Fat-Hatin'

Shaker Laura forwards this POS that's lighting up Twitter and argues the precise opposite of fat acceptance and health at every size concepts (emphasis original):

Fundamentally, we need to depreciate the perceived social value for this kind of habit. … [A] little peer pressure goes a long way, and this is important: People will change when their culture expects them to do so. What's being seen today as "normal" is just plain wrong. We need a major perception change, if we're to do anything about this problem, and it's a problem that's affecting our very planet. It's not just a problem with people who are overweight. It's a problem with everyone who thinks it's OK to be obese.

Wow, how revolutionary! It's totally the component that's been missing all my life—someone to make me feel bad for being fat!

Meanwhile, Shaker Carrie sends me a picture of an advert she saw from the Ad Council in Chicago's Greektown neighborhood.


[Click to embiggen.]


In case you can't see the images, it's the profile of the disembodied torso of a white woman's body in a bathing suit, with three dotted "cut lines" running along her body. The first reads: "Started going for short walks during lunch hour." The second reads: "Stops ordering take-out and starts cooking healthy meals." The third, and innermost, reads: "Just bought bikini that challenges some obscenity laws."

The point of this ad, with its tense-challenged copy, is that the woman is shaving off parts of her fat caboose by making lifestyle changes—so she can reach her goal weight, at which point she can finally do what all women should be getting in shape to do: Show off her sexy body for public consumption.

Aside from the fat-shaming and exhortation to find one's purpose in sexual objectification, the cut lines create a whole other problem, as Carrie notes: "I guess the 'cut here' line is supposed to be clever, but I find it disturbing, because of course I am imagining actual scissors cutting this woman." A woman whose head and most of the rest of her body have already helpfully been amputated by the ad makers.