Feminist Elizabeth Wilkins-McKee commented here at great length, also publishing two Substack essays. A PhD in Physics who wishes to remain anonymous wrote the following in rebuttal:
**
I recently came across Janice Fiamengo's "Why Does Feminism Want Women Fat?" critiquing the fat acceptance/body positivity movement. Elizabeth Wilkins-McKee responded negatively, claiming in her opening statement that:
"I think this essay dramatically oversimplifies a remarkably complex area of research."
Elizabeth then proceeds to give a long list of medical and psychological lines of argumentation to assert her claim that Janice is out-of-touch in alleging a significant role for feminism in the ascendency of the fat acceptance movement and its harms to society.
As an observer with a STEM background, I have major issues with Elizabeth's position on the fat acceptance movement's attempt to negate deep biological drives underlying what men find physically attractive in women.
Before I begin, it's also important to identify what most likely motivated Elizabeth to write about her opposition to Janice in the first place and to subsequently attack her credibility. The most obvious signal appears at the beginning of Janice's article, with a photo of fat acceptance advocate, Virgie Tovar, an obviously overweight woman with a double chin, a fat face, and by logical inference a large waistline who nonetheless "was hired by the San Francisco Department of Public Health in late 2024 to advise the department on weight bias."
For someone like Elizabeth who advertises herself as a licensed therapist to help people with psychologically-driven issues, I can understand how and why she would be triggered by the image of a clearly unhealthy woman being hired to give guidance on public health issues when she (Virgie Tovar) has given no clear indication of any interest to work on her own health and fitness or to advocate as such for others. The photo is jarring, showcasing the obvious absurdity of this line of reasoning from both Tovar and the San Francisco public health department to support the foundational principles of fat acceptance.
While it's certainly true that, for many people, there are deeply rooted psychological issues to overcome regarding body image, it's still a basic fact that a psychologically healthy person who's also severely overweight/morbidly obese has a serious physical problem that dramatically undermines quality of life.
Carrying too much body fat on the chest, arms, legs, torso, etc. will compromise basic body movement, impose dangerous levels of stress on vital organs, create high blood pressure throughout the body, and over time induce the formation of fat blockages in veins and arteries, leading to strokes, blindness, and other catastrophic consequences. NONE of these health risks has anything to do with the alleged societal merits of the body positivity movement, since the issues outlined above concern the FUNDAMENTAL SCIENCES of physics, chemistry, and biology that simply don't care about one's personal psychology or ideological worldview.
It's a basic physical reality that if you consume more energy per day as food than you expend through exercise and other productive activity, the net outcome is that the difference is stored in your body and you will gain weight. This is an obvious example of high-school level physics known as "conservation of energy," and no amount of psychological posturing will ever violate that reality. In that respect, there's nothing complicated about what needs to be done to help both men and women alike. For people who are willing to look for solutions, reliable fitness programs and other information are available on how to lose excess weight safely and effectively, and also keep it off permanently over time.
In light of essential facts about the physical universe, I can see how someone like Elizabeth will feel very threatened by someone like Janice affirming the existence of an objective reality that's independent of the (MIS)-PERCEPTIONS of that reality. This isn't to say that people who operate within the therapy profession don't have something positive to contribute. However, it's very dangerous for such people to outright deny the realities of basic science that even grade-school students have no trouble accepting as true.
I think that people like Elizabeth crave a longing for excessive complexity in understanding conceptually simple and physically-driven issues like weight loss and personal health in order to unnecessarily inject social and cultural descriptions of the problem and present them as causal factors when they simply aren't so. Furthermore, quoting from various studies in support of such claims doesn't necessarily indicate anything of substance when the studies seek to avoid basic facts that everyone understands.
While I don't think that Elizabeth is necessarily a stupid person, she does come across as MEDIOCRE at best in her scholarly understanding. From my observation of her critique of Janice's article, along with her own articles on Substack, with a disturbing fixation on Janice's personhood overall, I sense a feeling of intellectual inadequacy on her part and a need to overcompensate by citing a heavy reliance on "scholarly" literature to bolster her alleged points. All of this is done without ever addressing Janice's basic truth claims and the evidence that she cites.
Part of this sense of insecurity can be attributed to the fact that Janice has a sizeable following of over 9600 subscribers to her Substack page, while Elizabeth has 530 subscribers. While that's certainly a respectable number of people who follow Elizabeth, basic arithmetic says that for every one subscriber who supports her, Janice has well over 18 supporters. I already know that numerical fact doesn't sit well with feminists like Elizabeth whenever they come across an anti-feminist like Janice with expert knowledge about feminism as a social movement, and who is articulate enough to explain all of the demonstrably negative consequences caused by the feminist movement for the past 100 years or more.
If we examine the statistics of Janice's original article posted since July 6, to date there are 441 likes, 138 comments, and 70 restacks recorded. We can compare these statistics to that of Elizabeth's first Substack rebuttal posted on July 14 entitled: "One Weird Trick for Critiquing Feminism: Ignore What Feminists Actually Wrote." For her article, to date there are 13 likes, 12 comments, and 8 restacks. While that's not nothing, a grade-school level calculation gives Janice a 34-to-1 advantage on the number of likes compared to Elizabeth, and no amount of psychological-based argumentation will ever negate the basic mathematics of that reality. I would encourage Elizabeth to repeat the calculations for the other statistics on her own to drive the point home.
As for Elizabeth's second rebuttal posted on July 21 called: "You Cannot Diagnose an Intellectual Tradition" that's also addressed to Janice by name, her article has 4 likes, 9 comments, and 3 restacks, corresponding to a 110-to-1 like ratio advantage in favour of Janice.
In fairness to Elizabeth, there is one caveat to incorporate in this comparison, which is that a large CONSENSUS of popular opinion doesn't necessarily imply CORRECTNESS in the belief. However, that argument also applies when looking at feminism as a GLOBAL phenomenon where there exists a broad base of support among academic, media, and government institutions with the benefit of decades' worth of social programming to underpin its popularity. While anti-feminist belief is still numerically small on a global scale, its rate of support is growing significantly as an on-line presence that's not ever going away, with a corresponding increase in the outright rejection of feminism whose long-term future as a belief system appears destined for TOTAL ANNIHILATION over time.
For someone like Elizabeth who has a strong emotional attachment to feminism, someone like Janice clearly appears as an existential threat to her worldview, so it's of no surprise that she would feel such hostility towards her intellectual opponent. The fundamental problem Elizabeth has, however, is the growing worldwide recognition that the entirety of feminist scholarship is COMPLETE GARBAGE that's unworthy of anyone's time to read.
The fact that Janice has a deep understanding of feminist literature and can effectively articulate its toxicity for the benefit of others who don't have to subject themselves to this nonsense is something to be commended. From a cost-benefit basis, why would anyone want to waste his/her valuable time reading such idiocies as found in the ENTIRE CANON of feminist literature!? For someone like Elizabeth, whose entire line of argument is reliant on the same body of feminist literature, she would get ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE trying to persuade scientists like me to waste my time reading such COMPLETE GIBBERISH passing itself off as erudite scholarship, let alone expect me to take any of it seriously!
The bottom line throughout all of this controversy is that people have the right to believe or disbelieve whatever they want. However, NO ONE has the right to demand a specific outcome based upon said beliefs. If someone needs to adopt a posture of using complicated and convoluted lines of argument in order to address a relatively simple issue like weight loss and personal health, it's clear to me that such a person is employing a tactic to obscure the truth than to reveal it.
I think this misses what women are actually pushing back on. Most women know health matters. We live in these bodies. We know when we feel strong, tired, heavy, inflamed, anxious, attractive, disconnected, all of it. The issue is not that women want to be unhealthy. The issue is that women are tired of their bodies being treated like public property.
No one's body should be treated like public property, and I don't claim to speak for all women. Did you actually read this essay? The focus is on FEMINIST denials that there are clear links between obesity and health. Feminists do claim to speak for women, and they lie to women about obesity. If you don't care about that, fine, but don't pretend I made arguments I didn't make.
And while you're on your high horse about women's bodies as public property, which is a very dubious claim, try being a man in the United States. Men's bodies actually ARE property--the property of the U.S. government--in that men are required to sign up for Selective Service in case of a draft during war. Nobody asks women to make that commitment.
The article was spot on in showing the ridiculousness of allowing academics anywhere near public messaging, indeed anywhere near the public. It was an interesting read, thank you.
No problem, i wrote an brief article about red pill and militant feminism behaviours, it's an interesting space but you wrote about something i hadn't thought about at all - it was very interesting.
One caveat. A very close friend was morbidly obese. Actually so as he died at 71 of congestive heart failure. He and I walked into a store together. But he was about 20-30 feet ahead of me. We did not immediately appear to be together. We were the only customers in the store and the salesgirl, despite him having entered first, brushed right past him to serve me. After that I made a point of walking into stores behind him. People were openly hostile toward him. Other customers. Sales people. It was awful.
