I’m going to post a couple links to sources for the next couple days to hopefully start a conversation in this space! These will fall in the area of Fat Studies and there’s some norms you should be aware of:
- “fat” is taken as a neutral descriptor, think of it as reclaiming the word.
- “obese” arbitrarily medicalises fatness and Others fat people
I’m a cis man and I have (had) body image issues (in the past)
https://humanparts.medium.com/my-journey-toward-radical-body-positivity-3412796df8ff
I’m queer and fat
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yeefpijtl4s7orv/Flaunting Fat – Sex with the Lights On.pdf?dl=0
I’m queer and not fat
https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/fat-liberation-is-totally-queer
The others don’t apply to me and/or I only have the energy/time to read one source
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/
:sankara-salute:
Ah yeah that’s what I feared. It’s similar to that study that was going around on reddit that claimed veganism is bad because vegans have a higher overall mortality rate but it also failed to take into account correlating factors. The amount of shitty science and shitty science reporting being done cannot be good for convincing the general public to trust the science of climage change.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, esp in regards to covid. If you look hard enough, you should be able to find a study that says basically whatever you want, and if you cant find a study that says what you want, you should be able to find a study that you can creatively misinterpret into “saying” what you want it to.
And if you cant do that, you should be able to find some news article written by a clueless (or willfully dishonest) journalist/opinion columnist that says there’s a study that says what you want it to say.
If you’re some average person, how the hell are you supposed to make sense of it all? I’m not surprised at all that theres people that just shrug it all off completely and say that covid is hoax, or that climate change is fake or whatever.
I just spent like 10 mins on google and quickly found an article saying that being overweight is actually better than being “normal” weight, and another saying the opposite.
How am I, not being an expert on medicine, supposed to make sense of it?