Thursday 11 August 2011

We know what love is

I was going to leave the Weiner piece alone due to the amount of things wrong with it, but I can't help but be struck, predictably enough, by the title.

"Loving my body almost killed me" 

It was according to the author supposed to be "provocative", that's as maybe, but what it brought to the surface is the way abuse is constantly presented to especially fat women as love. It made me think of something like "My partner hurts me because/so *(trigger warning; even worse) they love me" or Orwellian doublethink.

I'd be lying if I said I feel particularly upset in the way I might have before, this explains an important part of why. Encouraging people to be open to abuse and to abuse themselves, is as immoral as it is stupid. The extent to which this mentality repels me is putting increasing distance between me and people like this who are just so out of touch from so much of fat people's experience.

The assumption that fat women are so unloved and not of this world that they do not know what that is or feels like and can therefore need to be told by a magazine is getting increasingly laughable. Let me try to explain something about basic ethics, if you ever reach this point, where hate=love etc., rethink as a matter of principle, okay?

If that doesn't occur, why would you think any fat person in their right mind needs to take you seriously? I am not asking for rigid agreement amongst those who are into fat/body acceptance, on the contrary,  I cannot understand why fat people ever feel we have to give up the basic norms of character and personality in order to fit into the box assigned by those who think they must define us.

Sticking rigidly to their caricature of what a fat person is they talk at that, not grasping how many of us have already gone unwittingly down the hate route from way aback and have had to claw our way back, because we were utterly mashed up, sick and tired of being sick and tired.

People like this do not speak to that, I don't care whether she is fat or thin, "body acceptance" or not. I do not claim mine is universal either, but it does reflect what so many of us have been through and how this has silently affected us and how we seek to redeem our situation, positively, without the permission of anyone but ourselves.

People like that are on our way back because our tolerance for this kind of thing has been, intellectually, emotionally, physically exhausted, many times over. Not just once around the mulberry bush, hemming and hawing whimsy.

I don't worry about "fat positive", are you kidding me? Just no longer attacking myself feels like enough of a holiday, that I could be miserable as heck and still feel like I was skipping around in comparison with before.

Having had an eating disorder, I'm sure this could have read more like a genuinely personal story and less like a public information stereotopia, telling clueless fatz how to find our arses.

2 comments:

  1. Oh, but where do we learn what love is? From our parents? From society? Not all of us are so fortunate. Some of us learn that love is for other people. Some people see abuse as "just the way things are".
    If we are sometimes not in our right minds, it comes from our inability to resolve the clash of what the world wants vs. what our own truths are.

    Mulberry

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  2. We are born loving ourselves, that is supported or comromised by those around us, our position in society and to some extent, ourselves.

    What we think of as self loathing is an interruption of that. We feel it as a loss through contrast with what is always there- the assumption that we are intrinsically loveable.

    Because we are born with it, we have to learn how to defend it from being usurped.

    We can become defeated less by disappointments than beliefs we hold in esteem which contradict our own esteem.

    The only route out of that I can think of is to let go of the beliefs that do not allow us to feel that worthiness.

    Often they are ones we hold very dear and think are above reproach, not on their merits usually, but on the social standing of those transmitting them.

    That is the problem, we discuss logic, but those ideas really serve as a vechicle for the imposition of a social order, we all fit into.

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