But, his obesity arguably killed him. And, it was due to over eating. He was my business partner and we would often travel on business. He and I ate about the same amount at most meals. But I would get up to urinate in the middle of the night and almost every night he would be sitting in the living room of the condo we would rent and be eating a massive meal. He would say ‘I couldn’t sleep and got bored so I came and sat down and thought I would have a snack.’ A SNACK! It would be more than I would eat in two days. He consistently said he didn’t each much. True enough if all you counted was what he consumed in public.
I think there is an incredible anti fat bias. But fat is very unhealthy. And we are a very fat society.
Part of body positivity movement is also around race. Many poorer black women eat poorly and are obese. They aren’t as beautiful. Race baiters have attacked thinness as a beauty standard because it is largely white.
I personally feel better the thinner I am. I could easily eat 2/3 of what I eat often and feel better. In fact, at 75 I really need very little. Most days I do live exactly that way. Skipping meals, eating less etc. but when I am with others eating I tend to eat more.
I too feel better when I don't eat much. I think my general health has greatly improved as I have cut calories over the past decade and more. It gets easier as one gets older, I find. I used to be very hungry all the time in my early 20s, and it was easy to gain weight.
I don't want to be an obsessive or become anorexic, etc., but I feel better when I don't make food a central part of my pleasure and satisfaction in life.
I too find it easier as I have gotten older. Not nearly as strong an appetite. And I’m especially glad to be eating less at this stage of life as the detrimental effects of fat on health seem to get worse as one gets older.
Well, I've got to admit that one thing I ocassionionly get a bit frustrated by is the expectation that men walk into the maw of eminent battle and almost certain death with perspective and grace, and then having to listen to women engaged in discussions of their battles regarding weight with the expectation that I'm to draw some sort of meaningful equivocation.
I've had to put my little sister to work. She now rings me every day to make sure I AM eating. Low blood pressure and not eating enough turned out a bit dangerous for me.
It was sad. I hung out with him on a Friday. We bumped into a mutual friend who called me later and said he was glad he bumped into him. ‘He seemed happy, for the first time in years’. I said he had been. It was good to see. But he was also really out of it. He was confuses as to where we were and asked if I knew where we were. A block from my home. Where he had been a hundred times. I was wondering if he should drive home. On the Sunday I got a call he had gone to bed Saturday night and didn’t wake up. Great way to go. Very hard on his wife. No time to prepare or pre-grieve etc. They had no children.
I am not a foodie. It is somewhat needed. And some of it tastes good. But it always tastes better when I am genuinely hungry, rather than ‘it is 6 o’clock, I must be hungry’
Servant of the uber wealthy, the quote at 0:22 was either an organic observation, or a signal of compliance to those who had previously thought as much.
Thank you so much, Janice, for that second paragraph. It has made my day or perhaps my year. For something that should be so obvious to everyone (and by no means only in contemporary America), it's amazing that so few people, even men, actually notice it (or at least publicly acknowledge it for fear of ridicule or persecution). If that isn't the result of culturally fostered self-negation, I can't imagine what would be.
After all, even slaves have been fully aware, throughout history, that society has objectified and exploited them. Some house servants in the Old South were treated better than field hands, for instance, but few resisted the urge to rebel or escape when they could. Moral intuition (often encouraged by religion) told them that that their lives, their bodies, were of infinite value, not disposable or expendable (the means to some other end).
I should add here that it took centuries for Western countries to make men accept military conscription with some degree of passivity. Despite the promise of regular food or of adventure beyond their villages--along with the threat of jail (or execution for running away in battle)--press gangs had to beat most boys and young men into submission.
Also, service in the American armed forces is now voluntary, but it's not voluntary in most countries--certainly not for the "boy soldiers" in African militias.
On a different but related topic, has anyone noticed that fall from grace (and adulation) of Graham Platner makes a mockery of due process? I do suspect that he richly deserves his fate for raping a woman, but I don't actually know that because the only evidence against him has come from "credible" accusers, not from sworn testimony by witnesses in a court of law. The vigilantism of MeToo lives on, because even his former Democratic supporters now acknowledge (under pressure and out of political expediency) the need to "believe women." This reinforces the ideological premise that any means can justify a worthy end. What a mess.
Your point is well taken, Greg. I would add only that those were usually witch trials, not witch hunts (screaming mobs with torches and pitchforks). Their legal standards for evidence were far from ours, but they were at least argued in ecclesiastical or secular courts of law--and not all were convicted. The feminist vigilantes of today have no need for torches and pitchforks but also no interest in due process under the law.
The burnings were largely lynchings as you say. Over about 170 years in Europe there were about 80,000 formally accused witches, conviction rates in the low 50% range and the punishments were generally a couple of years in prison which would not have been fun. Adam Jones did some interesting writing about such events in his work "Gendercide".
Interestingly the further north you go the higher the ratio of accused males. I always wondered if the mythologies in various regions and the types of "mischief makers" present in them affected this.
Witchcraft is still technical illegal in my environs - VIC, AUS. I wouldn't be surprised if our pollies have left it there as a joke.
No, Greg, the burnings were not exactly lynchings. Burning was a legally established punishment (although the witches of Salem and many other places were hanged, not burned). Courts tried the accused and then, if the accused were convicted, burned or hanged them. Lynchings in the American south during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were, at least in theory, illegal. They were carried out secretly, therefore, by vigilantes. Lynching was a form of mob terrorism, not of state-sponsored persecution.
But yes, Greg, men were often accused of sorcery (meaning the same thing as witchcraft), especially before the early modern period in Europe. Very often, these men (and women) belonged to suspect populations such as heretics (or crypto-heretics such as the Christian descendents of Jews who had been forcibly converted in Spain and Portugal) and infidels (openly practising Jews and Muslims). The early modern period, however, began with the Black Death, which suddenly destroyed medieval civilization but eventually led to a new one on many fronts simultaneously: theological (Reformation and Counter-Reformation), socio-economic (a rising urban middle-class), political (the modern nation-state), technological (gunpowder and eventually the steam-powered Industrial Revolution) and so on. Meanwhile, the survivors experienced profound disillusionment, anger and fear. They projected their fears mainly onto outsiders (some of whom, were imaginary and others, notably the Ottoman Turks, really were attacking Europe). I wrote what follows as my comment in an earlier Fiamengo File. I'm adding it here in case you haven't read it.
Yes, Greg, men were often accused of sorcery (meaning the same thing as witchcraft), especially before the early modern period in Europe. Very often, these men (and women) belonged to suspect populations such as heretics (or crypto-heretics such as the Christian descendents of Jews who had been forcibly converted in Spain and Portugal) and infidels. The early modern period, however, began with the Black Death, which suddenly destroyed medieval civilization but eventually led to a new one on many fronts simultaneously: theological (Reformation and Counter-Reformation), socio-economic (a rising urban middle-class), political (the modern nation-state), technological (gunpowder and eventually steam power) and so on. Meanwhile, the survivors experienced profound disillusionment, anger and fear, projecting their fears mainly onto outsiders (some of whom, notably the Ottoman Turks, really were attacking Europer).
I wrote what follows as my comment in an earlier Fiamengo File. I'm adding it here in case you haven't read it.
For one thing, not all of the witches were women. From ancient times until the fourteenth century, roughly equal numbers of men and women were tried (not necessarily executed) for witchcraft (a.k.a. sorcery).
It’s true that one target population included women (often old) who lived alone and supported themselves as midwives or abortionists. They were suspected of using supernatural methods (such as the “evil eye”) to harm or steal the children of other women. Because they prepared and sold herbal medicines, moreover, they were suspected of practicing the “old” (pre-Christian) religion and thus of being either heretics or infidels who conducted satanic parodies of the mass.
And there other populations either remained or became targets. These, including both men and women, were still interchangeable in the late medieval period because of intense anxiety about God during and after the Black Death but also intense anxiety about increasingly threatening “others.” Among these others were infidels. Jews had long lived “apart” in Europe, for instance, and were therefore targets of suspicion and resentment. By the early modern period, moreover, aggressive Muslims were invading southeastern Europe. Closer to home were many heretical movements. Heretics included the Cathars but also Protestants or Catholics (depending on political geography). It’s worth noting that all of these outsiders (some of them allegedly threatening and others truly threatening) were accused at the local level of similar crimes: poisoning wells, spreading plagues, desecrating the host, kidnapping and murdering Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes. When Jews were being attacked or exiled for these crimes, not surprisingly, heretics were left alone; when heretics were being attacked, Jews were left alone. This sense of peril from outsiders came with Europeans to the New World, moreover, where infidel tribal peoples sometimes (though not always) seemed to be sinister “outsiders.” It was in this context that the Salem witch trials—not hysterical “hunts” with torches and pitchforks but carefully litigated trials—occurred. The easiest targets were not tribal warriors, however, but their own children (most of whom, at this stage of the collective pathology, were girls or young women). At this point, the phenomenon began to die.
