false individualism

[cassidyrose]

One thing that has been on my mind a lot is the way that we are trained to think of our actions and choices as individual behaviors that a.) are not influenced by the greater cultural norms around us and b.) as not affecting other people. In particular, I think about this in regards to how people talk about both dieting/weight loss and gun ownership. A lot of people talk about both things as if they exist and occur in a vacuum with no impact on anyone else. I hear a lot of "I just want to lose weight" in an attempt to divorce that desire from extreme internal and external fatphobia as well as "I just like guns" as a way to divorce their existence from their purpose of killing people.

Neither are neutral.

I am all for bodily autonomy, but make no mistake, if you are giving money to any sort of weight-loss product/institution you are giving them money to continue to sell products based on fatphobia and fat shaming. You are giving them money to fill all our FB feeds and other websites we use with diet advertisements. You are giving them money to continue to tell people they are not good enough as they are. The diet industry (and this includes all medical institutions that sell weight-loss surgery, fat camps for kids, etc.) is a HUGE profit-machine based on fat hate. You can give them money, but please don't distance yourself from what those companies are doing. If we give them money, we are participating.

If you talk, write, or otherwise share about how much you love participating in diet culture/industry then you are helping promote it. You are helping sell body shame to other people. There is NO WAY to say, in our incredibly fat-phobic culture, that wanting to lose weight is just about you. There is nothing weight neutral about the world we live in. Our choices are informed by a culture which rewards people for losing weight, no matter the means, and that punishes people for being fat. Of COURSE, given that context, it is easier to be smaller, but let's be real about it and not pretend it feels better to be smaller because "it just does" and not because from day one we have been taught that smaller is better, more desirable, more attractive, more healthy, more employable, etc.

I feel similarly about gun ownership. Guns exist, primarily at this point, to kill people. I mean, the vast majority of us do not and have no need to hunt animals for food. If you have one to "protect your home" you are planning to kill or wound someone with it...otherwise you would not have it. When you buy a gun, when you participate in the culture, you are helping fund the gun industry. You know, the same one that resists regulation and that has George Zimmerman show up at a gun show to sign autographs. The greater gun industry survives and thrives on racism, on selling people fear of non-white people, on telling people they need to "protect" themselves from all the scary people in the world. It doesn't matter *why* you bought a gun, by purchasing one and participating in the culture, you are supporting companies that sell them to people for the purpose of killing other people. You are giving them money to do that. If you are cool with that, fine, but distancing yourself from that is not OK. Own that you are participating.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Our actions are not without consequences. How we spend our time and money have huge implications, far beyond our personal lives, and far beyond what we can see.

****And this is not to say that I do not have sympathy/understanding for people who do choose to participate in the the diet industry, but I do think that when we do participate we need to stop framing it as an individual choice devoid of all cultural context. We are pushed at every turn to participate and our participation is not meaningless.

Comments

[firecat]

True of pretty much everything we do. Even if we're not supporting gun culture or diet culture, we're supporting the exploitation of humans, animals, and/or resources somewhere.