Reddit mentions of Fat Is a Feminist Issue

You're probably remembering some real Ragen drama, but I don't think she quit the ASDAH. They are the official public face of HAES, and she was writing for their blog semi-regularly at one point in 2015; Linda Bacon herself has endorsed plenty of Ragen's "activism" work. Ragen's partner used to be an official spokesperson for NAAFA, but Ragen managed to torpedo the LA branch when she moved there and transitioned it to the Size Diversity Task Force (of diet book papier-mâché ball fame). NAAFA itself had a pretty big implosion in the last few years and actually stopped running their annual conferences due to lack of funds after 2014.

Marilyn Wann has been quite critical of the ASDAH in the past, e.g. when Fat is a Feminist Issue author Susie Orbach spoke at the ASDAH conference in 2009. Marilyn is the kind of person who enjoys complaining for the sake of complaining, and will always find something wrong.

First of all, congratulations on taking healthy and positive steps in your life. 49 pounds lost is excellent!

I want to throw something out there that I haven't really seen on Reddit. I'm a 27 year old woman who's had weight and food issues since I was about 8 or 9. My biggest problems haven't been a lack of self-control or willpower. Contrary to what a lot of people say, for some people--myself included, willpower is just not the key to permanently losing weight. Again, for some people, it's really about why we eat, what we eat, and how we eat.

This might be presumptuous, since I don't know where the root of your weight and weight loss lies. Maybe you have no food weirdness, maybe your metabolism's changed, whatever. But if for you, food and weight are a way to confront (or more accurately, avoid confronting) more personal issues, I would highly, highly recommend these two books:

• Fat Is A Feminist Issue, by Susie Orbach
  
  
  
• Feeding the Hungry Heart, by Geneen Roth
  
  
  Even if you don't have issues with compulsive or emotional eating, reading one or both of these books can be really instrumental in understanding why some people, particularly women, become overweight. Orbach's book in particular really shone a light on why I eat the way I do.
  
  Sometimes being fat isn't simply a matter of eating junk food and being lazy. I mean, yeah, that's part of it, but I get the impression that for you, weight is a deeply personal and emotional issue. If you want to keep the weight off, you'll need to realize that, whether you weigh 282 lbs. or 233 lbs. or 133 lbs., you are always the same person. You're not "better" or "worse." Healthier and more comfortable, sure. But you're still you. :)

From the feminist perspective, there's a double standard regarding the extent to which men and women are judged on their appearance. For a woman, it's much more shameful to be perceived as unattractive because in our society a woman's value is more dependent on their looks than a man's. Feminism attempts to combat this in a variety of ways, one being to try to detach one's personal perception of one's own beauty from that of society, thereby escaping negative judgement.

Fat is probably the single most important factor contributing to a woman being seen as unattractive, therefore fat has become a feminist issue. There's even a book with that exact title - Fat Is A Feminist Issue (which I haven't read).

Some feminists see it in terms of a patriarchal society requiring women to be 'less' than men in all sorts of ways - take up less space, make less noise, etc. The poetry slam, Shrinking Women, approaches the issue from this stance.

EDIT:
Having done a little more reading, I was guilty of oversimplifying.

Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978) attempts to combat the problem of the cycle of compulsive over-eating followed by unhealthy crash dieting. Orbach identifies a variety of reasons for over-eating.

>"For many women, compulsive eating and being fat have become one way to avoid being marketed or seen as the ideal woman," she writes. In other words, what your fat says about you, is: "Screw you!" "Fat expresses a rebellion against the powerlessness of the woman," says Orbach.

>She postulates that women get fat because it means they will be taken more "seriously in their working lives outside the home". If they lose weight, they "find themselves being treated frivolously by their male colleagues". Others do it to de-sexualise themselves; others to avoid competition with other women; others because of their mother's own bonkers relationship with food.

>Orbach argues that while fat women may think that they are desperate to lose weight, they subconsciously harbour the "desire to get fat". Whether they know it or not, they enjoy the topsy-turvy advantages that their layers of fat offer them.

Source

Orbach helped create the site AnyBody, which promotes body acceptance.

Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1991), a classic of third-wave feminism, argues that the real purpose of society's focus on female beauty is to control and limit women, and that, to free women, standards of female beauty should be broadened.

>A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

---

>Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn’t care about women’s appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will “be good,” but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

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>We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it.

>Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.

>Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

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>Let's be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women's choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it.

Obviously Wolf's "Be greedy" and "eat and drink what we feel like" go pretty strongly against the ethos of /r/fatpeoplehate!

My perception is that Orbach's theories about the reasons for over-eating are fairly idiosyncratic, and not mainstream within feminism, however the notion of body acceptance - promoted by both Orbach and Wolf - is, as are many of the other ideas in The Beauty Myth.

> Feminism and the FA movement aren't related.

Sorry, but you're totally wrong on this point; the 1978 publication Fat is a Feminist Issue argues that :

> female obesity should not be viewed as a moral failing, but rather as a declaration of independence from the
prescriptive cultural requirements imposed on American women.

An argument that is still pushed forward today :
Fat is still a Feminist Issue.

In the 1990s "fat feminism" was officially supported by the National Organization for Women

Orbach got together with Mary Evans Young and in 1992 launched International No Diet Day.

They were joined by Allen Steadham and the International Size Acceptance Association who now sponsor the event