The underlying problem was not, Young and I argue, anxiety over “gender.” No one, especially after the Black Death, wanted to depopulate communities by murdering women. The problem was a series of dramatic historical changes, which were experienced as threats of subversion from both within (including the rise of science along with what would become secularism) and without (mysterious and therefore threatening outsiders).
Let the Courts deal with Platner. Your suspicion is irrelevant. You might even be wrong in your suspicion.
Making an allegation, is in most cases, risk free with no consequences for the accuser. Proving innocence is extremely difficult. Major damage is done even if no Court case results or even if a not guilty verdict is given.
That's true, Seamus. My personal suspicion is indeed irrelevant, both legally and morally. That's my point. But truth is not irrelevant in any community that values justice. This is precisely the danger that vigilantes have posed (at least) since biblical times. Only 250 years ago, the founders of American democracy realized the need for due process--fair trials for every citizen, no matter how unpopular--as a way of avoiding what they called "mobocracy." As you say, "Let the courts deal with Platner." Trouble is, they might not. And any lawyer who defends him in court--this is the legal duty of any prosecutor--will have to pay a heavy price for doing so.
Actually, public and private property rights have nothing to do with this, and I fail to see how the concept is in any way applicable to either arguement. They refer to land.
Whenever I read an assertion such as “women are tired of their bodies being treated as public property” I look up to see a scantily clad blubbery female shoving her mammaries and bits in everyone’s faces.
Because the irony is that it’s always these vulgar types who say shit like this.
You probably have a more legitimate beef with the post Cold War liberal political system that enabled the rampant objectification of women under the banner of corporate consumerism, rather than the rather wooly 'men bad' - most western societies and especially big business have been matriarchal for quite some time, and yet the objectification continues......
I think this essay dramatically oversimplifies a remarkably complex area of research.
We know that chronic shame, self-loathing, weight stigma, and repeated weight cycling are associated with poorer physical and psychological outcomes. We also know that hating yourself has proven to be a remarkably ineffective long-term health intervention.
Contemporary obesity research is far more nuanced than this essay suggests. Weight is one variable but it is not the only variable. Health is influenced by metabolic factors, physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, sleep, trauma, medications, socioeconomic conditions, chronic stress, genetics, and access to healthcare. Two people with the same BMI can have very different health profiles.
That doesn't mean obesity is irrelevant. It absolutely deserves thoughtful clinical attention. But reducing an extraordinarily complex biopsychosocial issue to "feminism wants women fat" is neither good science nor good public health.
The essay also ignores where much of the field has moved over the past decade. Increasingly, clinicians are talking about body neutrality, not body positivity. The goal is not to convince people to love every inch of their bodies. The goal is to help people care for their bodies without making weight or appearance the center of their identity. That is a very different proposition.
I'd also encourage reading more broadly across the obesity literature. One book worth considering is "Big Fat Lies". One of the ongoing challenges in obesity research is disentangling the effects of adiposity itself from the effects of weight stigma, discrimination, healthcare bias, chronic stress, repeated dieting, and the lived experience of being an obese person. Those variables are extraordinarily difficult to separate in longitudinal research, which is precisely why sweeping claims should make us cautious.
Finally, I think this essay replaces one reductionism with another. It rejects one ideological narrative only to substitute a different ideological narrative. Women's bodies deserve better than becoming the latest battleground in someone else's culture war.
If we're going to write confidently about women's health and public health, we owe readers the breadth of the evidence not simply the evidence that confirms our preferred worldview.
And perhaps the better question is this:
Who benefits when women spend their lives believing their bodies are projects to be fixed?
The answer is not simply "feminism." It is an entire ecosystem of industries, weight loss, wellness, beauty, pharmaceuticals, social media, and yes, parts of medicine that profit from women's dissatisfaction.
That is the conversation I wish this essay had taken seriously.
But the problem for you is: feminism is full of these reductionist narratives, and you are a feminist. How can you support an ideology that lies repeatedly? My essay doesn't claim to address all the issues relating to women and obesity; it merely claims to show that feminism lies and profits from lying.
I don't think that actually addresses the point I was making.
Can you name a single intellectual, political, scientific, or religious tradition that is entirely free of error? Before we go further, it would also help to define what you mean by a lie. That's a strong accusation, and it shouldn't be used interchangeably with "I disagree."
I wasn't arguing that feminism is beyond criticism. Quite the opposite. Like any broad intellectual and political movement spanning more than a century, feminism contains competing schools of thought, internal disagreements, ideas that have been revised or abandoned, and claims that have proven more or less persuasive over time.
The existence of flawed ideas or flawed people within a movement is not, by itself, evidence that the movement as a whole is fraudulent. If it were, we would have to discard nearly every major intellectual tradition ever developed.
Your essay presents a highly complex area of obesity research as though there were a single explanatory cause. The current scientific literature does not support that conclusion. If your thesis is that some feminist writers have made claims about weight or body image that are unsupported by evidence, then cite those claims and evaluate them. That's a fair argument.
But moving from "some feminists were wrong about X" to "feminism wants women fat" is a conclusion that requires far more evidence than your essay provides.
I'm interested in following the evidence wherever it leads, even when it challenges my own assumptions. That's why I think discussions of obesity should reflect the full biopsychosocial literature rather than reducing a multifactorial health issue to a single ideological explanation.
And if we're going to ask who benefits, then let's follow the money. The industries profiting from obesity, weight loss, cosmetic procedures, wellness products, pharmaceuticals, social media engagement, and even parts of healthcare generate billions of dollars every year. That ecosystem is driven by incentives far more powerful than any single political or social movement. Reducing it all to "feminism" oversimplifies the evidence in exactly the same way you criticize others for doing.
"The existence of flawed ideas or flawed people within a movement is not, by itself, evidence that the movement as a whole is fraudulent."
Gee, I hear the sonorous rhythms of AI! Are you a bot, or are you just using AI to write your responses?
The AI statement is true, but when the movement is LED by flawed people with flawed ideas, and when the vast majority of the movement's foot soldiers enthusiastically support those flawed people and flawed ideas--then yes, the movement can legitimately be seen as fraudulent.
I quoted directly from major popular and academic feminists claiming that fat is a response to patriarchy, that obese women challenge the patriarchy, and that there is no causative relationship between obesity and poor health. There is fraud for you! I suggest you spend your time challenging the highly influential feminist narratives that have failed to address a major health crisis for women, rather than feeding my essay into ChatGPT, or wherever you fed it, in order to come up with your canned responses.
I assure you, Elizabeth isn’t AI and she doesn’t use AI to make her point. She is an intelligent person who can articulate herself by using her own brain. I’m sure that’s scary for you… 🤷🏼♀️
For what it’s worth, I think the author is attacking feminism because she thinks (practically says) that desire is only “natural” if it suits her preconceptions of such. The attack on feminism reads more as a cover for personal bias.
I think we've reached the end of a productive conversation because the discussion has become increasingly reductionist.
The idea that health disparities have nothing to do with feminism or with social, economic, and patriarchal structures is simply not supported by the evidence. Public health research has spent decades demonstrating that health outcomes are shaped by far more than individual choices or voices, for that matter.
What also seems to be getting lost is that feminism is not a single, unified ideology. Like conservatism, liberalism, Christianity, psychoanalysis, or economics, it contains competing schools of thought, vigorous internal debates, and ideas that have evolved over time. Treating "feminism" as though every feminist agrees with every other feminist misunderstands how intellectual movements work. Isn't this in political science 101 courses?
This very same oversimplification appears in the discussion of obesity in the essay and on this thread. Very few serious researchers or thinkers argue that obesity is irrelevant. The debate is about far more nuanced questions: the limitations of BMI as a screening tool, the role of weight stigma, metabolic health, body neutrality, social determinants of health, and how we measure health risk accurately. How many times do I have to write this here?
A handful of provocative writers do not define an entire field. I would think an academic would understand this point.
By that logic, Donald Trump would represent the totality of conservative thought simply because he is a Republican. I don't think many conservatives or former President George W. Bush, for that matter would accept that premise. Intellectual traditions are always more diverse than their loudest voices of the time...or the most annoying ones.
We should extend that same courtesy to feminism. Anyway, reductionism prevails here. Once again.
The points I have made and my voice are genuine and rooted in my work and the research I have done to support it. I'm not quite sure why a nuanced and complete response to your essay reads as AI-generated to you. Research on the consistent use of AI indicates that it leads to a decline in the ability to apply critical thinking and inordinate trust in AI-generated material.
I would also like to add that ‘the thin ideal’ is mostly perpetuated by other women. Men usually like a variety of healthy body types and tend to prefer women who appear to have healthy hormones.
