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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Not a single one of the replies is by statistically literate people. "Sample size" is an applause light, nothing more.

But I've been thinking about this recently, why did fat women become a protected class among the woke? After being recommended, this video about how some Norwegian students found a math question about calories in vs. calories out "offensive".

After all, most woke protected classes share either one of two traits. Historically did not have rights in the US or are hated by the ring wing in the US. Fat women don't satisfy either category. And yes, the "body positivity" egregore speaks for fat women only.

My theory is that it's a memetic mutation. It has all the markers of a true woke cause and can Cuckoo as a woke cause as a result. The fact is self-serving for its adherents might just be a coincidence. Or it could just be the woke female analogue of inceldom. Also probably incentous with the quirky mental illness memeplex. Just fucking madness. I'm not even gonna bother trying to make sense of all this.

After all, most woke protected classes share either one of two traits. Historically did not have rights in the US or are hated by the ring wing in the US

I would argue that fat falls into the latter category of "the right wing hates fat people" especially with the rise of dramatically named concepts like "fascist fitness" (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/06/fascist-fitness-how-the-far-right-is-recruiting-with-online-gym-groups) and "gym bro" culture being associated with the right wing. Even Trump, who isn't exactly skinny himself, could not stop making fun of people's weight.

Fatness also falls into "traditional" conservative thinking re: personal responsibility. You don't like being fat? Great, just diet and exercise. No, don't implement a sugar tax, because it is YOUR problem, not mine. Bill Maher requested that we "start fat shaming people again" back before COVID.

There have been Catholic arguments that fatness is akin to immorality. I know, conservatives are a far greater sphere than just Catholics, but religious guilt can go far, down with the patriarchy, etc.

There are also internet subcultures about "men's self-improvement" that also have encouraged this kind of thinking, as well as the whole "hot trad wife" mindset. While conservative states are the most obese in the US, the cultural pushback against "body positivity" for objectively unhealthy bodies is also primarily conservative.

See also, commentary on Lizzo, especially after the James Madison flute incident. Reddit banned fat people hate in 2015 and that also leaned fairly to the right.

After all, most woke protected classes share either one of two traits. Historically did not have rights in the US or are hated by the ring wing in the US. Fat women don't satisfy either category. And yes, the "body positivity" egregore speaks for fat women only.

The immediate answer that springs to mind is black women:

African American women have the highest rates of obesity or being overweight compared to other groups in the United States. About 4 out of 5 African American women are overweight or obese.

This has become a political issue (see maternal mortality rates as well as general health issues) and feminist theory around hypersexualisation of black women as well as concerns around beauty standards, which include body size:

When compared with White women, findings show that African American women reported lower levels of body image dissatisfaction, maintain a more favorable view of larger body sizes, have less concerns about dieting, weight fluctuations, and fear of fatness, and are less likely to internalize sociocultural standards of beauty. Furthermore, Falconer and Neville (2000) found that African American women with bigger body sizes were more likely to be satisfied with specific body areas. Fewer studies report negative body satisfaction among African American women.

Ergo, judging black women by white beauty standards is racist. Saying any particular black woman, or black women in general, is too fat is racist (see Lizzo).

So if you're fat, white and feminist, this can be included in your schema of why you should not be judged negatively or viewed as unattractive/unhealthy.

Woke is basically a project to change social attitudes to make people idealize traits previously seen as negative. Some of those traits are actually Unironically negative(being neuroatypical is not a good thing, and I would happily trade several inches in height to not be so), many are neutral(having dark skin might require you to take a vitamin D pill if you live in Detroit, and might expose you to discrimination, but it’s not a bad thing in itself). Fat fits in with that project even if it’s stupid, and, well, woke women as often noted tend to have personal reasons to think that one’s important.

While you certainly have a point about the woke being anti-Natalist, they really seem to hate incels.

This is because incels are involuntarily celibate. They think that their lack of reproductive success is a problem that should be fixed, ideally by social intervention to curtail what they see as the modern excessive status of women. If they instead celebrated their sexual exclusion, praising how great it is that modern women have the freedom to reject them and continually reinforcing their claim that nobody owes them anything sexually (as many equally involuntarily celibate, though not incel-identifying, "nice guy" male feminists do), then they'd be accepted (as those "nice guy" male feminists mostly are so long as they maintain the submissive irrelevance befitting their chosen ideological position).

