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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
As discussed in the previous thread, I agree that having hate for fat people is a bad thing. I also think it's pretty uncommon and hardly the point. When people talk about "fat hatred", what they're typically talking about is things like people being pissed off that they have to sit next to someone on a plane that's spilling into their seat. The claim that we "should treat them poorly" is also doing too much work - what exactly is meant here? Sure, don't just randomly be a jerk to a fat person for no particular reason, all good and agreed. Are people obligated to feign attraction to them? Aside from just literally not being rude to people for no evident reason, I'm unclear what the expected standard of treatment is that people feel isn't typically met.
I think it boils down to ‘fat women feel ugly(because they are) and want all of society to feel an obligation to fix their emotions’. So yes, people are obligated to feign attraction to them in a fat acceptance activists ideal world.
Of course, the way this is framed is that heterosexual males are simply conditioned to think they find women of a healthy weight more attractive than overweight or obese women, and if we were able to remove the "toxic beauty standards" propagated by social media and the fashion and entertainment industries, straight men would instantly be deprogrammed and realise that of course they find Lizzo hotter than Emily Ratajkowski, and how could they ever have been so stupid as to believe otherwise! In this obese utopia, there would be no "feigning" of attraction.
There's a grain of truth in this observation to the extent that social contagion plays some role in what people find attractive (e.g. Hollywood actress starts wearing her hair in hairstyle, men start finding women who wear their hair in that style attractive). But the sad reality for fat acceptance
activistsslacktivists* is that many if not most of the traits to which straight men are attracted don't seem to be culturally bound at all, because they are obvious proxies for genetic fitness and fertility, and this is true even of cultures which have never been exposed to the "toxic beauty standards" of white capitalist cisheteropatriarchy (e.g. African villages without a TV or internet connection to be found). Find me a culture in which most straight men find 40-year-old women more attractive than 20-year-old women (all else being equal), or in which the hourglass figure is widely seen as repellent, or in which facial asymmetry is seen as more desirable than facial symmetry, or in which women who are so emaciated that they've stopped menstruating are highly prized - then we can talk about how straight men's distaste for obese women is a "Western social construct".You'll also notice that the traits which fat acceptance activists themselves find attractive in men are mysteriously exempt from having been conditioned into them by these toxic Western beauty standards they so loudly decry. The only reason the tall, lean gymrat next door doesn't want to fuck you is because he's been brainwashed into false consciousness; but the reason you want to fuck him is because he's just ever so dreamy. Awfully convenient, isn't it?
If I sound contemptuous of these people and their self-serving motivated reasoning - well, I am. More than anything I'm infuriated by the scorn with which sexually frustrated men are treated, while sexually frustrated women can land themselves cushy academic jobs in which they get paid six figures to whine about how sexually frustrated they are for reasons entirely within their power to change.
*The noun "activist" presupposes that you are active, which the obese aren't by definition.
I mean there's a grain of truth in that modern American beauty standards are a bit less porky than what men would prefer. But that some tribe in Timbuktu considers it high status for women to look like walmart landwhales is no more evidence of men secretly preferring that than Chinese beauty standards being borderline anorexic is for men preferring the concentration camp survivor look.
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