Hi!

I am definitely positive on the subject of size/fat acceptance.  don’t know what I would classify my level of activism, not because I don’t think about it or join in fights to de-stigmatize fat (or skinny, or non-mainstream!) bodies, but because I’m not a regular blogger and usually am present in a mostly reblogging sense. I’d like to do more original posting but I always seem to have too much going on to get in the habit! Which is probably not true. I definitely am interested in visibility, though, foremost.

I got started as many of the Tumblr fat bloggers did, on the LiveJournal community fatshionista, which is still active as far as I know, and was at the time a huge eye opener for me. I’m 12-18 in regular sizes and my wife is anywhere in the 20s, so both of us have trouble shopping, especially finding things that are awesome, and it’s frustrating! finding a community where

From there I got more into other bloggers: Kate Harding, HAES, and then just blogs in general. It’s been a cool thing to see more and more people become aware of the movement.

There are things about the movement that I don’t like, and generally those things become evident on the rare occasion that I post text posts here. For example, I agree with many other people on Tumblr that HAES doesn’t work for everyone, and trying to prove that fat is okay because fat people can be healthy too can be self-defeating. If you are mentally or physically unhealthy, you should still be able to love your body and you shouldn’t be judged for it. I think the point that people are TRYING to make is that someone smaller is going to not have the assumption made that they eat unhealthily or that their weight is at fault for their problems when they go to the doctor. But whether or not they are metrically unhealthy in some way, or they eat nothing but starch, both people are going to be treated differently, and that’s wrong. That stigmatization is as unhealthy for the thinner person as it is for the fat person! It’s why we’re shocked when 30 year olds are having stress-induced heart attacks: because we assume slim people don’t need heart screenings.

That was a huge tangent. What I’m trying to say, though, is that stigmatization of bodies outside the mainstream is pervasive, and that people justify it. This doesn’t just apply to fat people, it applies to ablist condescension toward those with disabilities, it applies to nonbinary folk, etc. Once you can pathologize someone and dub them unhealthy - mentally, physically, etc - it’s so much easier to tell them they look wrong. And yet all of this has been fed to us by industries trying to make us hate ourselves, pay to hate ourselves, and pay to do something about it hopefully unsuccessfully so we have to do it again.

So, uh. Yes! I am an activist, I guess. But I don’t talk about it much!