It's true that women compete with one another to be thin, often far beyond what most men prefer (certainly beyond what they 'require')--but I think most women who struggle to reach an ideal are thinking of a male viewer appraising them. The feminists are wrong that it is something imposed by men; it has to do with the psychology of femininity.
My husband once got me this giant-lips-shaped face exerciser we saw on TV as an “As Seen on TV” gag gift. I keep it in a drawer I open frequently, and whenever I see it, I laugh
As evidenced by the fact that no matter how you explain to them that it's not your preference, they persist in that belief. The ideal is not imposed on them by men. It's internal, and stubbornly immune to any external input.
Yes, women and girls impose a ruthless hierarchy on each other based on attractiveness. I suspect it's more intense than the pressure men put on women.
The most handsome men tend to be jocks and jerks who wouldn't give a plain girl a minute's conversation, but the average man certainly would.
Women punch down more than men! Men are more likely to just ignore down. Anxiety among Gen Z girls is epidemic; among boys not as much.
According to feminists that's the fault of men who control everything. This is news to the majority of men, of course. In my experience, men are much more accepting of average/normal women as potential partners than women are of men. However, this is reframed by feminists as men not noticing, caring or only after sex etc. so Gentlemen you can't win!
No, the women men should avoid do that, not all women. I take exception to any assertion that these are the general rules. I've personally known too many women (and men) to lazily group them in this manner.
Basically all supermodels (the models you actually know of) are indeed adult women. They likely started in their late teens but they gained notoriety as an adult.
Go look at any ad now and it’s teens modeling. I’ve been following fashion for years, and many models are teens. I’m not talking about “super models.” No teen should be modeling adult clothes. It makes no sense.
I just flipped through my latest issue of Vogue and there are teens in a few of the ads, but most of them were adults. It's pretty normal to wear regular, adult brands once you're 17, and definitely by 18-19. Designers feature young women because our idea of beauty (for women) is intrinsically tied with youth. It makes all the sense.
I've reported several ads in recent weeks as "child porn" or very near it. The models were definitely children but the posing was very "adult". Serves me right for playing games on my phone I guess.
One of Bill Maher's routines years ago had a bit about how the models were buxom and hourglass-shaped until the 1960's and then suddenly Twiggy was the turning point. I think what really happened is that the fashion industry figured out that clothes hang a certain way on long-limbed slender women that creates much allure. Not seeing the curves is somehow more fascinating than seeing them, especially in younger women who still have the glow of fertility.
So I think it was mostly about selling clothes and magazines, not anything started by men; the fashionistas figured out that thin worked really well for sales -- to women.
Before then most men were into big breasts, small waists, and big hips, a pretty rare combination so it's hard to sell clothes for such hourglass figures. Whether men naturally liked that form or whether women had put that ideal into the heads of men I have no idea.
Two axioms of feminism on display here that permeate all feminist thought and "scholarship":
(1) No matter the topic, always blame men (the patriarchy). No woman has agency; all are being puppeteered by an unseen male hand, in all things.
(2) Never consider the topic from the male side. Are obese men mistreated or ignored by women, including feminist women? Of course. Do men feel pressured by women to work out, build muscle, and also to not have protruding fat? Of course. Are men bombarded with images that make us feel inadequate? Absolutely. Just looking at leading men in movies, we see most, if the character is portrayed as sexually desirable, to be ripped, with six-pack abs.
As feminism wallows in self pity over this topic, same as all topics, if they realized it was similar not different for men, that might give them solace and provide some of the peace they seek.
I'm not sure they do seek peace. They need to believe that men have always had it better. There is a deep pleasure in resentment and outrage, in believing one's group to have been targeted for unjust treatment. If men are treated just as badly (or, as we know, much worse in many regards) in our societies, then the entirety of the ideology falls apart, and with it all the grim satisfactions and self-pity of righteous victimhood.
Whilst in Germany and watching some TV, I saw a show about medical emergencies. A woman had been stabbed in the back and to remove it was seriously dangerous for her life.
Very delicate situation where any movement could kill her because the knife might make her bleed..
Anyway, I didn't see the end,. but it worked out, apparently.. but at one point a woman appeared and started talking about 'Gewalt gegen Frauen' - 'Violence against women' and that it is mainly women that get violated.
I was shocked.
I thought, you ladies must bring everything back to 'females are worse off'.
It turned out that it was a man that stabbed her.
But for my part, all this in German, was that it was a show about Medical situations that were very complicated and certainly dramatic and showed the situations that Ambulance people find themselves in,
and at that point I didn't give a damn about gender anything. Using a show like this to prove some point.
At that point it was about saving someones life and the people that were doing the saving, at one point, were all men.
Nope categorically wrong, Mark. I have yet to meet a feminist arguing for "special treatment." I've met plenty arguing for equal pay, equal legal rights, freedom from violence, reproductive healthcare, paid parental leave for both parents, and the ability to participate fully in civic life.
If that's "special treatment," we're using very different dictionaries.
Sorry, you are perhaps, like a fish, oblivious to the sea of privilege you are swimming in. Here are a few examples.
* All the major universities have a Gender Studies depatment, formerly Women's Studies, which is not expected to abide by the normal academic commitment to truth but is openly activist, and supports women, despite the fact that women outnumber men in academia.
* Schools have been redesigned to suit girls. The difference in performance that boys had before that has been exceeded by the current advantage to girls. But that difference is not being addressed.
* There are many female-only scholarships but next to no male-only, despire the fact that women have surpassed men at every level of study
* Female teachers, who are by far the majority, mark papers with a male name lower than if it has a girl's name.
* Family courts tend to accept any false accusations by mothers and to give default custody to her
* The field of psychology is dominated by women and the female mode of feeling and reacting is taken normal while the normal male ways are seen as inferior or pathological
* Only men get called on to put their lives on the line militarily. In the US you cannot vote unless you sign up for selective service
* On the Titanic being a woman was a greater privilege for getting onto the life boats and surviving then being upper class
* Men get harsher penalties for the same crimes
* The domestic violence industry tends to completely ignore male victims, excuse female violence, and assume men are evil. In fact, more women commit DV than men
* DEI supports women in careers where men are the majority, but areas where men are a minority do not offer quotas for men.
* We keep hearing about the pay gap, even though women in their 20s outearn men, and men are more committed to work and making money
* In France it is illegal for a man to do a paternity test on a child that he is raising. Hospitals get sued if the wrong baby is handed to a mother
* A study was done into gender equality around the world and it produced the Basic Index of Gender Equality (BIGI). It found that in all the western countries women were ahead of men. So of course it was not discussed much in public and the website was soon taken down.
I meant to add that I don’t think the Selective Service system is a good example of the hardships of men:
—it has never been activated since put in place after the Vietnam War and both men and women have argued it should be universal; if it’s a hardship for men because they have register in order to vote, then convince the decision-makers to change it, don’t blame women
—social reality is that only a tiny portion of American youth meet standards for service; if the Selective Service is ever activated for an existential threat, it will include men and women in order to give us a chance
—we have a volunteer force that is made up of both men and women
—women had to struggle with Congress and the Pentagon to get the right to serve in combat roles because men thought they weren’t capable and needed to be protected behind the lines. You might retort that women don’t have the same PT requirements but if that’s the issue, recognize that you’re saying men have it hard because women are excluded from roles they want to serve in.
All of which is to say, I hope that I’m helping by providing factual underpinnings to your claims.
I disagree. There are a number of things here that you are simply wrong about--and I've done my research. For example:
--Some careers are dominated by women, such as teaching. That is not because women are favored but rather that teaching has historically been considered a low-prestige and is a low-paid profession, as well as one of very few options for women to be employed. Women now have more options, but teaching remains low-prestige and low-paid.
-- Drawing on France as an example to make your point simply begs me to note that in some countries, female genital mutilation is a normal and involuntary practice not matched by any mutilation of males.
-- The pay gap accelerates permanently if women take time away from work to give birth. So the same people who think women need to have more babies also say that women have too many privileges. If women earn more in their 20s, part of that is because more women are entering the STEM professions and that pay gap reverses over time. The pay gap is also due to the different jobs men and women are able to access.
-- There are many people, myself included, that are concerned about the structure of schools and the need to ensure that they meet the needs of all students. A major challenge has actually been the effects of No Child Left Behind as implemented, not some feminist agenda.
There is so much more I can write here, but I'm concerned that your response will not further a constructive conversation. If you choose to be constructive, I will respond constructively because I am interested, as I hope all of us are, in making the world a better place.
Twins, male and female, sexually abused as children by the same individual at the same time.
SHE has free mental health services available in their home town.
HE must fly hundred of kilometres at his own expense and pay expensive private psychologists for the same help.
Governments had made the mistake of giving all the money and resource to feminist groups who promptly excluded males, including little boys, from all service provision for decades.
Through recent royal commissions we've learned of many suicides which might have been avoided had those victims been able to get the help they needed. That may or may not have involved "special treatment" but it certainly puts blood on feminist hands.
