The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Are You an ‘Anti-Fat Troll’?

Posted on | April 6, 2019 | Comments Off on Are You an ‘Anti-Fat Troll’?

 

Elizabeth Di Filippo (@mselizabethr on Twitter) is a Canadian feminist who is a “lifestyle editor” for Yahoo News, and she is offended that some people consider it unhealthy to be fat:

Earlier this week, Gillette Venus’s social media accounts shared a photo of Anna O’Brien . . . frolicking in the ocean with the caption, “Go out there and slay the day.”
Almost immediately, Venus came under fire for “promoting” and “glorifying obesity,” with the brand’s multiple social media channels overflowed with anti-fat hate speech. One scroll through Instagram and Twitter and I witnessed everything from debates about diabetes and heart disease, to requests for the company to delete the post.
This latest “controversy” for Gillette follows closely on the heels of its commercial that sparked outrage for calling out toxic masculinity, with many branding the company “anti-male.” It just so happens to have occurred while I’m in the middle of building a series about the body positivity movement, and its impact of social media.
For the past month, I’ve spent countless hours researching and speaking to advocates and health experts about health, weight and weight-stigma. The process has been one of tremendous self-reflection and humility, as I realize that my own deep-seated biases and fatphobia, which I thought had been addressed and resolved, are still very much alive.
One of the things that has stood out for me the most is the disservice of the medical field to pathologize weight, and declare a “war on obesity.”
Despite what we’ve been told through sound bites on television and eye-catching headlines, weight has very little to do with a person’s overall health.

Except, of course, obesity does impact health, quite negatively, and this impact is not a result of “biases and fatphobia.” While on the one hand, a slightly pudgy person is not necessarily less healthy than a skinnier person, it is a completely different matter — indeed, it is irresponsible — to pretend that morbid obesity is harmless. It is not “anti-fat hate speech” to point out the health risks of being as obese as Ann O’Brien, who weighs over 300 pounds. One would think that a feminist like Elizabeth Di Filippo would be aware of how Andrea Dworkin suffered in her later years, and died at age 58, due to complications of decades of obesity.

Of course, matters of health are not why feminists celebrate obesity. Rather, this is part of their attack on “patriarchal beauty standards,” which is to say that feminists consider it oppression for men to prefer beauty to ugliness. By the way, I must ask, why would a news organization hire an avowed ideologue as a “lifestyle editor”? Why is it that a woman who declares herself a feminist isn’t viewed as skeptically as, say, a Muslim who pledges allegiance to Hamas? Feminists hate men at least as much as Palestinian terrorists hate Israelis, but we’re not allowed to say this, because a man will be accused of “misogyny” if he objects to being demonized as an oppressor of women. So while Yahoo News would never employ an avowed conservative as a “lifestyle editor,” Ms. Di Filippo is paid to wage an ideological crusade against men and call this propaganda “journalism.” But I digress . . .

Adam Piggott invokes Rollo Tomassi’s “feminine imperative” concept to analyze Gillette’s celebration of female obesity as an aspect of “the feminist desire to maximize female sexual selection opportunities whilst limiting male selection strategies as much as possible”:

Obese and unhealthy women being promoted in this way and openly celebrated by men feeds into this premise. On the one hand over 80% of men are ignored on dating apps as they do not fit the female selection criteria, a criteria that has not changed for millennia. . . .
Women are able to have extraordinary lists of attributes that potential male suitors must possess, but men are not allowed to have any whatsoever. Men cannot have similar selection criteria because that is deemed offensive to women.

Adam is very close to nailing the point here. Feminism is a collectivist political movement based on a zero-sum-game mentality that seeks to inflict punishment on males in the belief that anything that harms men (as a group) must necessarily benefit women (as a group). This perverse belief system manifests itself in the tendency of feminists to find “oppression” in ordinary male behaviors and attitudes that are entirely harmless. Any male expression of admiration for female beauty, for example, is punished as “harassment” or “objectification,” and why? Simply because men enjoy beauty, and anything men enjoy must be wrong, according to feminism’s zero-sum calculus. Thus, feminism becomes a campaign to eliminate every source of male joy in the world.

This is what “fat feminism” (what Ms. Di Filippo calls “the body positivity movement”) is really about. As Adam Piggott points out, feminists have no intention of lowering the standards by which men are judged; indeed, feminists judge males by a standard so impossibly harsh that all men are condemned as sexist oppressors. “Body positivity” is about protecting women from any comparable standard of male judgment. You may be sure that Ms. Di Filippo would dump her boyfriend if he became a bloated slob, but “body positivity” means he cannot complain if she gains 50 pounds. In this as in so many other things, feminism is not really about “equality,” but rather a unilateral attack against men, motivated by a zero-sum-game calculus that views an increase in male unhappiness as a positive good, regardless of whether women benefit from the harm inflicted on men. Whatever is bad for men must be good, the feminist believes, and even if an obese woman might be happier and healthier if she lost some weight, feminism would rather her stay fat, because her obesity is a defiance of “patriarchal beauty standards,” or whatever.

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and this destruction takes many different forms, including a razor company promoting a 330-pound lesbian as a role model.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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