Graffiti-S
1yr ago
It's been a long time since I read Fat Is A Feminist Issue, but my recollection is that its basic thesis was:
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Fatness is a problem caused by compulsive eating.
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Compulsive eating in women develops as a way of coping with psychological conflicts, partly but not entirely attributable to unfulfilable and contradictory social expectations, and as an attempt to fulfil unmet needs for security and self-efficacy.
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The pathway out of compulsive eating involves becoming aware of the unconscious processes that drive it, recognising their futility, and supplanting them by being more assertive about one's rights and boundaries. There is an emphasis on group therapy that, while focused on compulsive eating, doubles as political consciousness-raising.
It's definitely not in total agreement with contemporary mainstream feminist attitudes about fatness, as can be seen by reading some of its Goodreads reviews.
Graffiti-S
1yr ago
I'd argue that suicide prohibition and lockdownism are actually quite similar: they both severely curtail individual rights in the name of preventing social harm; they both a contrast themselves against a cruel, stony-hearted, libertarian alternative ('letting Grandma die'); they're both fairly easy to circumvent in isolation, but very difficult to oppose in an organised way. I suspect the fury you feel against the total, arbitrary, capricious power of the medical/state establishment would be very familiar to suicidal people who have been involuntarily committed.
But perhaps this is tangential to your point; truly legal suicide is far from the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia. Still, I'd be surprised if anyone petitioning the Belgian state for euthanasia wouldn't have saved themselves the bother if equivalent means were freely available to them.
I sympathise with your position, as someone who supports legalised drugs and criminalised vagrancy. Most people seem to treat them as a package deal, so it's understandable that you'd defend one in order to protect infringements upon the other.
It's unfortunate that things have to be like this, though. We're left with a policy that accommodates the moral non-negotiables of liberals and conservatives, at the cost of screwing up everything else.
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