Shalanna ([identity profile] shalanna.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] hermionesviolin 2010-03-03 05:09 am (UTC)

Two different issues: health AND this game women play of one-upmanship

This particular article, though, is NOT about fat people being talked to so much as it is about EVERY FEMALE being controlled by the other females. This kind of talk usually takes place among the skinny women. They are, in a sense, competing to show off who has the most self-control, and attempting to subdue anyone who does not actively talk all the time about how Fat is bad and thus Fat People are Evil and Doing It On Purpose and If Only They'd Have a Little Self-Control and all this. They talk like this to make themselves feel superior and to show their plumage as Righteous Deserving Good People, when it really doesn't have anything to do with their worth as a person. If your knees hurt or whatever and you are losing weight, you probably do not start in at every meal about how people shouldn't eat this or that--you just DO it. This is completely different--it's a transactional analysis game of "I'm Better Than You Are" or "You're A Pile Of Self-Indulgent Crap" or "Shame."

If shame could make people lose weight, there would be no fat people in this society. I would not object to people shaming me if it actually helped. But it doesn't. I have deep-seated psychological issues and also a metabolic/endocrine disability, and to rag on me about "oh, I wouldn't eat THAT for anything" just makes me want to whap them upside the head for being a game-playing manipulator. That is not the real way to help someone else "get healthy." It's a camouflage for the age-old game of putdown.

Not that I've given any thought to this issue at all or anything. *wink*

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