How ironic..I was thinking of Love Your Body Day as a time to put some kind of wonderful-smelling lotion on myself or sit back and enjoy some wonderfully sensual movies (I may yet have the chance to do that when I get home). I truly didn’t dream that I would have to try to convince a member of a Fat Acceptance Blog that fat women and fat people are beautiful or that Fat Rights should be celebrated along with Love Your Body Day!!
It is a good sobering lesson for me, though. We have a lot of ground to travel. Old attitudes toward beauty and toward fat people die very hard. The media saturates the airwaves and net and print with admonishments about fat being bad and with the unbelievably wrong and pernicious junk science that has already been disproven, but that they still trot out with such enthusiasm, often because Diet Centers and Fitness Centers and pharmaceutical conglomerates advertise on all of these media. And it is very very difficult to contradict a lifetime of dieting brainwashing and the wonderfully simple, entirely wrong equation of “People get fat because they eat too much and don’t exercise enough.”
But we have to keep on fighting. Otherwise even more people will die from BLS complications and from incorrect and lazy diagnoses by bigoted medical personnel. Otherwise superbly talented people will never be encouraged to raise their voices in literature, drama, music and art. Otherwise it will still be considered okay to make fat people uncomfortable.
I like to think of “Love Your Body Day” as a *real* Independence Day for women of all shapes and sizes. May our diversity sparkle and light up a nation.
