cw for weight/body image, of course

Usually discussions about this get overrun by chuds so I think it’d be nice to hear what people here have to say.

Personally I think it’s some good and positive ideas but they’re mixed in with potentially harmful medical misinformation.

  • VYKNIGHT [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    Fat people shouldn’t get shit on for their weight, shit’s exhausting. But at the same time, I don’t think we should necessarily promote obesity with things like “fat is beautiful” because I’m in the boat of people who’d rather promote the idea that you don’t need to be beautiful to be a good person, instead of trying to spin everything as beauty. My line is that we shouldn’t encourage and look favorably at being fat, and we should try to lower the average weight and augment the overall health of society. However, this doesn’t mean that we should shit on fat people, if they’re comfortable with their own weight and aren’t dying to it, then live and let live.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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      4 years ago

      I’m sorry but that kinda reads like a backhanded compliment, at least when I encounter it in the wild. The “Oh people don’t have to be beautiful to be good” stuff, fat people are fucking beautiful and deserve to feel that way, swerving into “why do we even care about beauty in the first place” whenever this is brought up unintentionally just reads as “fat people aren’t beautiful but its mean to say that so lets just ignore the whole thing”.

  • AHexbearUser [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    being fat sucks and people should be better educated about how their diets affect their weight so they can make a more informed choice about whether eating that extra food is worth gaining that extra weight

    on the other hand, being shitty to fat people is a huge problem in society in various different ways, so a fat acceptance movement is necessary to solve that problem. im not sure id say it’s the fat acceptance movement which we need, though, because the one we have is absolutely full of people saying incredibly dangerous and stupid stuff, like that for a lot of people it’s “impossible” to lose weight or anything along those lines, or of course the “healthy at every size” group who spread nonsense about how being overweight actually doesnt suck at all.

    i see overweight people the way i see people with any medical condition. like, im not gonna be rude to someone because they have a disease or something, but im absolutely not going to say “actually having diseases is cool and not unhealthy at all”

  • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    Body positivity is good. Health is also good. The line should be for people to be healthy in their bodies, whatever that looks like, a position that is hard to achieve under capitalism.

  • Gamer2 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    Many common health issues are primarily due to capitalist alienation, including the rampant obesity in western countries. I’ll never judge anyone for that, ever. I have to fucking sit at a desk for days on end and many others do too. The most affordable food options for me are both disgusting to my taste as well as the cruelty they inflict on both animals and people. “health” has become a commodity mostly accessible by the bourgeois

  • ssjmarx [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    Body positivity is good. Nobody should have a complex because of how they look, and we should strive to create a society where absolute acceptance is the default. Fat acceptance is part of that, though I would prefer a more holistic approach to just focusing on one aspect of it.

    I find the way that people react to the idea of fat acceptance to be extremely revealing. There’s lots of concern trolling, even ITT, about the movement - I’m sure some people attached to it have had some bad takes, but the mainstream position is not about denying medical science like some people would have you believe.