Fat acceptance is not a particularly radical, in itself. Equality is no longer a radical idea, that time has passed. With the advent of numerous laws to improve the fate of the disadvantaged and numerous movements for civil rights and cultural recognition, equality is a dominant if not fully realized ideal.
What has now become more radical to assert directly and openly is the idea of acceptable inequality.
That some groups of people should deliberately act or be pressed into playing inferior in order that others can pretend to a natural and unsurpassed superiority, to serve some common good. That's radical.
If fat acceptance is positing fat people want out of their chore, in this regard and wish others to stop insisting. It is asking nothing more than equality with others.
If anyone wishes to negotiate on that, trying to negotiate on equality undermines it. This is fat hating pure and simple.
Take for instance those who say FA's, deeply unpopular. We are prepared to relieve your agony by being more friendly towards you but you have to accept fat phobia and support us in hating you. Not only is the basis illegitimate and mean spirited, the demand is really-change nothing or in this case, make things worse. If we are saying drop the fat phobia/hating and you say, tolerate it, that's worse than when we started! At least before we didn't know.
In a sense, we are asking for nothing, if you take equality as a given. There's no room in this, either it's equality or it's inequality. A tangle occurs when people wish to use fat phobia/hating, but cannot justify it with their conscience. They put it back on fat people and tell us to dance like fatty Bojangles-when there is no point for us.
We are tolerant enough of people's acquired habit of fat loathing. My issue is with pretending that the choice to fat hate yourself or others must be the only view. And that the costs of that should be ignored.
Fat hate costs.
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