"bl_list" via Abigail in Google Reader

Excellent Vacation is Excellent

2013-05-23T03:11:00Z

Sooooo much fun is being had here in the Sault; lots of visiting is being done, Kat is a huge hit (as if there was any doubt), the weather is ok (as in, at least it's not snowing), and there has been a LOT of good food eaten. Unfortunately Kat has been freaking out about where we're sleeping, which means neither of us is doing much actual sleeping. Infact, if I had half a brain, I'd be catching a few Zzzz right now! I just wanted to say hi and let you know how my trip was going, and it's going just fine.

Thanks

2013-05-23T01:36:33Z

Hello there mods!

As a thin person, this isn’t really a place where I have a right to speak, but I just want to thank you SO MUCH for the work you do on here.

When I first started reading this blog, it pissed me off. I was underweight and struggling with an eating disorder, and I was a major thinsplainer, full of the usual defensive “omg r u saying thin ppl have perfect lives, we SO do not!!!!!11” bullshit.

As I kept reading over the weeks, I realized not only the purpose and truth of this blog, but I was forced to confront my own privilege and realize exactly how fatphobic I was, and the judgments that I made on fat people without ever speaking to them.

Thanks to you, that has all changed. I avoid making these judgments, and call other people out when they make fatphobic remarks.

This blog has taught me that all bodies deserve to be respected, and that all bodies are beautiful. What I feared most in the world was gaining weight, because I thought that people would lose respect for me. Because of the efforts of this blog and the way my perspective has been changed from it, I have gained 20 pounds and am recovering from my ED. And I don’t give a flying fuck if I get fat, because I will still deserve good things.

So thank you so much for helping me recognize what a shitbag I was being to myself and to everyone else.

I love you guys.

Whales at the pool.

2013-05-22T23:12:45Z

I live in an apartment building that has a pool, I recently discovered how nice it is and as a bonus it’s also very empty most of the time. For some reason managment decided they needed to hire a lifeguard (even though noone really goes to the pool)

My (fat) girlfriend and I (also fat) decided that we would go for a swim (one of the most terrifying decisions for a fat person) and headed down to the pool. The (skinny) lifeguard immediatly gave us the most disgusted looks as we’re dropping our towels and getting in the pool. God forbid a fat person uses the pool our fees pay for right? Those same fees that pay her salary.

We shrug it off and continue. As soon as we get in and start swimming around she gets up and starts following us around the pool. Cause obviously these two giant fatties can’t swim! These two cows are gunna go right to the bottom! She’s clearly following us around not even trying to hide her death glares. If we go to the deep end she rushes around the pool to where we are, if we swim to the shallow end - there she fuckin is eye murdering us.

We just wanted to swim in peace with a little bit of privacy without getting judged as being unable to swim, unathletic, lazy, and ugly… The best (worst?) was when I gave my girlfriend a kiss and the girls face when from glaring and hating us, to pure disgust watching two fat chicks kiss.

We wanted to swim for an hour, but we cut our swim in half because she was making us feel so bad about ourselves.

As we were leaving my girlfriend said “For your information, I might be fat, but I bet I could swim faster than you” - My girlfriend was on her high school swim team. Her mouth was left agape (probably used to it haha) as we walked out laughing

"Women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat."

2013-05-22T22:22:00Z

“Women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat.”

-
When Strangers Click, a 2011 documentary about online dating.

It reminds me of that famous Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It also reminds me of something written by one of the mods of Sex Worker Problems: “Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.”

I mean, it’s just true.

(via tealeafprincess)

This is where sexism and fat phobia meet for fat women. You not only have to worry about your physical safety but that your date might be afraid of meeting someone with your body type.

-FBP

Folks, I understand the need to clarify posts occasionally. I've got my head in fat rights and its issues more than many of TITP's followers, so when I approve of a submission it might seem clearer to me than others. This also goes for posts where I haven't checked my privilege in some area and need to edit in order to address an issue of intersectionality. But there's a whole passel of folks out there who intentionally misread TITP posts in order to enjoy some happy fun trolltime. And whatever, that's their perogative. But I'm not going to pretend that shit deserves a response. I still might respond. But I certainly do not feel compelled to.

2013-05-22T22:19:53Z

I do not have anything against this blog; however, i would like to point out that dying from complications due to weight IS a death of natural causes. Unless it has to do with an outside force, it's called natural-caused death. If there are issues with medicine prescribed due to weight, then yes, that wouldn't be a natural cause, but things like heart attacks or other issues are all natural. It's still a death of natural cause.

2013-05-22T21:36:00Z

You might have nothing against the blog, but you missed the point of that post.

It wasn’t a statement about death certificates and the dictionary definition of ‘natural causes.’

It was a statement about the social perception that when a fat person dies, it’s because they’re fat.