And, as a feminist, I'll add something that may surprise you: healthcare is a human right. For everyone.
If what you're claiming is accurate, this mini incomplete case study, that lack of access contributes to suicide deaths, which it does, then we should be asking why people cannot get the care they need, not using those deaths to score ideological points.
Look at who is actually doing the work: researchers studying suicide, clinicians on psychiatric units, therapists, social workers, crisis responders, and those providing care to people living on the streets. Men and women alike are dedicating their lives to reducing suffering and expanding access to treatment.
Your reductionist "us versus them" framework obscures a real issue you introduced here and I will not let you cheapen it with your antifeminist musings: healthcare inequity. It keeps us arguing with one another instead of addressing the structural problems that cost people their lives.
Of course feminists aren't arguing that they need special treatment; instead, they're insisting that they've been so badly oppressed that they thus deserve every special - oops, I mean necessary - accommodation they can possibly extort from society. So it's not demanding unearned preference, it's social justice! Laughable...
The entire universe seeks peace. Like a bee seeks a flower. Like an ideology seeks a victim. Like a river seeks the ocean. Like a bird seeks...something.
I think this comment can be true of many minority groups not just feminists. It can get to a stage when it’s toxic and wallowing in resentment and bitterness.
I was lol'ing the other day driving past a billboard for the upcoming Chris Brown/Usher Raymond tour. Women will literally lose their shit over male performing artists they consider hot no matter how awful they are, meanwhile no female artist ever can count as her core fanbase men who lust after her.
In response to your #1 example. Feminists want women to swap the puppetering male hand, for a puppeteering female hand. As another commenter pointed out, women are way more judgmental of other women's (and men's) bodies & life choices than are men.
Women can absolutely police one another's bodies. There is good research on that. But it doesn't answer the question feminism is asking.
The question isn't, "Who criticizes whom?"
The question is, How do social structures, institutions, media, economics, and cultural norms shape women's lives, and who benefits from those arrangements?
Those are different questions.
And if we're broadening the conversation beyond body image, then we also have to ask who disproportionately perpetrates intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and homicide against women. Those are empirical questions with empirical answers.
Feminist scholarship isn't fundamentally about blaming men; it's about examining systems, incentives, and power including the ways those systems constrain men.
Men's body image, eating disorders, and pressures around muscularity have been studied for decades, including by feminist scholars.
It's much easier to argue with caricatures than with what people actually write.
But you've just demonstrated that you don't appear to understand what scholarship actually is.
The nice thing about public conversations is that there is a record. Anyone reading this exchange can decide for themselves whose arguments are grounded in evidence and whose are not.
Scholarship is simply the educated talking. Education does not, in fact, make people correct in their opinions.
Earlier you pointed out that my statement about feminism pulling off a bait & switch as to who we now allow to criticize our (female) chooses as a 'red herring' & a "straw man". Then proceeded to ask "empirical" questions that you insist have "empirical" answers. I'm assuming you're using scholarship to get those answers.
The problem with feminist scholarly research is that it only asked the questions you referenced. It does not ask how women negatively effect those spaces. How women, in the search for the empirical answers you are so sure exist creat a world of blame & negativity.
Feminism refuses to admit that in the pursuit of "equality" the movement has created a society of conformity, pressuring females to live in a prescribed way. This may not matter to you, if you prefer to live for a career & internalize the opinions of other women as the truth. Which leads me back to my prior argument.
Feminism is about creating in women a fearful victim mentality. Yes men kill women. Women also kill men, research shows in increasing numbers. Yes male run institutions exclude women. Female run institutions exclude men in increasing numbers. Women are not victims of male superiority, we are victims of female psychological manipulation.
And yet, in the feminist trial of the century, pictures of Harvey Weinstein's naked, overweight body were used as evidence the no woman could voluntarily find him attractive. Fatness was proof of guilt. No fat-acceptance there.
I always wondered if the debacle had been Brad Pitt behaving as Weinstein did, whether the 'survivors' would be reminiscing wistfully and smiling about their encounters.
There was a media interview with one 'survivor' I recall well, who couldn't factually describe her experience with Weinstein. Totally incoherent, she clearly had no clue what would constitute criminal behavior versus not criminal behavior, the entire point of the ongoing trial.
She just went on about 'ick' factors like his greasy skin and the way he "waddled." By those metrics Brad Pitt would definitely not have been found guilty of crimes.
It is interesting the "me too" thing barely touched the Rock world. Pretty amazing given the well documented excesses of bands and stars from the 1960s onwards.
The difference is with Weinstein it was tit for tat (pun intended), a transaction of sex for future roles. When the roles didn't come or weren't good enough, vengeance kicked in.
I have thought a lot about the Weinstein case, which is fascinating. I hope that one day in the future, a truly dispassionate person might write a book about what really went on.
The manner in which so many women turned on him, after years (decades) of going along with the playbook, may at least partially be explained by female psychology. Women tend to react as their peers are reacting, and suddenly it was time to take revenge on the man who had once controlled Hollywood.
In the meantime, perhaps, some might revive their own lagging careers and sexual cachet.
But I think more was going on. He was aging. They were aging. I don't think it mattered whether he had come through on what he promised or not. He was now older, frailer, uglier. Their fear or obeisance or admiration turned to hatred. Perhaps a surge of shame at their own previous mercenary behavior played a role. Or perhaps they merely wanted the chance to say, "I was once gorgeous enough to be coerced by this man!"
All of the testimony about his ugliness and misshapen genitals, etc. was pure feminine vengeance. Feminists think men hate women's bodies; once again, that is pure feminist projection. Women both envy and despise men's bodies, and seek evidence of weakness.
I suspect, also, that there is a great deal of self-hatred in Hollywood. Acting itself must at times induce a sense of one's own craven hollowness, made worse by the money to be made and the desperation around it in that place. The attack on Weinstein was a massive purgation and scapegoating of that hatred.
Brilliant. I think you nailed it. I also recall the unbridled hysteria that carried the year 2017, the #metoo moment it would come to be called. Given the trivial nature of many of the offenses, and how people like Aziz Ansari and Charlie Rose and Al Franken were vastly over-punished, it wasn't a moment of justice but more of a pogrom.
It was a national hysteria of women by the millions, in many cases reinterpreting innocuous male behaviors as if malicious.
I think women's tendency toward mob justice (an oxymoron) and groupthink were why societies limited women's participation in government for centuries, not misogyny. Decision making just works far better when people feel free to take an adversarial argumentative position without fear of being mobbed, which clearly isn't the case in the feminist movement. That's about lockstep agreement or keep your mouth shut. I recall one of your videos about a female professor who dared to say positive things about white men and how she was mercilessly mobbed by other academics. Such movements that severely punish the innocent are always as corrosive as acid against a functioning society.
> Perhaps a surge of shame at their own previous mercenary behavior played a role.
I do wonder how people who do certain things to acquire wealth / status feel years removed, when they've grown used to the results (the hedonic treadmill) and have to reconcile what they did to get there.
Throw in the fact that the peak advantages of fame (for most these actresses) are extremely youth oriented: at 22, everyone is jealous of the TV star. At 50 - in the circles many of these successful actors are mixing in - not so much.
The roles of the purported victims were secondary to the business interest at the time to reduce the value of Weinstein's interest in his film enterprise and force his resignation. All the shock and horror provided justification for this outcome.
The media ate the lamentations alive, with full knowledge that it was ever thus in Hollywood.
No one ever seems to mention that it is insulting to women to see women as cowering victims, or to see women as incapable of understanding the reason for an invitation to a private room. If there was such great interest in protecting other women, that interest was not served by failing to report assault. All concerned said the mogul's vulgar (to be kind!) behavior was an open secret.
This was my first thought at the time. If it was an open secret, then how could the women who went to his hotel rooms be victims? They went there knowing what was going to happen and prepared to deal with it. Some (including the two complainants in his New York trial) even wrote him love letters for years afterward! ("I miss you, big guy").
I know the feminist answer: it was still coercion. Will we ever get to the point at which we acknowledge that women can and have since the beginning of time engaged in sexual transactions with powerful men, and that this is not the same as rape or harassment? If Weinstein is to be punished for that, then they should be punished also, for betraying other women and corrupting the casting process.
This is an extraordinary amount of motive-reading presented as psychology. The Weinstein cases were about allegations of coercion, abuse of power, and consent not an invitation to speculate that dozens of women were motivated by revenge, vanity, or envy.
Remember the attack and legacy destroying of Bill Cosby? The same women that waited in line to have sex and do drugs with him, and take a chance at him divorcing his wife and marrying them - 40 years of bitterness that he didn't find their Sex-parts as great as those women were sure they had 'gold platted' ones ..
But, did a little and you find the Lawyer Witch that 'collected' women to mobb him and the symbol of good fatherhood, manhood, career professional, .. that his character played on mass-media and many boys took as a father substitute mentor.
