A lot of the projects that we do on this blog are large scale, and that’s cool and there are lots of good things that come from that. But I believe that the majority of the acts of a successful revolution are tiny acts done by a lot of people. I’ve heard this called everyday activism or armchair activism. Whatever we want to call it, I think it’s important to realize that there are things people of every size can do every day to make the world a more size accepting place. Here are some ideas, I absolutely encourage you to add your ideas in the comments!
Positive Body Talk
I was recently at a school where they are dealing with an online forum that is used to perpetuate all kinds of hate – racism, sexism, sizeism, homophobia etc. My suggestion was to flood the site with positive messages so that the haters have to sift through hundreds of positive messages to get their “hate fix”. This is something that we can do all over the place. In this culture, no matter what your size, loving your body and how you look is absolutely an act of revolution. There are lots of ways to do this depending on where you are on your personal journey. Choose not to engage in negative body talk or body snarking of any kind. Choose to say positive things about other people’s bodies and your own body. When you overhear others engaging in negative body talk, interject positive talk, or say something like “I look forward to living in a world where we can see beauty in every body.”
Purchasing Decisions
The diet and beauty machine that oppresses us runs on our time, energy, and money. We can take the fuel away and shut the machine down. There are lots of ways to do that. Cancel your subscriptions and/or don’t buy beauty magazines (including those that disguise themselves as health magazines). Stop clicking on articles about the “best and worst bikini bodies” or worst Oscar dresses, or how to hide figure “flaws”, or any article that shames people for how they look in any way. Don’t buy things that sell using a diet/weight loss message. Don’t buy anything that tries to sell you something by making you feel bad about yourself. Don’t buy products whose marketing suggests that you’ll never be happy, find love, be desirable etc. unless you buy it. Send them an e-mail and let them know why they aren’t getting your money. Do buy products that you notice use positive advertising. Do buy from business that are specifically size inclusive. send them some customer feedback letting them know how much you appreciate what they do. If your favorite product puts out a commercial or ad that lets you down, or isn’t size inclusive shoot them an e-mail and let them know how you feel.
Do the Thing
You know the thing you’re not doing because you’re scared that you’re too fat, too old, too short, too tall, too whatever?  Whatever it is, consider doing it. Maybe people will say or think negative things but I suggest it’s not about them – while it’s kind of you to do people the courtesy of giving them the opportunity to reconsider their stereotypes, I think it’s about the person who also thinks that they are too fat, old, short or whatever, then when they see you try it gives them the courage to try. They give someone else the courage and then someone else and soon the haters are outnumbered by the people who refuse to make their choices based on the bigotry and hatred of others. Then it’s a party.
Sometimes people suggest that a single individual can’t make a difference, but when I look at it, is seems like one person is the only thing that can make a difference. A massive protest doesn’t work unless each individual gets up and goes to the protest, a corporation-crippling boycott doesn’t work unless individuals choose to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to do the boycott, and a revolution doesn’t happen without tons of tiny acts of revolution from tons of individual revolutionaries. Viva la tiny revolution!!!
Like the blog? Here’s more of my stuff:
The Book: Fat: The Owner’s Manual The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for details
The Dance Class DVDs:Â Buy the Dance Class DVDs for Every Body Dance Now! Click here for the details
Become a Member, Support My Projects, and Get Special Deals from Size Positive Businesses
I do size acceptance activism full time. I created a membership program so that people who read the blog and feel they get value out of it and want to support the work I do can become members for ten bucks a month To make that even cooler, I’ve now added a component called “DancesWithFat Deals” which are special deals to my members from size positive merchants. Once you are a member I send out an e-mail once a month with the various deals and how to redeem them – your contact info always stays completely private.
I “Do the Thing” a lot. I know that just by going out and being SEEN that I am breaking all the rules. I know people who want me to stay out of sight. I refuse. I know people who want me to only buy veggies and ‘good fatty’ foods when I shop. If I have need of something on the ‘bad fatty’ list, I buy it anyway. I go to the doctor and now a days, in large part due to this blog, I even talk back when they try to fat shame me.
