and settle for an obese woman only when they have come to finally accept that the slender women consider them to be defective and disgusting. When a fat guy gets hitched, he rarely leaves behind any slender women with a broken heart.
Feminists, of course, understand this dynamic well, as is evident in their endless complaints about the fat sitcom husbands who are married to slender and attractive wives. This is slightly curious, since according to feminists, if I have now understood this correctly, the laws of the mating marketplace apply to men, but not to women. It is especially oppressive to deny that all women are entitled to find and monopolize a good man (assuming that they even want one, since most women need a man as a fish needs a bicycle) from the top 20% or so of all men without having to compete with other women for attractiveness, personality and attitude. Or the body mass, which surprisingly few men who the women consider to be most attractive and who therefore themselves have a lot of choice in women ever seem to choose. Wonder why? (Rhetorical again.)
"According to this belief, the popular stereotype of fat people being gluttons is completely wrong, and many obese people can be seen to write how they eat only 1500 calories a day, which probably wouldn't be enough to even maintain their normal body temperature."
So why are doctors stapling their stomaches shut?
I just flew back from Finland and I was wondering how on earth these huge people can even fit in the bathroom on the plane. I guess that they have to go in backwards. There was hardly enough room for me, and I weight under 190!
Posted by Fred Fry | 2:23 PM
I made a comment on that thread on Alas (#43 on the Fatsuits, Blackface, and Comparing Oppressions -thread). It included BMI. The point was, IIRC, that BMI sometimes is a bad measurement device, and that it is possible for a fat person to be currently physically active and eat healthy.
Do I believe that a person who has always eaten not-so-much and exercises regularly would be fat? No. Do I believe that it is illogical to make an assumption on the current habits of a person based on looks/weight? Yes (chance does not happen immediately, at best one could judge the history of a person). Do I believe that it is generally wrong to bully people on their weight? Yes. Is it wrong to offer helpful criticism? No.
Thus, the fat acceptance group does have some points, IMO. Clearly there are some who choose to interpret reality in a wishful manner there (bluntness = bigotry, more nuanced approach = acceptance of morbid obesity). As for the scientific message they have: Um, not convinced.
And for the record, 183cm, 68kg, heterosexual, preference toward slender/average women (not anorexic, but not obese either) to avoid the obvious insult. (That's 6' and 150lbs to Americans). I try not be an enabler, but being blunt in the issue does not seem to be working.
Posted by tuomas | 9:32 AM