Food for thought
Equality, in my mind will never come so long as we are directed by media to police and judge everybody skinnier, or fatter, than ourselves. Oh, and don’t forget that we also cruelly judge ourselves too.
Equality only comes when we stop seeing women as objects whom we should judge by their appearance, (which usually is first credited or criticized by body size) and when we stop judging men similarly.
After all, we are judgmental of men’s bodies when we make stereotypical assumptions about how manly they are with weights, or sports, or beer guts, or fit-bits, or gamer butts.
Or, we also determine by cultural wisdom that they have no discipline to be expected, so a round, dad body is admired. It displays our attitudes about how utterly incapable they are of controlling themselves either in their inability to avert a predatory male gaze, or to be disciplined enough to lose twenty-five pounds.
Judging the content of our character
People are expected to be very binary about body size.
If you think Adele’s recent weight loss is healthy, you may be fatphobic. If you think heavy rap stars — BTW, why is there only one Lizzo? — are body positive role models, then, you are for unhealthy eating habits and diabetes.
The thing is that weight loss, body size, is almost never one thing or another. Every single human body is different. Every motive is different. Every desire to be attractive is different. Each of us are unique individuals. Judgment of others is the only thing we should judge as deficient, and that deficiency is almost always found in the self-destruction of our own internalized phobia in our morning mirrors.
All that said, there is one universal aspect of modern body size that is the same everywhere. You may have noticed that the debate about celebrity weight loss is always about them versus us. Or, how we ourselves view our “better habits.”
The better habit may be that we, (unlike those fatphobes), understand the need for human body positivity. Or the better habit may be that we are inspired, and therefore taking better care to avoid obesity because “my idol is so inspiring with her/his hard-won efforts at body sculpting.”
We do this even though we know quite well that comparing ourselves to others is always going to end in an unhealthy one-up-man-ship game.
Let’s get down to the meat of the matter
You are so thin, I looked past you. You are so fat, you blocked my view. Can’t we imagine more than this?
There is much we don’t see by these attitudes.
We don’t look at why people today that are more susceptible to COVID 19, and several other diseases. There is poverty, plunder, and propaganda going on.
We don’t look at why we are addicted to fat, sugar, and sometimes, animal flesh. We don’t look at the sad fate of Earth biodiversity going extinct. We don’t look at deforestation to feed our species at the sacrifice of all other species. We don’t look at lost pollinators.
We don’t look at those same toxins in our food, because we are kept in the shiny, high drama of celebrity gossip.
We don’t look at cruelty. We don’t look at public policy, such as corporate farm subsidy, or cronyism policy that puts short term profit over long time health.
We don’t look at food deserts, poverty, or hungry children. We can’t see the need for real health, because we can’t see past whether so and so superstar is a better person due to her appearance.
We, especially in the West, can’t achieve equality because we can’t stop looking at one another long enough to see who is pulling our food addiction strings. Nor do we want to know that most media is pulling our ‘inadequacy, buy more stuff strings’, to be better looking Barbie and Kens.
It’s not just our collective phobia about fat, either.
Of course, eating disorders with skeletal results, or being undernourished, are also caused by this unhealthy obsession with “body perfection.”
Equality is about our true values
It all stems from the same place, people. We will remain unequal, in gender, race, and even political divide and non-progress until we see what our relationship to food really is.
To find our true values, we have to value each other.
For most of our two-hundred thousand, year modern human presence on Earth, we did not have heart-disease, obesity, or all the other over-eating diseases. But we also didn’t have long lives. We did have plenty of starvation, and ill-advised beauty standards.
Now we live on a globe that knows for a fact that our relationship to food will determine whether we eat bats and pangolins to unleash pandemics to come, or whether we allow pathogens to flourish because of injustice of employment standards in meat-packing plants.
Let’s stop looking at each other and making judgments, and start looking at the actual causes of so much suffering and inequality.
When we know the true enemy, we can do the right kind of work out.
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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Christyl Rivers