My relationship to my body is a little fucked up due to cultural stigmas & pressures. I don't think it would have been possible for me not to absorb at least some of the rampant body shaming, but compared to the women whose mother's shamed their bodies (or only praised them for being thin) & taught them a bad relationship to food & eating, I'm doing pretty damn well.

Fat-shaming your daughter is setting her up for a lifelong battle to love herself. It's fucked up to do that to someone you love.

As a woman who was NOT fat-shamed by her mother, let me tell you, that was the right choice.

I did not learn to view my body as a commodity. I did not learn to tie my love of myself to the size & shape of my body.

Fat-shaming is a tool of the patriarchy. Women are taught to harm their daughters & teach their daughters how to harm *themselves*, & for what? To have a body that is acceptable, to be the only kind of woman who is supposed to be allowed to exist.

It stuns me how much women's bodies are controlled, & what especially gets to me is that that level of control on that large a scale is not possible without mothers doing this psychological damage to their daughters from a young age.

Yes, it's fucking magazine covers, movies & TV, the girls at school, & all that shit. But without mothers teaching their daughters that to be a girl or woman is to have to constantly monitor your body & keep it small, this scale of dysfunction could not happen.

Women keep passing on their trauma, the shame their mothers trained into them, the feeling that their worth is tied to their physical form, & it fucking pisses me the fuck off.

I believe that body control is a *key* component of patriarchy. This is where women learn that they don't have the right to freely move through the world, that they don't even have the right to exist without modifying themselves to be smaller.

I think a lot of women think they are really helping their daughters. They know the ways they have been shamed.

They know the difference in how much respect a woman receives depending how much she weighs (this is true of all people in fatphobic cultures, but the level of *control* for women is higher & the threshold of "fat" is much, much lower).

It's understandable to want to protect your daughter from that, but really training her to submit to it is making her a victim, not setting her free.

It fucking stuns me how much energy women & girls are STILL expending in the year 2026 to monitor & control their bodies & appearance, but it just shows how embedded this aspect of patriarchy is.

We deserve to exist. Our worth isn't connected to the size & shape of our bodies.

This misogynistic bullshit needs to be put to bed. It is not ok to train girls to obsess over meeting meaningless & arbitrarily difficult (essentially impossible) standards.

This shit is also inextricably tied to white supremacy (patriarchy & white supremacy are thoroughly intertwined into a single system).

The body that women are pressured to have is specifically & intentionally a white body ideal.

It is not an ideal that most white women naturally meet, but it is defined by difference to body shapes more common among folks of African descent.

Training a young girl to meet this standard is training her to access the benefits of white supremacy & uphold its cultural power.

*Skinny* white women are the ideal. The ideal woman is a white woman who has dedicated her very life to the god of white supremacist patriarchy.

In part, it's a declaration of loyalty. All the meals she eats (or doesn't) are like ritual sacrifices to be allowed participation in the hierarchy of white supremacy.

Is that what we want other women to aspire to? To be made into acceptable tools of the kyriarchy?

Fatphobia & fat shaming are always harmful.

I'm pretty damn disturbed by seeing the pressures men & boys are under for meeting a body ideal too. I could be wrong, but it seems like those pressures have intensified over the last couple decades.

It's sick & twisted. It does nothing to promote health. Just suffering—both physical & mental.

Your body is not shameful. Your body is not the cause of the things you suffer. It's a fucking distraction from the real sources of suffering.

Access to rights & dignity are supposedly locked behind body-control, & you are supposed to think that if only you had the "right" body, all would be well with you, & the fact that all is not well with you is supposed to be the proof that there is something wrong with your body.

Bullshit.

Your rights are trampled & you live a life of constant indignities because of oppression, not because there is something fucking wrong with you that you need to fix before you can have good things.

Oppression requires control. The fact that we are taught to abuse our bodies & police the bodies of others is not some accident. Not really.

You are supposed to learn to conform & especially to fear the suffering that people inflict on you for non-conformity. Ideally (for the purposes of oppression), you would also learn to punish others for their non-conformity.

Fatphobia is a tool of the enemy, my friends. It is a way we are trained to hurt ourselves & each other.

It's not surprising when the capitalists need to increase their authoritarian control to be able to keep destroying the world that they would ratchet up the pressure on *everyone*—not just women—to obsess over controlling their bodies & expend all their energy on molding themselves into the "right" shape.

And those who can't or won't do that? They are to be socially punished for failing to submit to control. It is acceptable to punish them because they are existing incorrectly.

Fatphobia is still widely accepted, & this is a fucking problem for every marginalized group, because it is a tool to train us that *some people* do not deserve dignity.

It may not *seem* like the most pressing of bigotries, but I think a big part of its function is to train us all from childhood that human dignity is not inherent, & that it is ok to select targets for abuse as long as they are the "right" target.

"I'm just concerned about people's health."

You know some things that would make people healthier?

- Access to healthcare (without financial strain)
- Not being overworked & overstressed
- Experiencing fulfillment in one's labor
- Access to better food
- Feeling worthy of care & loving oneself
- Experiencing love & acceptance

You want people to be healthy? That's what people fucking need, not shame, derision, "helpful advice", or being denied life-saving healthcare until they lose weight.

The size of people's bodies is not the problem: abuse, oppression, & deprivation are.

Let's end poverty & see what people's health looks like THEN.

I am convinced that the primary reason being fat is associated with risk of early death is that doctors won't treat fat people until they lose weight.

I don't know how many stories I have heard about fat people who—after YEARS of going to the doctor complaining of health issues & being sent away without any further investigation—found out they were in advanced stages of cancer (or another illness) that should have been caught & treated long ago.

Even if we set aside extreme cases, how is someone dealing with serious health issues causing them pain, weakness, fatigue, etc. supposed to work on "losing weight"?

If fat people can't get treated for their illnesses & injuries until they are skinny, um...how are they supposed to "get healthy"?

They aren't, are they? They are supposed to suffer, because they have bodies that are not considered worthy of care.

Some people don't deserve life & comfort? What kind of fascist bullshit is that?

We already live in a eugenicist society. We have been living in a eugenicist society.

Fatphobia is one of the guises under which eugenics operates.

@artemis Sexual selection has always been a part of life. Be it human or animal. The measurements used to select a partner differs culturally and personally, and is shifting constantly.

Eugenics is a concept to control breeding on a societal level. In the furthest sense, can maybe the medial presentation of attractive attributes be seen as eugenics.

@vekkq
If you scrolled up 2 posts on this thread, you would have heard of it before replying.

Your definition of eugenics is far too narrow & does not account for systemic/societal factors.

It's not an individual problem. It is a systemic problem perpetuated by stigma, misinformation, & prejudice.

@artemis i read it before.

i think your definition of eugenics is too broad.

I also don't see how eugenics correlate to fatness. Gaining weight has little to do with genes. Deciding to having someone die, because of fatness, is rather an issue of severe discrimination, independent of race or genes.