Misrepresentation like this really gets my goat.

Having said that, however, in a world where fat people are discriminated against and reviled, where our headless images are used to illustrated moral panic scare stories about obesity, is it any wonder that the images Substantia Jones has chosen to reclaim are the images or larger women. Her choice of subject captures the beauty of fat women, but does not invalidate the beauty of women of other sizes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1237677/Plus-size-Crystal-Renn-takes-traditional-model-prove-fashion-flatter-figure.html

A fat person’s body, is a body. If a fat person sees themselves as a human being, equal to others, when they say, fat acceptance, they are automatically referrign to the acceptance of all bodies, because the the fat body is currently the most reviled.

It’s not the acceptance of fatness so much as the acceptance of a person and their body that happens to be fat, that matters.

I didn’t think that would have to be spelled out, because I take for granted that fat people are human beings.

In the same way, if a thin person speaks of being happy with themselves and their body, I warm to that, and feel inspired. I don’t need them to point my body type out specifically. I take it as read that it applies to me because I respond to it.

If on the other hand you don’t see fat bodies as representing humanity, then that feeling is less available to you.

In a society awash with cheap, easily-available, calorically-dense food, people have gotten larger. Because bodies EVOLVED to be that way.

This sounds a little backwards, actually. Our bodies evolved to *try* to get fat under difficult, low-calorie circumstances. It wasn’t easy to actually *accomplish* though. Unlike historical borderline-starvation conditions, having an excess of calorie-dense food is far too novel for us to have evolved perfectly to compensate. If anything we’re a little fish-out-of-water with all these great nutrients (and not-so-great other stuff) because our bodies still scrape and fight to prepare for a famine that never comes.

It’s more like we have evolved to *attempt* fatness rather than to actually *be* fat — just like a toddler is supposed to attempt to toddle all over the place and reach for things on the kitchen counter but it wouldn’t be so great for the counter to suddenly be toddler-height with all those knives and dishes and hot pans easily accessible. Then a well-evolved organism’s environment would have changed too quickly for the organism to compensate and the child would get burned. (To shrink evolution into a sort of child development time frame, which is heinous.)

I feel sorry, instead, for those who can not understand what it means, today, at every latitude, to be obese and how much of a burden their hatred puts on us. Fortunately I read here many more with great ideas and values!

Thanks again for posting.

Paolo
(Italy)