But most importantly I remember that by being Fat In Public, I am paving the way for others to feel comfortable in public, too. Every once in a while I will see another fat person, and they see me, too. We smile and nod. Sometimes the person is young and I can tell that the validation of seeing someone else who looks like them out in the world doing and being has done them good. That does me the most good of all.
I refuse to buy “good fatty” foods. Anything that toots its horn about being “diet,” “lite,” or “only 100 calories” will never end up in my cart. At any rate, most of Kellogg’s products (one of the bigger offenders) taste like cardboard, so no great loss!
Me too!
I have long felt that while big, mass acts are vital to a cause, the most powerful activism a person can perform is to stand up and live the life cie wants to whether or not it’s considered ‘acceptable.’
I’m damn well standing up, eating what I like when and where I like, singing, laughing, doing the forms of exercise that appeal to me, and steadfastly refusing to take part in body snark or diet talk.
Every huge revolution starts with a single person standing up and refusing to accept the status quo. It can’t happen without each and every one of us taking what part we can find the courage for.
That’s why a single person is powerful. I am powerful. You are powerful. Together, we can conquer giants. To the ramparts!
I have to laugh because to those of us who have been long-time Dave Barry bloglits (for reasons that would take too long to explain here) “ramparts” refers to “breasts.” Gives it a whole different meaning.
I’m with you on everything but the “worst Oscar dresses” and their ilk. Because it is (or at least should be) about the clothes, not the women wearing them. We can critique fashion while respecting women and their bodies. The key is finding sites that understand that. (Tomandlorenzo.com is the best, in my opinion.)
Hi Christine, Of course everyone gets to choose for themselves and I completely respect if that’s your thing. I included it because I think that spending my time trashing someone else’s sense of style, or the dress they wore for a special night, feels very much the same as every other type of snarking (especially since it is predominantly driven at women with much less said about the men), and I think it contributes to the same culture of tearing other people down for physical appearance especially when it encourages people to do the same thing to those who are not celebrities – I’d personally rather live in a culture where we focus on something other than how other people dress. That said, I absolutely understand that all of that is totally my opinion and recognize and respect that other people have completely different opinions about it.
~Ragen
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@Christine and Ragen: I have a secret passion for clothing-as-art-form, and jewelry as artistic representation, etc. That being confessed up front, however, I would argue that fashion gazing and critique–and media commentary about celebrity fashion–now function mostly as props for a social status quo which normalizes social and economic inequities and injustices by purportedly highlighting purely aesthetic characteristics.while keeping silent about, for instance, the inherent social biases and privileges that determine which particular individual bodies will serve as fetishized sites for the public display of material wealth, social status, and power.
Thus, fashion critique has become a kind of vulgar mockery of the bourgeoisie, a pseudo celebration that appears to both reify celebrities as treasured icons and to devalue their human bodies (still mostly female, as Ragen rightly indicates) as marketable commodities (and brands) whose individual human value is determined by market forces (an ethos of domination ) rather than social justice (an ethos of equality).
The hegemonic forces of mass media, therefore, share in the creation and maintenance of cultural illusions of social equality and justice by presenting fashion-wearing celebrities as subordinate to mass public evaluations, supposedly of the celebrities’ aesthetic choices in apparel. Hence, the celebrities’ subjugation to value judgments based on physical appearance and popular appeal presents the illusion that they are equally vulnerable (“just like regular folks”) to suffering from prejudice and discrimination based on looks and subjective perceptions.
Furthermore, when privileged and wealthy celebrities appear to (humbly) rise above the public infliction of unfair opinions or biased judgments about their looks (or they quietly seek make-overs, weight reduction surgery, etc), they may provide a distorted standard by which the masses (non celebrities) may also evaluate their own reactions to—and lived experiences with—individual suffering resulting from social bias (such as fat stigma) and/or unfair opinions based on looks. Indeed, many “regular folks” may conclude that their own experiences of living with stigma or bias are simply commonplace, *personal*, inconsequential, and thus unworthy of social protest or even “armchair activism.”
Ragen, I love your ideas about social activism (changing body discourse, changing purchasing choices, and doing “the thing”–mine is inflicting critical social analysis, LOL), but I also LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea of “a massive protest”, a multi-million-person march consisting of fat people, and friends of fat people, and all loved ones of fat people. I can’t imagine anyone better than you to help get that ball rolling, with the support of like-minded activists, and I hope that day will come when we can all walk as equally valued human beings, together.