Here is a quote from my Apologetic article found below ..
---------
VI. BILL COSBY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF A PATERNAL SYMBOL
The Bill Cosby case presents a different species of argument than false accusation in the straightforward sense, and it is more important for that difference.
The Cosby Show aired from 1984 to 1992. For eight years, at the precise cultural moment when the two-parent middle-class family was being dismantled across demographic lines — offshore job elimination gutting single-income blue-collar wages, no-fault divorce removing the legal barriers to family dissolution, welfare policy creating multigenerational fatherlessness in urban communities — the Huxtable family stood as a counter-image. Dr. Cliff Huxtable was educated, employed, present, engaged, affectionate, and authoritative. He was funny. He made fatherhood look like something worth aspiring to. Children of all races, from all family situations, absorbed this image as a model of what a father, a husband, a man could be. For the millions of children growing up in fatherless households — whatever their race, whatever the cause of the absence — this was often the only sustained image of involved fatherhood available to them.
The destruction of that image, beginning in late 2014, was accomplished through mechanisms that no court has ever fully addressed.
The sequence is documented. In October 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress performed a routine calling Cosby a rapist. He had performed the same routine for six months with no significant response. This particular performance was captured on video and posted to Philadelphia Magazine’s website; from there it spread rapidly through coordinated media amplification.²⁷ Within weeks, Gloria Allred — who would ultimately represent 33 of the accusers — was hosting simultaneous press conferences producing waves of new complainants: three at one press conference in December 2014, three more at another in January 2015.²⁸ Sixty-plus accusers eventually came forward publicly, alleging incidents spanning from 1965 to 2008 — 43 years of alleged conduct producing virtually no contemporaneous police reports, then dozens of simultaneous public accusations within weeks of a specific media trigger.
The timing compression alone is a legitimate observation. Phylicia Rashad, Cosby’s co-star and someone with direct knowledge of his world, stated in January 2015 that the accusations constituted ‘a coordinated attack to hurt the comedian’s legacy.’²⁹
The criminal case that was actually prosecuted — Commonwealth v. Cosby — was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2021 on due process grounds. The Court found that a 2005 district attorney had made an unconditional promise not to prosecute Cosby, that Cosby relied on that promise when he testified in a civil deposition without invoking his Fifth Amendment right, and that a successor prosecutor then used that testimony to convict him. The Court ruled: ‘When an unconditional charging decision is made publicly and with the intent to induce action and reliance by the defendant, and when the defendant does so to his detriment, denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness.’³⁰
Additionally, the first jury to hear the case deadlocked and could not reach a verdict in 2017. A second jury — empaneled after the MeToo movement had transformed the cultural atmosphere — convicted him at retrial in 2018.³¹ The interaction between political climate and jury composition raises legitimate questions that were never adjudicated.
The argument here is not that Cosby was innocent of all conduct attributed to him. The record is too complicated for that claim. The argument is this: the cultural effect — the destruction of the Huxtable model, the erasure of aspirational fatherhood from the cultural landscape for a generation of fatherless children who had used it as a navigational star — was accomplished through mechanisms that operated independently of what any court ultimately found. The campaign produced its cultural effect before the first criminal charge was filed. It has produced it permanently, regardless of the due process findings that followed.
The specific form of the attack — targeting a symbol of paternal authority rather than a politician, a businessman, or an entertainer of a different kind — was not incidental. Whatever Cosby may have done in private, the Huxtable model represented something specific and threatening to the cultural forces that Clark documents: evidence that masculine authority, fatherly presence, and domestic stability were not only possible but aspirational. Its destruction served interests that had nothing to do with justice for any individual victim and everything to do with the erasure of a particular kind of masculine paternal authority from the cultural landscape.
All those years, all those accusations in 2014, but "virtually no contemporaneous police reports." The mind boggles. There is no "innocent until proven guilty" when some women band together and get shrill. No proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" required.
It's actually impossible in a non-consent case to prove non-consent with no physical evidence. But they don't care if an innocent man rots in prison.
I have seen videos of the excessive drug taking and sex with young women which attempt this. However, Weinstein was very wealthy and influential and more importantly worth suing. I've read claims that the main thrust behind it all was to take down his studio which sounds credible.
The MeToo movement perhaps appeared to have a smaller impact on much of the rock music world, but plenty of musicians were accused of misconduct, some faced significant professional consequences, and several prosecuted. Maybe it just fades into the background.
Gene Simmons, Ryan Adams, Marilyn Manson, Morrissey, Blood on the Dance Floor, Jesse Lacey, Chris Conley, Justin Sane, Jack Barakat, Alex Gaskarth, Austin Carlile, Tilian Pearson, Ronnie Radke, Tim Lambesis, Ian Watkins, Twiggy Ramirez, Pinegrove, The Orwells … Should I keep going?
“Take down his studio” only sounds credible if you’re conspiracy-addled. Miramax did more than fine - acquiring, merging with and being acquired by Lionsgate, Spyglass Media, Viacom, Paramount, etc.
The inconsistencies and incoherencies with this "movement" (if you can call it that), were, and are, through the roof. It's a convenient and cunning power play, the "arguments" employed in one situation, ignored in the next, at female whim. Zero credibility.
Respectfully, I think this misses the central issue.
The Harvey Weinstein trial was not about whether he was attractive or whether women found him desirable.
It was about allegations of sexual assault, coercion, abuse of power, and the complicated dynamics of consent when one person controls another's livelihood and career.
Reducing that case to a discussion of body size trivializes what the women who testified were actually describing.
And yet his physical appearance was presented as factually unattractive, and was used in the prosecution's arguments to prove their case. So his desirability was part of the trial.
AND -- Attorneys introduce all sorts of arguments in court that are intended to persuade a jury. That doesn't mean those arguments accurately reflect reality.
Pointing to what an attorney argued about someone's physical appearance in a trial doesn't establish that the argument is factually correct or scientifically meaningful. It tells us what the attorney thought might persuade a jury, not what the evidence ultimately supports.
Courtroom arguments are not the same thing as empirical evidence for your argument.
THIS. The goal of both sides (defense and prosecution) is to get the jury to believe their case. But “facts” as they’re presented in court are not the same thing as scientific facts
Weinstein's ex wife was extremely attractive and didn't stick around long when the going got tough. "So Mrs Weinstein what first attracted you to the multi millionaire Harvey Weinstein?"
DJT is no Adonis but there are millions of women who would lie with him - willingly.
I observe lots of fat, ageing skinheads with tattoos who have no problem finding mates. Most of them with little cash. Go figure.
Harvey Weinstein was extremely attractive to many women, who commodified their bodies. The oldest profession.
It all boils down to what you've always said, Female reproductive strategies by nature seek to destroy competitors. What better way to eliminate them than by making them repulsive.
Women hate any woman more attractive than them. It’s vicious to say the least. It’s why my wife has so few female friends.
And let’s not forget leftists are akin to biological human waste. Not smart, not attractive, unmotivated envious nasty people who want nothing more than to destroy all that is good and beautiful.
Orbach's book was one of several that appeared in the 70s which seemed to be bestowing blame on all men. So I make women fat, eh? It's one of the silliest cases of falsely subscribing to an external locus of control - and repudiation of one's own responsibility.
Common nonsense has traditionally offered that fat women have such nice personalities. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 'free pass' provides cover for all manner of sadism. Sword and shield both: how convenient.
“How is it remotely empowering to cast oneself as a victim in all circumstances?”
Have you been asleep for the last decade?
Being the oppressed victim is the favored thing for leftists.
Because it is what woke Critical Theory / DEi / intersectionality teach: that the evil straight white male Christian (or Jewish) capitalist patriarchy are oppressors and responsible for all evil - and little to no good - in our zero-sum, power-based world.
And that the oppressed have a right to overcome their oppressors BY.ANY.MEANS.NECESSARY.
So being the oppressed is good. And being straight is bad, especially if you are white.
Which makes it not at all coincidental that there has been an explosion of teen girls who identify as bisexual and who identify as trans.
Then you will be cast out of the group of good little leftists.
Here in the U.S. at least I am protected by First Amendment free speech rights. I see now that in the U.K. you are not that lucky, and that thousands of Brits have been arrested for wrongthink posts on the Interwebs, so you’d best be careful… 😏
I remember when fat acceptance exploded onto the Internet. Seems to have died down now with more people pushing for health, fitness and self-improvement (sometimes to the extreme). Funnily enough I posted a recent article about body positivity. The whole thing is just sick. Yes of course it's not polite to constantly nag overweight people about their weight by my god, since when was promoting morbid obesity as "positive" a good idea?? Would we promote "skinny acceptance" and say anorexic people "deserve to be accepted as they are"? What nonsense. It's ridiculous.
Nonsense and ridiculous have always been the stock in trade of feminism. I originally thought many feminist ideas were a literal joke, that they weren't serious. Then I thought well it's an attempt to gaslight everybody, the old get them to not believe their own eyes.
