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Not so simple
This is largely a response to this Body Impolitic post, but the issue has come up recently in some other places I hang out too, so I am discussing it in my journal.
Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
There are certain things that people try to make more simple than is possible.
Specifically, there is no "the [fill in the blank] community" unless you're talking about a single group of people who meet for one purpose only.
There's no "the fat acceptance community," "the poly community," "the Buddhist community," and so on.
People say "the FITB community" as a way of shorthand when they're talking about all the people interacting around certain ideas. But sometimes they seem to start believing in their own shorthand. Sometimes they seem to act as if all the FITB people will be forced to spend the rest of their lives together in a small confined space so they'd better all think a lot alike.
But if you're talking about many people geographically distributed who share an interest in a certain idea, and especially if that idea is complex, then they do not form a single unified community. They have multiple different relationships with the idea and multiple different ways of interacting with other people who are interested in the idea. For most ideas, that's not only OK, that's good.
When I embrace this understanding of how people interact around ideas, I feel a lot more relaxed. If I believe in X and Z, and someone else believes in Y and Z, we don't have to fight it out about whether the community should be either X+Z believers or Y+Z believers. We can both take part in groups interested in Z and retain our beliefs about X and Y. Then we might be able to discuss X and Y productively instead of feeling like we have to stomp out all those X-believers or Y-believers.
Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
There are certain things that people try to make more simple than is possible.
Specifically, there is no "the [fill in the blank] community" unless you're talking about a single group of people who meet for one purpose only.
There's no "the fat acceptance community," "the poly community," "the Buddhist community," and so on.
People say "the FITB community" as a way of shorthand when they're talking about all the people interacting around certain ideas. But sometimes they seem to start believing in their own shorthand. Sometimes they seem to act as if all the FITB people will be forced to spend the rest of their lives together in a small confined space so they'd better all think a lot alike.
But if you're talking about many people geographically distributed who share an interest in a certain idea, and especially if that idea is complex, then they do not form a single unified community. They have multiple different relationships with the idea and multiple different ways of interacting with other people who are interested in the idea. For most ideas, that's not only OK, that's good.
When I embrace this understanding of how people interact around ideas, I feel a lot more relaxed. If I believe in X and Z, and someone else believes in Y and Z, we don't have to fight it out about whether the community should be either X+Z believers or Y+Z believers. We can both take part in groups interested in Z and retain our beliefs about X and Y. Then we might be able to discuss X and Y productively instead of feeling like we have to stomp out all those X-believers or Y-believers.
no subject
*pokes at my brain and tries again*
I'm kind of like one of those women who's in favour of women's rights but ambivalent about feminism: I definitely think Western society is screwed up and absurdly, hurtfully anti-fat, but have never felt comfortable aligning myself with, or spending much time around, the Fat Acceptance movement as I've perceived it.
So when I said "noone knows.." I wasn't talking about FA people, just the people I've talked to in every day life (mostly either pro-weight loss or vaguely pro-fat-acceptance but not actively identifying that way)
And I found trying to lose weight was incredibly bad for my health as well (mostly physical, but it also interacted really badly with my neurotic disposition. I stress enough about food without counting points!) So I can totally understand wanting to find a space where you can feel not pressured to lose weight even though it would be "healthier" in some ways, and I'm sorry that you haven't found the FA movement to be that space. I would have assumed it would be, but that's what I get for assuming :(
To respond to your actual point: I think I have been too inclined, as an outsider, to see FA as a single movement, and thus when I react against the views of some parts of it I assume everyone feels that way and thus the movement is not for me. I get narky every time I see "healthy at every size" for example: I am unhealthy at every size! I think what I really need is an approach which is particularly aimed at people with my sorts of stomach problems, since the way I have to approach food is quite different to that usually suggested. But since my weight is not that big an issue for me I'd rather look for the FA parts of disability activism than the disability-friendly parts of fat activism.
From my experiences with feminism (and, to be shallow, fanfic fandom) I do understand feeling isolated when it feels like there's a single consensus and it doesn't include you, and the freedom of realising that while a lot of people ACT like there's a consensus and it agrees with them there's actually not, that there's lots of different valid POVs some of which align with your own.
no subject
That makes sense.
I'm sorry that you haven't found the FA movement to be that space.
Well, I would say that some FA people and groups are accommodating of what I need and believe, and not others. My post about how there is no the community but multiple interacting communities was partly intended to soothe myself over a fear that I would get "kicked out of the movement" for being intolerant of pro-diet-weight-loss talk as part of FA. But I won't get kicked out because there's no the movement.
I get narky every time I see "healthy at every size" for example: I am unhealthy at every size!
"Healthy at every size" would bug me too, because to me "healthy" implies some kind of perfection, and certainly not everybody is perfectly healthy.
A phrase I'm more familiar with is "health at every size," and in my opinion it means "You can do things to benefit your health no matter what size you are." For decades doctors have been giving fat people the advice "All your health problems are because you're fat, and if you lose weight all your health problems will go away," and I think the phrase is meant to get people to question that.
I'd rather look for the FA parts of disability activism than the disability-friendly parts of fat activism.
That makes sense too.
no subject
*nods*
I have perhaps been misinterpreting the slogan. I had the misfortune to encounter a really irritatingly ableist FA blogger bugging one of my friends and I think it's made me overly sensitive.
no subject