Oh yes, I’m eating, drinking and doing what I want to do, and damn the torpedo’s! (other people’s opinions) Just the other day i had a convo with a Weight Watchers “counselor” that also happened to be an aquaintence. (sp?) I was letting her know the usual..95% of “dieters” gain the weight back and more…I also pointed out to her that it makes me giggle when I hear, “I’m going back to Weight Watchers cause it always works for me!” Seriously? If Weight Watchers worked for you, why are you going back? You should be thin, now, if it always works for you. Amazingly, this woman admitted the only reason she was able to keep her weight off was because she worked there!
HAHAHAHAAAAHHHH!!! Seriously, I just fell over laughing…it’s such airtight logic…! “I’m going back to WWs because it worked for me”.
If it worked, why would you go back?? Doesn’t that negate your whole statement??
Bloody hell, I don’t think I can sleep now, I’m laughing so hard…
The number of times I’ve heard that! Not just weight watchers but all kinds of programs. It has worked every single time I’ve done it! Do they not hear themselves?
I know a girl through my best friend (never met this girl directly) who lost a lot of weight through Weight Watchers and they were offering her money to be be one of their success stories. The only issue was, they were asking her to lie about how much she’d lost and the time frame in which she lost it. So, yeah…
I get where you’re coming from, and I’m always a bit torn on matters like this, but I do find laughing at someone who is doing something for themselves in earnest a bit uncomfortable. These comments came across to me as mocking this woman for stupidly being illogical enough to go back to Weight Watchers, but her logic is nowhere near as ridiculous as you’re making out. She might be wrong about her long-term prospects for losing weight permanently, but it does make sense to say that a diet worked for you while you were on it. When she followed the weight watchers plan, she lost weight, presumably (from her comment), then perhaps she came off the plan and regained. In that situation going back on the diet because it worked in the past isn’t illogical at all. I think you must understand that’s what she meant, but that makes me even more uncomfortable with your response to it.
I’m starting to feel like not being on a diet or obsessing about my weight is my act of revolution. I have one friend on WW who, after the initial loss, now spends each week being miserable because she hasn’t lost or gained back a pound or two. I have three (THREE) skinny (read would probably fit the BMI acceptable range) who want to lose some weight.
Here I am, eating what seems appropriate to me, whether it is brussels sprouts or ice cream.
Have I learned to be completely comfortable with my size and shape? No. But I have done enough research to know that I can’t get the body shape I secretly crave (skinny waist!) any more than I can make myself taller or do without vision correction.
There’s a commercial on TV right now that makes my blood boil. In it, women talk about all the things they hate about themselves I.e. smile lines that won’t go away even if you’ve stopped smiling ( the horror). For the life of me, I can’t remember the produit they’re selling, but next time I see it, I’ll make an effort to remember and send a message to the company saying that their ad is totally hateful and designed to make women hate themselves even more than they already do.
I haven’t had television in a year. I can’t begin to say how helpful it is not to see those disgusting commercials.
I’d rather have smile lines than frozen Botox Face any day.
There was an ad I used to see on tv occasionally that made my blood boil. It was some form of weigh-loss or lipo clinic or something, and it used one of the “old masters” paintings of three women dancing, and – to the sound of something sucking – it made the women thinner. I actually took the time and effort to write the company and complain about their VERY tasteless ad!
I’ve put the URL for HAES in the comments of a couple of Facebook pals. One (who is a personal trainer) had put up a picture that said “You can cry from being overweight or you can cry at the gym” which ticked me off, because I don’t want to cry at all. I usually leave her alone, but I couldn’t let this one slide so I put in the URL. I haven’t heard back yet.
The other was for one of my friends who keeps trying to lose weight by just not eating, and she posted about how unhappy she was with overindulging in her breakfast. I can’t stand the thought of her making herself miserable, so I posted the link in her comments. Again, I haven’t heard back.
I don’t want to make either of these people angry or upset., but I want them to think about what they are doing.
I’ve been leaving my friend who does weight watchers strictly alone because she is so emotionally invested in it right now.