It’s about how if a thin person dies of a heart attack, it’s socially attributed to stress, high cholesterol, family history of heart disease, or maybe just a tragic/freak thing, but when fat people die of heart attacks, it was because they were fat even if they present all the same symptoms of a thin heart attack sufferer in a fat body.

It’s about how statistics that count how many deaths are “caused by obesity” are counting the deaths of fat people who had any fat-related (and that’s correlated, not caused) disease (which, by the way, tons of thin people also have, and die from). And how it’s impossible to know that that person would have lived longer or not had that disease if they hadn’t been fat, mostly because no one knows how to make a fat person permanently thin (and, more importantly, whether it’s worth it to try given the overblown ‘risks’ associated with existing as fat).

I’m not going to respond to the oodles of people willfully misunderstanding this. I can only conclude they’re monumentally ignorant, garden variety trolls, or too young to know about how fat celebrities who die are almost always blamed for their own deaths even if their death wasn’t attributable to their weight (it’s STILL an urban legend that Mama Cass Elliott died from choking on a ham sandwich. She didn’t).

-ATL

thelittlestthrasher said: I don’t think people are willfully misunderstanding. The original post in question was very vague, and left a lot open to interpretation, even if that wasn’t intended. Adding this explanation to it would have made the intended point clear. I <3 TITP!

Except, the only other explanation of that post is that TITP mods and the person who originally submitted it honestly believe fat people can’t die of natural causes. That’s fucking absurd, and you have to actively hate this blog or know nothing about it in order to believe (or want to believe) that.

-ATL

Also, it is a HUGE sign of privilege to not understand the meaning behind things. While this blog is about thin privilege, it is for fat people. Fat people do not need to spell out their experiences for people. The fact that this post has had such a big backlash against it because people don’t understand isn’t due to it not being true but the fact that when you have privilege you automatically assume something isn’t real. Your privilege makes you blind to understanding marginalized people’s experiences. Dismissing fat people’s experiences in their body as a person with thin privilege is you not acknowledging the space you take up. We cannot help anyone with that if they are being willfully ignorant.

BTW when I say “you” I mean people with thin privilege as a group, not specifically one person.

-FBP

Not 'client ready'

2013-05-22T20:48:25Z

Thin privilege is not being turned down for a job because you aren’t ‘client ready’.

When I asked for feedback over the phone, someone from HR read me the notes made by my interviewer. She told me I had been reported as ‘not client ready [due to] issues with personal presentation’. She (not being able to see me and only having the notes to go on) suggested I get some advice on expected standards of dress in a company of that level. I had been wearing a suit and tie, was clean-shaven with polished shoes and combed hair.

The only thing I can think of is that I am fat.

Fat People as Personification of Bingeing, part 1

2013-05-17T14:30:00Z

Whether it's those thin/slim anorexics who use "the fat person in the mirror" as a metaphor for why they're starving. Or the bitterness of people who see fat people as representing the thing inside them which made them fail to become anorexic.A certain type of slim person is still using fatness and fat people to express their personal psychodramas. If this unpleasant interlude is to be brought

Thin privilege is a coworker assuming that my bad knee is due to my weight, and not a hockey injury. And, when I mentioned I am working on strengthening said knee so that I can work up to a 5k them saying they didn't realize people like me had goals like that. Thin privilege is assuming that my weight is due to pure laziness, and thinking my two car accidents (one for which I was in rehab for a year for) and a pregnancy where I was on bed rest for half of it didn't factor in.

2013-05-22T18:24:34Z

"Thin privilege is being able to die of natural causes" I'm beyond astonished with the responses this post got , how can people be so ignorant.

2013-05-22T17:51:25Z

It just proves that trolls who call this blog ignorant are engaging in garden-variety projection.

-ATL

opus-pocus: brownp0wer: noyka: bastardlybrendan: princessfuckingprivilege: thisisthinprivilege: ...

2013-05-22T17:32:34Z

opus-pocus:

brownp0wer:

noyka:

bastardlybrendan:

princessfuckingprivilege:

thisisthinprivilege:

Thin privilege is being able to die of natural causes.

what

WHAT?

My brian mleted

Ya thin ppl are immuned to diseases + cancers bc diseases discriminate they say “ha ha this is what u get for bein fat” bc only thin people are healty I don’t see anything fatphobic in that at all go to hell u skinny bitches

I am beyond done with TITP

The ignorance, it burrrrrns

This is how it goes, you shitwaffles:

When a thin person dies, they die of what they die of.

What a fat person dies, they die of BEING FAT.

Go fuck a rock.

