"To end fatphobia, we need to dismantle Western Civilization"

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As the fat-positivity movement has gained momentum, so, too, have debates around how fat folks should lead healthy lives. Rashatwar, though, considers how sizeism is affected by racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, and she counsels people against intentional weight loss

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Rashatwar, who noted that people may perceive feminine bodies as more masculine if they’re fat, feels similarly about her upbringing. Being big and being the eldest child, she said, made her feel less like a girl growing up.

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She posts her advice in colorful blocks of text (“your body is an heirloom," “do you consume porn with bodies that look like yours?”) and then expands on those concepts in the captions.

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Rashatwar traces contemporary fatphobia to colonial brutality and how enslaved people were treated. Citing researcher-advocate Caleb Luna, Rashatwar said curing anti-fatness would mean dismantling society’s foundation: “I love to talk about undoing Western civilization because it’s just so romantic to me.”

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“And so when we internalize fatphobia and we really, like, personalize a fat, traumatic experience, it can impact our sexuality by making it uncomfortable to receive a hug because we feel like, ‘The person hugging me is probably so repulsed by touching my body. Let’s just get the hug over with quickly.’

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If we haven’t received comprehensive sex education, we don’t know what our sexual rights are and what our rights to pleasure are, the kind of treatment we deserve. And oftentimes we, we tolerate body-image abuse from partners. I work with clients who are recovering from an experience with sexual assault and a partner will say, like: ‘I get you’re depressed, but like, it’s been a week since you’ve been in the gym. And if your body changes because of this, I’m not in this. I’m no longer going to be attracted to you. I’m going to dump you. I’m going to leave this relationship.’ It’s pressure to maintain a body size in order to maintain a relationship.”

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“The language that I used in that talk that I gave was actually that I was not surprised that the person who shot up the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, was also a fitness instructor. I was not surprised by that because people who are Nazis, people who are white supremacists, people who are trying to think of the perfect race are also super fatphobic. … Oftentimes it’s very eugenic.”

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