While I happen to personally doubt that sensitive male feminists are having a lot of sex, they seem to me to be claiming they're having it.

Just fucking madness. I'm not even gonna bother trying to make sense of all this.

I can sympathise with that feeling of trying to understand madness all too easily!

But I've been thinking about this recently, why did fat women become a protected class among the woke? After being recommended, this video about how some Norwegian students found a math question about calories in vs. calories out "offensive".

Fat white women are not protected. Because obesity is highest in African American women and WOC overall, there is considerable overlap just by race alone.

My guess is it's an attempt to accommodate body types they associate with the Global south. Primarily Africa, and furthermore West Africa.

Leaving aside your cheap "boo wokes" applause lights, it's not hard to decipher: fat has been a feminist issue since at least the 70s. Short version: a lot of women are fat, losing weight is hard, fat women get shit on a lot, physical attraction is part of the whole patriarchy/"male gaze" memeplex, therefore it's appealing to women for a number of obvious reasons to try to persuade the public that being fat is not unhealthy, unattractive, or their fault. Since it's a lefty/feminist issue, it's a woke issue.

This book is outdated and does not coincide with today's body liberation movement, finding health at every size, and fat activism. This book is incredibly fat phobic and the psychoanalytic approach to being fat is BS. It suggests that women who are fat subconsciously want to be fat, it includes no other contextual factors. I thought this book would be about how fat women are treated by our patriarchal society. It does mention this concept, but the bulk of the book is a self-help guide to overcome compulsively eating to ultimately lose weight.

It appears to be very out of date and problematic compared to modern truths of "queer fat multiplicities that can disrupt dominant systems of subjugation and hierarchies"

There was already a "Fat Studies Reader (An Invitation To Revolution!) in 2009, and by 2019 we had "Queering Fat Activism: A Study in Whiteness" "argu(ing) for a thickened politics of white recognition within Fat Studies, so that scholars can better situate queer codes as aligned with the rejection of white civility"

It's certainly an expanding movement whose goals seem to have changed massively over time.

It's been a long time since I read Fat Is A Feminist Issue, but my recollection is that its basic thesis was:

  1. Fatness is a problem caused by compulsive eating.

  2. Compulsive eating in women develops as a way of coping with psychological conflicts, partly but not entirely attributable to unfulfilable and contradictory social expectations, and as an attempt to fulfil unmet needs for security and self-efficacy.

  3. The pathway out of compulsive eating involves becoming aware of the unconscious processes that drive it, recognising their futility, and supplanting them by being more assertive about one's rights and boundaries. There is an emphasis on group therapy that, while focused on compulsive eating, doubles as political consciousness-raising.

It's definitely not in total agreement with contemporary mainstream feminist attitudes about fatness, as can be seen by reading some of its Goodreads reviews.

But I've been thinking about this recently, why did fat women become a protected class among the woke?

They’re probably a majority constituency from my observations

Some belief is built on systems of oppression thought. In thinking about things primarily systemically, individual agency is ignored as a causal factor. Once you start accepting that, fat isn’t really someone’s fault.

It slides neatly into the memeplex of "men bad," since a (false) story can be told that it's primarily men who police women's bodies and create fatphobia.

For comparison, you'd expect incels' "heightism" to merit at least as much concern as fatphobia, but there's, unsurprisingly, little embrace of it as a cause among the woke.

I agree. The lack of concern for heightism should be enough to convince anyone that wokism is a hammer of the strong not a shield of the weak. Short men face extreme discrimination and there is nary a peep from the woke about the issue.

In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth. Worse, the hatred of short men today is actively cheered by most women.

There's a recent commercial where a woman is watching a football game during a wedding. When the minister says "are there any objections", she says (watching the game) "he's so clearly short". This is played for laughs. Imagine she had said "he's so clearly black" instead.

Like how being a woman, or not being fat both also mean you live longer?