Finally to my horror I had to accept that leading feminists really do believe their own nonsense. Any flaky idea as long as it blames men will always have traction.
Failure to desire fat women is simply one of the ways that all aspects of male sexually are sullied by feminists as undesirable, shameful, yuck, patriarchal and so forth. This has extended into criminalising and misconducting normal male sexual courtship, especially from men considered less desirable. The rules distinguishing acceptable male courtship from criminality are now deliberately both subjective on the part of an accuser and vague. This renders men vulnerable to prosecution, workplace discipline or career destruction for innocently motivated communications seen to be in error.
Allegations of sexual harassment now don't even require a woman to make clear in any way that a man's approaches (or was it his physique, status or wallet?) are unwanted. Claimed power differential is put forward in itself as evidence of harassment even when there was no suggestion of punishment or reward for the accuser's response. Sure, some behaviour might be so socially abnormal or disrespectful of the recipient that it reasonably could be defined as harassment; e.g. lewd offers of sex to someone relatively unknown. However, most allegations of sexual harassment don't involve such behaviour. Many criminal prosecutions for male sexual behaviour are now based on fine interpretations of 'consent', interpretations that over time have allowed consent to be judged as lacking regardless of contrary evidence. Misandry in full splendour.
One consistent goal of feminism is the desire to turn men and women against each other. This is another aspect of that. If enough women can be convinced that being massively overweight is in their interests, there will be fewer male-female relationships and more reasons to blame men. That such an outcome would be detrimental to women is, as usual, not an impediment to feminist ideology.
I clicked the heart, but it won't register, so please count this as a reply and an up vote.
I so agree about the goal of feminism being to turn women and men against each other (or, at minimum, just turn women against men, for similar results). Only from that standpoint does the complete incoherence of feminist thought make any kind of sense. One would think that a group of people as smart as the smartest men, over a time frame of centuries, could have concocted a doctrine that would be internally consistent.
I've started to believe that perhaps rigid norms (objective standards, judgment, social penalty) are a reflection of masculine control (even when they're ENFORCED by women). The feminization of society is therefore leading to an erosion of norms, including a perverse and contrarian kind of joy in promoting ugliness, ill health, and disadvantaged identity groups.
Have you looked into the work of Joyce Benenson (her book Warriors and Worriers), and those of Tracy Vaillincourt and Dani Sulikowski?
They focus on intrasexual competition between women and men. Your observation that women teachers are more uncomfortable choosing among better and worse students has deep evolutionary roots discussed sensitively by these scientists, and indeed they are supported by Darwin’s work in this area. You and Janice Fiamengo both have hit on such precise descriptions of what this looks like on the cultural level that you seem most poised to check how the biological explanations find consilience with culture, and if they do, how.
An amusing paper Sulikowski wrote can be found here, about women’s competitiveness in cutting off each other’s hair, called “Off with her hair” (paper 51)
Tracy Vaillincourt studies female competition and coaches girls soccer teams. One arresting observation she mentioned was how girls would not shake hands after a game with the opposing team if there was beef during the game, whereas boys just let it go and shake hands at the end.
Joyce Benenson’s book is hated (naturally), but is absolutely chock full of many years of study, with fascinating detours into animal behavior:
If we are to be honest, we would have to say that we are witnessing a grotesquerie in progress—which is what feminism has become. Indeed, fat is fab, if we only knew it. The feminist cathexis on weight as a positive attribute is a sign, if I may put it this way, of conceptual fatuousness. The culture itself has grown fat, bloated with an overabundance of feminist theory and commuting the question of identity to, among other things, body image and a celebration of body diversity, at the expense of the many faculties, qualities, and affective valencies that make us truly and fully human. An exclusive focus on body image is the simple-minded expansion of merely one particular attribute, given an ideological spin. The celebration of female fat—or as they sometimes put it, of those “at the higher end of the weight spectrum”—is a heavy weapon in the feminist arsenal. This is sizeism with a vengeance, which is ironically mentally reductive, a form of intellectual anorexia. Believe it! We have entirely transcended the realm of reason, sanity and common sense, and tossed the question of health and the concept of personal responsibility into the cultural dumpster.
A few things stand out as contributing explanations:
1) Self-image - if you are X and X is not the current standard, it helps you feel better about yourself if you can bully people into believing X is good, actually.
2) Confusion that male sexual attention is not the same as relational investment, leading to some women assuming that they're 'enough' as they are and do not need to consider the desires of men (which is suicidal, given men are the target audience)
3) Women are often more fluid sexually and lesbians like creating more lesbians to widen the pool. Making women less attractive to men creates more single women, more single women who may try bi means more potential mates, and conversely
4) Intrasexual competition from straight women who meet the traditional standards for size who benefit by pushing as many women as possible out of the pool of possible mates for the top 5% of men that women fiercely compete over.
....describes the mindset of people who try to prevent others from gaining a favorable position, even if attaining such position would not directly impact those trying to stop them. It is usually summarized with the phrase: "If I can't have it, neither can you".
Feminist Elizabeth Wilkins-McKee commented here at great length, also publishing two Substack essays. A PhD in Physics who wishes to remain anonymous wrote the following in rebuttal:
**
I recently came across Janice Fiamengo's "Why Does Feminism Want Women Fat?" critiquing the fat acceptance/body positivity movement. Elizabeth Wilkins-McKee responded negatively, claiming in her opening statement that:
"I think this essay dramatically oversimplifies a remarkably complex area of research."
Elizabeth then proceeds to give a long list of medical and psychological lines of argumentation to assert her claim that Janice is out-of-touch in alleging a significant role for feminism in the ascendency of the fat acceptance movement and its harms to society.
As an observer with a STEM background, I have major issues with Elizabeth's position on the fat acceptance movement's attempt to negate deep biological drives underlying what men find physically attractive in women.
Before I begin, it's also important to identify what most likely motivated Elizabeth to write about her opposition to Janice in the first place and to subsequently attack her credibility. The most obvious signal appears at the beginning of Janice's article, with a photo of fat acceptance advocate, Virgie Tovar, an obviously overweight woman with a double chin, a fat face, and by logical inference a large waistline who nonetheless "was hired by the San Francisco Department of Public Health in late 2024 to advise the department on weight bias."
For someone like Elizabeth who advertises herself as a licensed therapist to help people with psychologically-driven issues, I can understand how and why she would be triggered by the image of a clearly unhealthy woman being hired to give guidance on public health issues when she (Virgie Tovar) has given no clear indication of any interest to work on her own health and fitness or to advocate as such for others. The photo is jarring, showcasing the obvious absurdity of this line of reasoning from both Tovar and the San Francisco public health department to support the foundational principles of fat acceptance.
While it's certainly true that, for many people, there are deeply rooted psychological issues to overcome regarding body image, it's still a basic fact that a psychologically healthy person who's also severely overweight/morbidly obese has a serious physical problem that dramatically undermines quality of life.
Carrying too much body fat on the chest, arms, legs, torso, etc. will compromise basic body movement, impose dangerous levels of stress on vital organs, create high blood pressure throughout the body, and over time induce the formation of fat blockages in veins and arteries, leading to strokes, blindness, and other catastrophic consequences. NONE of these health risks has anything to do with the alleged societal merits of the body positivity movement, since the issues outlined above concern the FUNDAMENTAL SCIENCES of physics, chemistry, and biology that simply don't care about one's personal psychology or ideological worldview.
It's a basic physical reality that if you consume more energy per day as food than you expend through exercise and other productive activity, the net outcome is that the difference is stored in your body and you will gain weight. This is an obvious example of high-school level physics known as "conservation of energy," and no amount of psychological posturing will ever violate that reality. In that respect, there's nothing complicated about what needs to be done to help both men and women alike. For people who are willing to look for solutions, reliable fitness programs and other information are available on how to lose excess weight safely and effectively, and also keep it off permanently over time.
In light of essential facts about the physical universe, I can see how someone like Elizabeth will feel very threatened by someone like Janice affirming the existence of an objective reality that's independent of the (MIS)-PERCEPTIONS of that reality. This isn't to say that people who operate within the therapy profession don't have something positive to contribute. However, it's very dangerous for such people to outright deny the realities of basic science that even grade-school students have no trouble accepting as true.
I think that people like Elizabeth crave a longing for excessive complexity in understanding conceptually simple and physically-driven issues like weight loss and personal health in order to unnecessarily inject social and cultural descriptions of the problem and present them as causal factors when they simply aren't so. Furthermore, quoting from various studies in support of such claims doesn't necessarily indicate anything of substance when the studies seek to avoid basic facts that everyone understands.
While I don't think that Elizabeth is necessarily a stupid person, she does come across as MEDIOCRE at best in her scholarly understanding. From my observation of her critique of Janice's article, along with her own articles on Substack, with a disturbing fixation on Janice's personhood overall, I sense a feeling of intellectual inadequacy on her part and a need to overcompensate by citing a heavy reliance on "scholarly" literature to bolster her alleged points. All of this is done without ever addressing Janice's basic truth claims and the evidence that she cites.
