Ideology and Etiology

The fat acceptance movement, when you get down to it, is one of the most hideous ideological aberrations on the social media scene right now. (And there are plenty of aberrations to vie for those top spots.) It’s almost perfect in its perversity. When other pet causes of the culture war Left try to corrode normalcy, they’re at least somewhat subtle about it. There’s some sort of bait and switch in play. They want you to call a masculinized woman “empowered” or they want you to call some mental illness a “gender identity.” They want you to merely distort the truth. That hashtag #BodyPosi, on the other hand, forgoes such partial measures. It demands that you call the ugly “beautiful,” the moribund “healthy,” the miserable “happy.” Skipping, like so many salads, right over the half, the quarter, the sixteenth truths, it goes straight for the lies.

And yet, for all its ugliness, the fact acceptance movement proper has probably had a somewhat negligable effect on our communal lives thus far. The movement didn’t cause America’s obesity epidemic at any rate. Far as I can tell, it’s a fairly recent arrival to our collective consciousness, whereas our collective bodyfat percentage has been creeping up steadily for decades now. No. The causes of the Great American Fattening lie elsewhere. Sedentary lives, high-fructose corn syrup, bass ackwards dietary guidelines from the USDA, endocrine disruptors, self-medication via food, livestock portion sizes in our restaurants, grabbing another dinner at Chic-Fil-A because both mom and dad had to work late again, hell, the automobile—these things expanded our waistlines. It wasn’t as if Lindy West and Dove Inc. sidled up to some fit-and-trim nation, whispered into our ears about being “sexy at any size,” and then suddenly we decided that we should eat ourselves into adult-onset diabetes. In actual fact we were doing that anyway, long before they came along.

People who pay attention to these sorts of things are always debating the extent to which ideology drives social change and the extent to which ideology merely reflects it. Some take the hardline stance that our various belief systems are all downstream of the material conditions of our lives, dependent on them. In this scheme, our conscious and professed ideals work just like some sort of oily press secretary, spinning whatever palatable narrative it can around an already-determined course of action. Personally, I don’t think that model quite captures things. But others tend towards the opposite error. They conceptualize history as some grand gigantomachy of contending ideas. Statism and Individualism, Tyranny and Liberty, Leftism versus the Right all determine the course of human events with their wars. And petty considerations like technology, biology, population dynamics, etc. scurry around underneath their huge legs like so many mortals. I’m not in either camp, but I say let the debate about the role of ideology carry on. Let’s see if it helps the rest of us guess better about what position in the vast and confused middle ground between these two poles is closest to correct.

Fat acceptance, however, certainly seems much closer to the ideology-as-effect pole than the ideology-as-cause pole, as I discussed above. (Other movements, for example anti-racism, seem to me to lean in the other direction.) It is yet another mutation crawling out of the Petri dish of Cultural Marxism, of course, and ought to be opposed on those grounds alone. It is a lie too, and ought to be opposed on those grounds. But at worst what it—and other ad hoc movements like it—represents is a surrender to larger trends rather than the origin of them. It is capitulation to our dysfunction rather than a source of. (These movements also provide opportunities for rent seeking. But here I’m only talking about true believers in the cause, not necessarily the leeches on its underbelly.) And this is an important distinction to make, because it means that one could obliterate the movement entirely, see it driven from Tumblr before us, hear the lamentations of the plus-sized transwomen, etc. and still not substantially improve the health of society at large. The processed foods would still be with us, the long commutes, the anxieties and alienation that cause stress eating. For people interested in solutions, ideological epiphenomena like “End fat stigma!” are red herrings.

Unfortunately, while the doctrine of body positivity is good for the occasional laugh, not all such social neuroses are. Take a look at what is happening on our college campuses regarding “sexual violence.” (It’s increasingly a horrorshow, I know. But stand fast regardless, acquit yourselves like men, and stare into that abyss.) There the notion of “rape culture” has taken hold, giving both a narrative and a sense of moral legitimacy to the marches, the sloganeering, the courses in Women’s Studies, the hoaxes, and the on-campus kangaroo courts. The epidemic of roofies and Satanic frat initiation rituals that these measures have been deployed against is imaginary. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something rotten in the experiences of young women on our campuses. In fact, there almost certainly is.

The true believer in fat acceptance is a person whom modern life has gotten the best of. They eat shitty foods to anesthesize themselves against loneliness and anxiety and boredom. They chug overcaffeinated sugar drinks to get through another meaningless day on the job. They’ve racked up a long record of failed fad diets. Many of them are already so far gone physically that getting back into shape would be a Herculean task anyway. And then along comes a ideology that allows them to displace all that misery, so they go all in. I think many true believers in rape culture are in the same boat. The promises of the “college experience” turned out to be hollow ones. She had expected freedom. She had expected to “experiment” and “take risks” and “find herself.” Instead she ended up in a functionally nihilist YOLO party culture. Replete with booze and drug abuse and empty hooks ups in the blackout-drunk early morning hours. She ended up with walks of shame and bitter regrets. Ended up trading in her charms and getting nothing, not even intimacy in return. And then along comes a protest that allows her to take that rage and blame it on the patriarchy, whose diabolical rape culture put her in this sorry state.

The marcher with the “Bigger Is Better” sign and the marcher with “No Means No” sign are both tilting at windmills. There never was a conspiracy by society to shame fat people qua fat people nor to rape women qua women. But they are both reacting, in a sense, to our collective failures, to real and present dysfunctions in our lifestyles. We on the Right can, and absolutely should, resist the false etiologies of their condition, ones that contemporary victim identity politics have presented them with. But we should also recognize that, unless we address the underlying morbidity, we are only treating symptoms. You could annihilate those ideologies forever and the sickness would remain.

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