-ATL

This is just something ive noticed alot lately and I thought i should mention it to you. In almost every cartoon or even non cartoon childrens movies ive watched in the past 6 months or so there has been a character who is fat and joked about, picked on etc, the only reason for that being because they're fat. This is one of the major reasons young kids go out and pick on other kids and call them fat. They look up to these characters and want to be exactly like them, so they copy them.

2013-05-22T16:56:00Z

Undoubtedly. The media aimed at children has a big influence over how they contextualize their world. Not only do fat villains/bullies have an effect, but how can’t kids notice that all the “hero” characters — like the zillions of movies about ordinary little boys saving the planet or princesses largely being saved — are vastly thin and white?

Kids are impressionable because it’s a survival tactic. They have to learn about their world in giant gulps, often without context, and definitely without the wisdom of experience. So they internalize shit like this pretty hardcore. And thus you see the physical characterizations in cartoons and kids’ movies play out in the dynamics of the playground.

-ArteToLife

Thin privilege is not having your mother tell you she wants you to lose weight so that you can...

2013-05-22T16:02:48Z

Thin privilege is not having your mother tell you she wants you to lose weight so that you can “fall in love and have a relationship and live life to the fullest.” Because clearly fat people can’t do any of those things.

Thin privilege is being so terrified, at a size 14/16, of being fat-shamed by your GP that you delay...

2013-05-22T13:36:49Z

Thin privilege is being so terrified, at a size 14/16, of being fat-shamed by your GP that you delay going to see him for a symptom that could indicate a serious illness OR be caused by your weight gain OR mean nothing.

I ended up going to see my new GP after months and he found out it was nothing serious. He made no comment about my weight whatsoever. I’ve had more than one bad experience with the medical establishment in the past, but I’ll learn to trust him more.

I wanted to know, how are you supposed to submit an ask, when the ask box doesn’t allow for...

2013-05-22T12:07:54Z

I wanted to know, how are you supposed to submit an ask, when the ask box doesn’t allow for anonymous and non-Tumblr participants to use it? Given the fat-hating on Tumblr, some people might be afraid to join for fear they could become a target. There should be a way to ask questions, without putting ones self at the mercy of Tumblr’s rarely upheld rules.

Also if you don’t mind, I think your Disqus post box is full, as I cannot post with it.

Mod response:

You submit an anonymous question exactly the way you did: through the submission box, giving no name and either your email or a fake one. We got waaaaay too much hate in the askbox when it allowed anon.

Disqus is flat-out broken, and nobody has been able to figure out how to fix it or has any more time or energy to invest in figuring it out at this time.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

-MG

Weight Stigma Conference Talk on YouTube

2013-05-22T11:50:00Z

I was invited to give a presentation at the first Weight Stigma conference last week. The conference was organised by Angela Meadows, a PhD student at Birmingham University. I spoke about Research Justice.

Research Justice is a concept emerging from activist communities in the US, and has roots in disability activism. It proposes that research subjects should have a voice in the research undertaken about them; it also treats research as a tool to support social change.

Research Justice really excites me because it adds a practical dimension to the discussion about the failings of obesity research, and proposes measures for building research projects that have more direct benefit to fat people.

In the presentation I explained what is meant by Research Justice; why it's important that people get on board with it in relation to fat and stigma; and I showed what it might look like in real-life settings by making some mock-ups of a series of web pages.

I recorded my talk and have added it to my slides. You can watch and listen to it here on YouTube. There were some questions afterwards but, since I do not have people's consent to include them, I have cut them out.

When Angela invited me to talk, some months ago, I knew that I wanted to present something about Research Justice, because this had a powerful effect on the way I approached my own research. I didn't realise how prescient the subject would be on the day.

I appreciate the work undertaken by Angela and the other organisers and volunteers, it was very clear that people worked extremely hard to get the conference off the ground and are deeply committed to the work. I also mourn the fact that there are so few spaces that engage with any critical voices on obesity at all. Our ESRC Fat Studies seminars ended in 2011, and since then Fat Studies in the UK has become fairly quiet, and has also become subsumed into the rhetoric of Health At Every Size. Not that anyone has gone away; there were many speakers at the Weight Stigma conference, and opportunities for debate across fat and obesity frameworks. There's still so much to say, and a lot of work to be done. Another Weight Stigma conference has been set for next year, and I hope that other gatherings spin off from it too.

The conference raised many questions for me about who gets to talk about fat. I think, but I'm not sure, that I was the only speaker out of 17 who identified explicitly as fat and brought that identity to the work I was presenting. I wonder whether or not this will continue in subsequent conferences. I don't think that fat people are the only people allowed to talk about fat, fat stuff is a subject for everybody, but I think it's perplexing that the people who research and theorise fat, or at least those academics who are visible in that work, are generally normatively-sized. This is not necessarily to criticise their work (some of it's great, some not) but there are conversations about thin privilege and its effects on the work that are not yet happening within this milieu and which, I think, need to be expressed. Additionally, there are plenty of Fat Studies scholars, and activists too, who are fat, who include the knowledge they have as fat people into their work, and who would be great speakers at conferences about fat and stigma.

