Fat acceptance is not “promoting an unhealthy lifestyle”.
Fat acceptance is not even “promoting obesity” as a body shape.
Fat acceptance is promoting acceptance of the body you have. Self-acceptance, and acceptance by the people around you. Whether it’s your “fault” or not.
It chills me to the bone that people still say that fat celebrities, a.k.a. people convicted of Living While Fat, should be ashamed. It chills me in exactly the same way as when it’s directed at a thin person. When in either case the individual is called disgusting or sickening or told they shouldn’t expose themselves that way. How dare you tell anyone to hide their body because it offends your eyes. I promise you that is all it is. Because you sure as shit can’t tell what’s going on inside that body, so you can’t tell me that person is “promoting anorexia” or “promoting overeating”. Even if you argue that some susceptible young girl might still abuse herself in these ways to obtain these figures, your blame is still incredibly misplaced.
Magazines and television “promote” thinness by making it the only acceptable public image a woman can have. By making fat (or non-white, or disabled etc.) bodies practically invisible in those media, making the viewer feel like an oddity. Additionally they bombard us with information on how to obtain this figure for ourselves. Every day, every issue, every ad break. And even on top of that, they reinforce the stereotypes that make being unthin look so undesirable CONSTANTLY.
At no point, though, is the thin model/actress/presenter/whatever standing up and saying, “BEING THIN IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE.” At no point is she herself promoting that figure as the ideal. She is manipulated by those she works for. And even in the rarest of cases when a model does venture to say something this stupid (hi, Kate Moss), her voice is still incredibly tiny compared to the booming hegemony of the media + the diet industry + the pharmaceutical industry + the public panic + the weight loss surgery industry etc. etc. etc.
And it is even rarer, and even more easily drowned out, for a fat person to say that being fat is the only way to be. This is a different message to “I like being fat”, or “I accept myself” or “I love myself”. And I really be beyond amazed if you find me an instance of Beth Ditto saying that fatness is in anyway superior to thinness. Or even that she finds thinness unnattractive (her girlfriend is tiny, for crying out loud). But again: EVEN IF SHE DID, you really think this would constitute “promoting obesity”? You really think a girl watching that ITV2 interview sat back and thought, hey, I want to be as fat as Beth Ditto! I want to invite all that hatred, concern-trolling and discrimination! I want my entire career to come second to the discussion of my body!
A woman like Beth Ditto or Gabourey Sidibe being publicly fat and happy promotes fuck all except self-acceptance. At the most it will make an already fat person watching them think that maybe, one day, they too can get past this obsessive self-loathing that has already wasted so much of their time. OH UNSPEAKABLE EVIL. OH THOSE TERRIBLE WOMEN. HOW DARE THEY.
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Because I have to say this again and again
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