Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a fan of the “healthy at any size” mantra, especially when it comes to kids:
If I were a kid today I’d be out scouting the neighborhood for a home school or church to take me in as long and teach me latin and math and give me a reading list as long as I didn’t have to have someone’s jiggly bits pushed in my face or be shown diagrams of sexual positions, and asked ceaselessly about my food intake, my BMI measured (25 states mandate this) and no doubt entirely invasive questions about my family and father and weird uncles and so on. It would be like living in a perpetual inquisition, danger everywhere, with no privacy in any area of one’s life, with every sentence and expression evaluated on whether I am being a good member of the inclusive collective and will step aside so someone less privileged can have a chance.
But I am not nine and therefore spared all that, but God in heaven I feel sorry for them. Schools have stepped up to take the place of the at-home mother who had a relationship with her kids strong enough so that their emotional needs were being met and they didn’t have to stuff food down their throats for a relief from the ceaseless pressure to conform, and severe emotional loneliness from the absence of a family system.
Instead of your mind, the dominant focus seems to be your body, and at the most vulnerable time in your life. I know they think they are raising good little socialist citizens, who are acutely aware of the struggles of the less fortunate, but add in the bullying of Middle School and little wonder 49% of kids are overweight or obese, and the rest stuffing their feelings 24/7. Great for the food pushers, sucks for the medical system.
Virginia Sole-Smith who is the anointed high priestess of Fat Positivity Culture, has been pushing fat is AOK and in fact, possibly superior to thin-ness, which she never fails to excoriate, for the New York Times, Slate and Science and various other high-end publications for 20 years. Her latest book Fat Talk, which sits on the NYTimes bestseller list is about raising fat children, or not fat children, it’s kind of confusing. Ok, to be fat, but not obese, but you can’t put obese kids on a diet because that will make them fatter, and besides everyone is criticizing them and that has to stop.
Every leftie cliché is brought out of the barn and groomed within an inch of its life. White privilege, thin white privileged women, BIPOC exclusion, thin privilege in sport, entertainment, business, and so on, a system systematically prejudiced against fat people.
Basically, however, Sole-Smith is staking her ground and that is that “small fat”, which is how she defines herself, is normal and we should adjust our eyes to see pudgy tummies as “something to aim for” – as she states in her last chapter called “How to Have The Fat Talk”. We have to start “reclaiming (sic) fatness as a perfectly good way to have a body”.