(By the way, during one of the breaks I asked a couple of people who enjoyed my talk, who wanted to know more, and who work for a fairly trad anti-obesity organisation why they thought people like me never get invited to speak at those £500-a-ticket obesity conferences. Answer: because my presence would completely undermine everything! I think I may have blown their minds with that one, whoops).

Where fat people are in the minority at an event about fatness, debate may be possible but this does not take place on a level playing field. Instead of an environment where open sharing of ideas is possible, only the very bravest and articulate – or furious! – are able to speak because the setting is risky. Few people have the security of a PhD in contributing to debate and it's easy for academics to shoot down comments made by people who don't share their privilege. It means that people with lived experience of fatness, or activists and allies, become marginalised where academic discourse is regarded as the gold standard. For example, one woman I spoke to at the conference, a fat woman new to activism, was talking to a thin academic, a presenter, and when he asked who she was and what she did – she's not an academic – patronised her by saying: "Oh! You're the general public!"

Another incident intrigued me on the day. An academic said some fatphobic things and this was down-played by two others. He'd dropped a bomb, stating that even if fat people present to him with 'healthy' (whatever that means) behaviours, he will remind them that their fat bodies are not acceptable and that they need to lose weight. When questioned on this, he shrugged and remarked: "It's just the truth." A fat woman tried to tear him a new one, and during the course of the day he was on the receiving end of some stink-eye from others. Stink-eye is what maligned people resort to when all else fails and they know they're not going to be heard. Yet another academic tried to force some kind of agreement and common ground with him, appealing to appealing to manners and polite debate. The fatphobic speaker was later praised as "brave" for having spoken; never mind that he's a privileged academic who does this kind of thing for a living and whose work is deeply embedded within a dominant discourse from which he benefits in terms of money and status. Later the audience was chastised by another speaker for being "mean" to him because, presumably, fat people and our allies are not allowed to be extremely angry when someone pulls this crap in a setting where we may have assumed folks will be advocating for us.

The day was pretty exhausting and I was left wondering where Weight Stigma might go, whether it will become another kind of obesity conference, whether it will build capacity in fat people within and beyond the academy to articulate our own lives, and about the role of the academy and the professionalisation of fat and obesity discourse within the conference.

I am really glad that I was invited to speak at Weight Stigma, and very happy that the conference offered financial assistance to people who could not otherwise afford to attend. Great, too, that they offered Continuing Professional Development accreditation to people. I'm thinking how capacity in non-academic participants could be extended, perhaps through pre-conference workshops, or some kind of orientation event. I hope very much that the people who continue Weight Stigma undertake the vital work of developing fat community links, and I am available to help facilitate that if they are interested.

defyingthelabyrinth: i would just like to remind everyone that only about 1/3 of eating disordered...

2013-05-22T00:31:45Z

defyingthelabyrinth:

i would just like to remind everyone that only about 1/3 of eating disordered people are underweight. you can die from an eating disorder even if you are at a normal weight or overweight. you deserve help and recovery no matter what you weigh.

Thin privilege is not being told by your oncologist after you’ve had a traumatic battle with...

2013-05-22T11:12:41Z

Thin privilege is not being told by your oncologist after you’ve had a traumatic battle with breast cancer that it’s your fault because “being fat increases your chances of getting cancer.”

In my opinion, if an artist can't/won't draw fat people, I don't consider them an artist at all. I mean how hard is it to draw people how they truly are? Not hard at all.

2013-05-22T08:48:47Z

Thin privilege is never having to deal with shit like this while you’re at work: (I am...

2013-05-22T06:24:44Z

Thin privilege is never having to deal with shit like this while you’re at work:

(I am working the reference desk. I have a great rapport with our patrons, and am often complimented for my positive attitude.)

Me: “This is the reference desk. How can I help you?”

Patron: “Can you tell me why fat people are so defensive?”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Patron: “Can you tell me why fat people are so defensive?”

Me: “I can find you some materials on obesity, or prejudice faced by obese people perhaps—”

Patron: “I just want to know why fat people are always so angry.”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am; I don’t think I can answer your question.”

Patron: “See! You’re angry!”

Me: “I’m sorry; do I know you?”

Patron: “No, but I’ve been in your library before, and I recognize your voice. You’re fat. Why are you so angry?”

Me: “Ma’am, I consider your question offensive and bigoted. Would you ask that same question about a particular ethnic group?”

Patron: “You’re a f******* fat b****!”

(I’d like to say this conversation didn’t shake me, but I felt ashamed of my appearance for the rest of the day.)

From Not Always Right