Women also live longer than men, but that doesn't seem to heavily impact feminist theory.

In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth.

Surely this is an extremely hyperbolic comparison. Per Wikipedia, Cagots were legally "typically required to live in separate quarters", "not allowed to enter taverns or use public fountains", "buried in cemeteries separate from non-Cagots, with reports of riots occurring if bishops tried to have the bodies moved to non-Cagot cemeteries", "allowed to enter a church only by a special door", "compelled to wear a distinctive dress to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose", "prohibited from selling food or wine, touching food in the market, working with livestock, or entering mills", and so on, and so on, and so on.

On the other hand, short men in the modern day... have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?

have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?

I think if you add the parent comment to yours and divide by two you'd get the truth. So a little hyperbole for humor is par for the course here.

As a tall dude, the way short men are treated is beyond "difficulty getting dates". I know men whose SMV would quadruple with another 6" in height. Everything requiring effort and personal quality comes second to a chick standing on her tippy toes to kiss.

I understand it's correlated with dick size but the female height fetish has never been not fucked up.

Even if short men could literally not get a partner ever, this would not take them half the way to the situation of Cagots according to most people's value function (though I have certainly seen a tendency in incel communities to obsess about female acknowledgement/attention to the point that it displaces anything else, and they can truthfully say that they consider deficiency in it worse than the previously listed set of abuses; this seems to me to be pathological).

Moreover, I do not think it is in fact true, unless one is so short as to be disfigured; among all my acquaintances I can not point to a single single guy whose singleness appears to primarily be due to them being short, though there may be nontrivial indirect causality (along the lines of shortness contributing to lower SMV, which contributes to negative experiences, which contribute to personality flaws). I know of two long-term couples where despite the odds the guy is significantly shorter than the girl (and in neither of the two cases does he have any overwhelming compensatory advantages like being rich or famous). Being so short that there are no girls shorter than you at all, for a guy, at any rate would be very rare.

You could argue that the "short->unattractive personality->no dates" pipeline is just "short->no dates" with a technical extra step, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other initial causes that end in "unattractive personality->no dates" for men all the time. Among the people I knew, "got into the wrong kind of anime early on" depressed performance more than "is short"; and while you could argue that getting in the wrong kind of anime is fixable in a way being short isn't, in this case we are talking about either effect being mediated through personality (you can't unwatch Love Live! any more than you can gain height), which in either case is likely fixable, even if you need to get electroconvulsive therapy or something in the toughest cases.

I can tell that subconsciously I'm much more dismissive of men 5" shorter than me, than men around my own height.

Note, this does not apply to short men who are visibly jacked. Take the dwarf pill. Clangeddin be with you.

It applies less: I knew short guys that were competing in physique bodybuilding competitions. It didn't help them much with women; their partners were invariably morbidly obese.

Being jacked puts a damper, but it doesn't negate the effect altogether (in terms of direction).

You're going with "short people just have bad personalities"? On point for this group, I suppose.

Another interesting variation on "if you can't get dates, you have a bad personality".

It's proxies all the way down.

"Short people who can't get a partner just have bad personalities" (or, I guess, something else wrong with them, but this wasn't obviously the case for any I knew).

If Love Live! is the wrong type of anime, what’s the right type?

(Incidentally I think there are quite a few female LL fans, to the point of reaching parity or even exceeding male fans in some demographics.)

Among the Zoomers that I TAed in grad school, being on point with the JoJo memes seemed to have a decidedly positive effect on getting laid, and I think mainstream stuff like AoT is also at the very least neutral. I even grew up inhaling sekaikei manic pixie magical girlfriend chuuni wanks and the only identifiable adverse effect it's had on my dating life was that it made me worse at processing breakups. Eliezer is a self-proclaimed F/SN fan and he's managed to found a whole BDSM sex cult.

What about mecha anime?

The worst thing possible for short men would be being accepted into the pantheon of oppression. That's not to say they don't face unfair discrimination; they do (source: I'm a 5'3" guy). But getting caught in the black hole of victim ideology is far worse than having to work a bit harder than the average person.

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