Technology

I do find it concerning just how many people talk about things like this without ever challenging their fundamental understanding of social norms. A lot of you do just assume you're smarter than me, which is funny, and I wonder if you've ever actually read anything on fatphobia and the arguments for its recognition.

Bigotry is difficult for liberals to understand because they typically want to recognize it as individualized actions of aggression like calling someone a slur or being mean about someone's weight. Have you considered for a moment that you are vulnerable to the laundering of values that promote dehumanization and genocide through vectors of "bigotry" which you don't take seriously, such as fatness? You used the word "curable," which is very convenient for me as it is a good demonstration of how this topic is medicalized (we can ignore the well-documented discrimination against fat people in medical settings for now), and specifically how it is pathologized. When something is pathologized, that means that whatever is seen as wrong with it is always relative to an idealized, "positive" thing; a fat body is bad (unhealthy) because it is not good like a thin body (healthy). Regardless of the medical science behind this construction (of which I'm sure you also have not read as it is well established by this point that fatness is not necessarily unhealthy relative to other factors), this has manifested socially as a vector of discrimination exactly because of the perception that this is an illness that is cured by willpower. Conveniently in an neoliberal culture, an illness that materializes laziness, poor self-control, and general moral degeneracy reinforces an individualism where individual people are responsible for the effects of their material conditions; i.e. you can choose to be fat the same way you can choose to be poor.

Because fatness is not a recognized vector for discrimination in the same way that racism and sexism is, it is an important site of scholarly discourses exactly because of how effective it is at laundering ableism and classism; along with the fact that it is a measurably oppressed and vulnerable group based on the research I allude to above. Liberals like you don't question any of this, and then readily engage in the fascist rhetoric I am criticizing in this comment with the assumption that you are doing the righteous thing by promoting bodily health and dissuading any claim that a person's fatness is not related to their moral quality of character. It is not about, "body-positivity" any more than anti-racism and anti-queerphobia is even though those forms of oppression similarly relate to the subordination of particular bodily attributes to others. That oppressive ideal of thinness is inextricably linked to ideas of whiteness, and "fitness" in a very fascist understanding of the natural world and human evolution.

Hope that explains some of it to you.