- Brenda from the Traveling Tickle Trunk reminds us that making aborting illegal does nothing to reduce the number of abortions that occur (although it does increase the number of deaths and serious injuries that people seeking abortions are faced with. Pro-choice is pro-life.)
- If you haven’t heard about it yet, go read up on the body-positive colouring book Fat Ladies in Spaaaaaaaace and maybe even get yourself a copy! (I just did.) Colouring is so much fun!
- Our Bodies Our Blog has some info on the pros and cons of using IUDs for birth control – worth checking out if you’d like to be more informed.
Tag Archives: fat politics
News: Prisoner Justice Day, Sex+Motherhood, Fat+Health
-August 10th was Prisoner Justice Day. I very strongly suggest listening to the most recent edition of GroundWire on the topic of prisoner justice to learn about prisons in Canada, and why progressives, feminists, etc. should be very concerned about the rights of prisoners.
-Great article on our discomfort with sex and motherhood mixing on Salon: “When porn meets real motherhood.”
-A recent study out of Edmonton suggests that being fat isn’t actually inherently unhealthy (what!?!?!??), being unhealthy is what is unhealthy. Emily over at Feministe breaks it down. The original article that she quotes has a bit of trouble fully comprehending the idea that fat is not the same thing as unhealthy, but that’s what Emily is for – she italicized the good parts.
Fatness and Parenting
Great article over at Feministe on fatness and parenting.
I was once told that I had an obligation to become thin (as if I could just choose to be and, voila!) because my kid will grow up looking at me and thinking that fat is a way to be. As if, somehow, she would catch my fat, no matter how our family lives and eats and moves and no matter what her genetic predispositions. (This person assumed, as many do, that thin is objectively healthier and ‘better’ than fat.) Some people think children should be kept from the terrible knowledge that contented fat people exist because that would, by some sorcery, mean that the notion of fatness would never occur to them and they would always remain thin. Some people just don’t believe fat parents can possibly provide a healthy home. Some people think parents of fat children are by definition lazy or incompetent or unloving. Some people are ignorant. Some people are arseholes.
Some of those people have been in the media this past week talking about a study which, it has been widely reported, recommends that very fat children be removed from their parents and put into foster care. One of the problems with this is that the study has been widely misrepresented: have a read of this break-down by Dr Samantha Thomas if you’re interested. I’m not in the least surprised that the media haven’t been more accurate and sensitive in their handling of this ‘news story’. That’s par for the course when it comes to ‘obesity’ and they do love to parade us fatties as cautionary tales. Unfortunately, what could have been an opportunity for some serious discussions about systemic barriers to good health and the ethical problems with performing gastric banding surgery on minors, became a great big festival of fat hate with a large helping of mother blaming. Especially poor mothers, cause they’re really easy to hate on, apparently.
Head on over and read the whole thing.
Adamant Eve 