OK, so this is where we blur the lines, it seems like a parody but it's not.
Fatness is health, dieting is sexual assault, and fitness is a white supremacist Nazi science – so stated a self-described ‘Fat Sex Therapist” at a college talk. Commenters were shocked, but the anti-fitness backlash is growing.
Sonalee Rashatwar, the therapist in question, delivered her polemic in a two-hour lecture at St. Olaf College, Minnesota last week. Puzzlingly, the lecture was hosted by the university’s Wellness Center, in conjunction with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.
“I truly believe that a child cannot consent to being on a diet the same way a child cannot consent to having sex,” she declared, adding: “I experience diet culture as a form of assault because it impacts the way that I experience my body.”
Diet and fitness, encouraging healthy behaviors,
is assault. For reals.
While the overwhelming medical consensus recognizes obesity as a cause of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, and premature death, Rashatwar joins a growing number of ‘fat acceptance’ and ‘health at every size’ activists who argue otherwise. Science, she told the crowd, is a white supremacist tool designed to oppress the obese.
“We should be critical of the use of science and the production of knowledge to continue promoting this idea that certain bodies are fit, able, and desirable… is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?” Rashatwar, who uses the gender-neutral ‘they/them’ pronouns, asked.
“Fatphobic” science is “often actually eugenic science… eugenic science is Nazi science,” she continued.
Science is the tool of white supremacists. Right, OK. Does the phrase "white supremacist" even mean anything anymore?
High blood pressure is not caused by obesity but instead by the stigma of being fat. Seriously, you can't tell if it's a parody or not, can you? You can't point out being obese causes health problems. If you do, you're a Nazi and, hey, it's ok to direct violence at Nazi's!
“I do not think it’s surprising that the man who shot up Christchurch, New Zealand was also a fitness instructor,” the self-described “Donut Queen” said. She argued that the shooting was “a clear communication that there’s still an idealized body. Nazis really love this idea of an idealized body, and so it makes a lot of sense to me that a fitness instructor… might also think about an idealized body in this thin white supremacist way.”
See, fitness-oriented people are dangerous, they kill innocent people. Being fit is being a Nazi, you are evil if you're thin!
Now, you're thinking it just a one-off screed by an angry, overweight person with low blood sugar jonesing for their next donut but it's not:
Rashatwar’s intersectional rambling was not a once-off event at a stereotypically liberal university. Rather, it came as part of a 12-date nationwide speaking tour, during which she dissects issues like “How Fat Queers the Body,” and “Health is a Social Construct.” She is also a licensed therapist.
A 12 date, nationwide tour. WTF?
I'm open to the idea this is fake news, I'd love it to be. I fear it's not. Who can tell?
