Tuesday 8 October 2013

Fat Woman and the helpful input

Fat Woman likes taking helpful input from people. Fat Woman has a Twitter feed full of tweets from people or organisation that share great information about new exercises, research and food as well as other individuals with an interest in fitness. Fat Woman has also found everyone at the gym very helpful, although possibly a large part of that is that she has always been under the obvious care of Personal Trainer. Upsetting Personal Trainer's client is like upsetting Personal Trainer, and despite him being a genial chap most of the time no one wants that. 

Since becoming an adult Fat Woman has never suffered the verbal abuse that other fat women talk about having to endure on a daily basis. Fat Woman puts this down partly to her air of confidence - Fat Woman is unusually self confident for a human being, never mind a fat woman - and partly because she lives in a small university city with an unusually educated populace. Fat Woman used to get her fair share of randomly thrown abuse as a teenager, but usually from other young people.

Fat Woman found the following words posted as an anonymous comment on her blog:
Do you fat women even realize how fucking ugly you are? I mean I almost vommitted looking at your picture, you fat ass. LOSE SOME FUCKING WEIGHT, YOU DISGUSTING FAT COW!!!!!!!!!
Fat Woman hasn't seen such a fine example of illogical hatred in a long time. 

Fat Woman hasn't actually published a photograph of herself on her blog. Fat Woman hasn't even linked to the little cartoon of herself she uses on Twitter. Fat Woman is amused that a three-letter word comes with such power.

Fat Woman thinks anyone commenting anonymously on a blog has already devalued their message enormously, but that hardly needs saying.

Fat Woman can allow spelling mistakes, but does not think the abuse of punctation and uppercase letters lends gravitas to any message, let alone what can only be called a troll. Fat Woman would like to point out that she is using "troll" as a verb here.

Fat Woman is shaking her head at all the other rookie mistakes the troll (noun) is making here. Fat Woman really hopes the troll generated the warm fuzzy empowered feeling he was hoping for because he hasn't managed to scare, upset or hurt Fat Woman with his badly-typed diatribe. The troll is blog fodder.

Fat Woman would like to make some points for her more logical and engaged readers:

(1) Fat is officially incurable. See this article on cracked.com.

(2) Fat Woman considered "fat" as an insult to have lost its sting after having heard it levelled at the tiniest women who happened to have normal bodies i.e. not the airbrushed limbs of a doll."Fat" as an adjective is comparative. Fat Woman has never heard the word used in a non-bullying way. 

(3) Human bodies aren't disgusting. Anyone disgusted by anything that is more than one deviation from the norm needs some education and some tolerance. Some people look different to the media-presented "normal", and that's okay. The media-presented "normal" is about making money for private company owners. 

(4) Fat Woman doesn't actually care what you think. Fat Woman would prefer it if you had a healthy informed attitude towards human bodies, but you probably have your own issues to deal with.. Fat Woman wonders if wishes were granted how many people would wish to have no fat on their bodies at all. In case that isn't clear to you, if you had no fat you would die.

Fat Woman isn't going to bother justifying how she got fat. It doesn't matter if Fat Woman got fat because she ate all the pies or she had a medical condition. The fact is that Fat Woman is fat, has always been fat and probably always will be fat. Fat Woman is okay with that and is certainly not going to buy into the idea that she is a non-person because she doesn't look like someone in a magazine or on a video. Fat Woman is pretty damn fit now, and almost certainly lives a healthier lifestyle than any troll. 

Fat Woman is writing this post because she would like her readers to realise that fat shaming is a tool used by bullies.Fat Woman would be grateful if people would avoid fat shaming themselves or others, whether that is by refraining from saying "you're so fat" or "I'm so fat" or giving helpful suggestions such as advising on diet. Fat Shaming, like Slut Shaming, is about controlling other people. People shouldn't be controlled, they should be autonomous, and control of other people is the basis of abuse. 

Fat Woman thinks that if you can't understand why it's not okay to tell fat jokes by now you're probably still telling jokes about ethnic minorities.

Fat Woman has put "a better class of troll" on her Amazon wishlist.


Tuesday 1 October 2013

Fat Woman and the amazing combination


Fat Woman was padding away in BoxFit class. Personal Trainer has finally got around to starting a BoxFit class at his new gym. Fat Woman has been waiting an entire year for this to happen. Other coaches do not compare favourably.

Fat Woman was working with a nice lady who is quite new to BoxFit but who was just starting to get the hang of punching the pads. This meant that together Fat Woman and the nice lady could make a good loud sound. After every combination of punches both Fat Woman and her partner would reset their hands. The combination was was left-left-right. The lady boxing Fat Woman was right-handed so her right punch was much stronger than her left punch. The noise the lady's gloves made on Fat Woman's pads was: "thump-thump-BANG! thump-thump-BANG!"

Fat Woman got well into the second chorus of We Will Rock You before the set was over. The most amusing thing to Fat Woman was that on hearing her padding "thump-thump-BANG!" other people were starting to fall in time with her. Fat Woman wishes that more people in the gym were singers because it could have been an AWESOME Glee-style moment.

Personal Trainer pointed out to Fat Woman that if she had breath to sing she wasn't working hard enough. Fat Woman escaped burpees, but reckons it would have been worth it.