Part of this sense of insecurity can be attributed to the fact that Janice has a sizeable following of over 9600 subscribers to her Substack page, while Elizabeth has 530 subscribers. While that's certainly a respectable number of people who follow Elizabeth, basic arithmetic says that for every one subscriber who supports her, Janice has well over 18 supporters. I already know that numerical fact doesn't sit well with feminists like Elizabeth whenever they come across an anti-feminist like Janice with expert knowledge about feminism as a social movement, and who is articulate enough to explain all of the demonstrably negative consequences caused by the feminist movement for the past 100 years or more.
If we examine the statistics of Janice's original article posted since July 6, to date there are 441 likes, 138 comments, and 70 restacks recorded. We can compare these statistics to that of Elizabeth's first Substack rebuttal posted on July 14 entitled: "One Weird Trick for Critiquing Feminism: Ignore What Feminists Actually Wrote." For her article, to date there are 13 likes, 12 comments, and 8 restacks. While that's not nothing, a grade-school level calculation gives Janice a 34-to-1 advantage on the number of likes compared to Elizabeth, and no amount of psychological-based argumentation will ever negate the basic mathematics of that reality. I would encourage Elizabeth to repeat the calculations for the other statistics on her own to drive the point home.
As for Elizabeth's second rebuttal posted on July 21 called: "You Cannot Diagnose an Intellectual Tradition" that's also addressed to Janice by name, her article has 4 likes, 9 comments, and 3 restacks, corresponding to a 110-to-1 like ratio advantage in favour of Janice.
In fairness to Elizabeth, there is one caveat to incorporate in this comparison, which is that a large CONSENSUS of popular opinion doesn't necessarily imply CORRECTNESS in the belief. However, that argument also applies when looking at feminism as a GLOBAL phenomenon where there exists a broad base of support among academic, media, and government institutions with the benefit of decades' worth of social programming to underpin its popularity. While anti-feminist belief is still numerically small on a global scale, its rate of support is growing significantly as an on-line presence that's not ever going away, with a corresponding increase in the outright rejection of feminism whose long-term future as a belief system appears destined for TOTAL ANNIHILATION over time.
For someone like Elizabeth who has a strong emotional attachment to feminism, someone like Janice clearly appears as an existential threat to her worldview, so it's of no surprise that she would feel such hostility towards her intellectual opponent. The fundamental problem Elizabeth has, however, is the growing worldwide recognition that the entirety of feminist scholarship is COMPLETE GARBAGE that's unworthy of anyone's time to read.
The fact that Janice has a deep understanding of feminist literature and can effectively articulate its toxicity for the benefit of others who don't have to subject themselves to this nonsense is something to be commended. From a cost-benefit basis, why would anyone want to waste his/her valuable time reading such idiocies as found in the ENTIRE CANON of feminist literature!? For someone like Elizabeth, whose entire line of argument is reliant on the same body of feminist literature, she would get ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE trying to persuade scientists like me to waste my time reading such COMPLETE GIBBERISH passing itself off as erudite scholarship, let alone expect me to take any of it seriously!
The bottom line throughout all of this controversy is that people have the right to believe or disbelieve whatever they want. However, NO ONE has the right to demand a specific outcome based upon said beliefs. If someone needs to adopt a posture of using complicated and convoluted lines of argument in order to address a relatively simple issue like weight loss and personal health, it's clear to me that such a person is employing a tactic to obscure the truth than to reveal it.
I think this misses what women are actually pushing back on. Most women know health matters. We live in these bodies. We know when we feel strong, tired, heavy, inflamed, anxious, attractive, disconnected, all of it. The issue is not that women want to be unhealthy. The issue is that women are tired of their bodies being treated like public property.
No one's body should be treated like public property, and I don't claim to speak for all women. Did you actually read this essay? The focus is on FEMINIST denials that there are clear links between obesity and health. Feminists do claim to speak for women, and they lie to women about obesity. If you don't care about that, fine, but don't pretend I made arguments I didn't make.
And while you're on your high horse about women's bodies as public property, which is a very dubious claim, try being a man in the United States. Men's bodies actually ARE property--the property of the U.S. government--in that men are required to sign up for Selective Service in case of a draft during war. Nobody asks women to make that commitment.
The article was spot on in showing the ridiculousness of allowing academics anywhere near public messaging, indeed anywhere near the public. It was an interesting read, thank you.
Thank you!
No problem, i wrote an brief article about red pill and militant feminism behaviours, it's an interesting space but you wrote about something i hadn't thought about at all - it was very interesting.
One caveat. A very close friend was morbidly obese. Actually so as he died at 71 of congestive heart failure. He and I walked into a store together. But he was about 20-30 feet ahead of me. We did not immediately appear to be together. We were the only customers in the store and the salesgirl, despite him having entered first, brushed right past him to serve me. After that I made a point of walking into stores behind him. People were openly hostile toward him. Other customers. Sales people. It was awful.
But, his obesity arguably killed him. And, it was due to over eating. He was my business partner and we would often travel on business. He and I ate about the same amount at most meals. But I would get up to urinate in the middle of the night and almost every night he would be sitting in the living room of the condo we would rent and be eating a massive meal. He would say ‘I couldn’t sleep and got bored so I came and sat down and thought I would have a snack.’ A SNACK! It would be more than I would eat in two days. He consistently said he didn’t each much. True enough if all you counted was what he consumed in public.
I think there is an incredible anti fat bias. But fat is very unhealthy. And we are a very fat society.
Part of body positivity movement is also around race. Many poorer black women eat poorly and are obese. They aren’t as beautiful. Race baiters have attacked thinness as a beauty standard because it is largely white.
I personally feel better the thinner I am. I could easily eat 2/3 of what I eat often and feel better. In fact, at 75 I really need very little. Most days I do live exactly that way. Skipping meals, eating less etc. but when I am with others eating I tend to eat more.
That's a sad story about your friend.
I too feel better when I don't eat much. I think my general health has greatly improved as I have cut calories over the past decade and more. It gets easier as one gets older, I find. I used to be very hungry all the time in my early 20s, and it was easy to gain weight.
I don't want to be an obsessive or become anorexic, etc., but I feel better when I don't make food a central part of my pleasure and satisfaction in life.
I too find it easier as I have gotten older. Not nearly as strong an appetite. And I’m especially glad to be eating less at this stage of life as the detrimental effects of fat on health seem to get worse as one gets older.
Well, I've got to admit that one thing I ocassionionly get a bit frustrated by is the expectation that men walk into the maw of eminent battle and almost certain death with perspective and grace, and then having to listen to women engaged in discussions of their battles regarding weight with the expectation that I'm to draw some sort of meaningful equivocation.
Just to be contrary...
"I too feel better when I don't eat much."
I've had to put my little sister to work. She now rings me every day to make sure I AM eating. Low blood pressure and not eating enough turned out a bit dangerous for me.
It was sad. I hung out with him on a Friday. We bumped into a mutual friend who called me later and said he was glad he bumped into him. ‘He seemed happy, for the first time in years’. I said he had been. It was good to see. But he was also really out of it. He was confuses as to where we were and asked if I knew where we were. A block from my home. Where he had been a hundred times. I was wondering if he should drive home. On the Sunday I got a call he had gone to bed Saturday night and didn’t wake up. Great way to go. Very hard on his wife. No time to prepare or pre-grieve etc. They had no children.
I am not a foodie. It is somewhat needed. And some of it tastes good. But it always tastes better when I am genuinely hungry, rather than ‘it is 6 o’clock, I must be hungry’
The saying 'the only real science is called engineering' describes everything.
Servant of the uber wealthy, the quote at 0:22 was either an organic observation, or a signal of compliance to those who had previously thought as much.
3 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxkKh6V3FWU
Thank you so much, Janice, for that second paragraph. It has made my day or perhaps my year. For something that should be so obvious to everyone (and by no means only in contemporary America), it's amazing that so few people, even men, actually notice it (or at least publicly acknowledge it for fear of ridicule or persecution). If that isn't the result of culturally fostered self-negation, I can't imagine what would be.
After all, even slaves have been fully aware, throughout history, that society has objectified and exploited them. Some house servants in the Old South were treated better than field hands, for instance, but few resisted the urge to rebel or escape when they could. Moral intuition (often encouraged by religion) told them that that their lives, their bodies, were of infinite value, not disposable or expendable (the means to some other end).
I should add here that it took centuries for Western countries to make men accept military conscription with some degree of passivity. Despite the promise of regular food or of adventure beyond their villages--along with the threat of jail (or execution for running away in battle)--press gangs had to beat most boys and young men into submission.
Also, service in the American armed forces is now voluntary, but it's not voluntary in most countries--certainly not for the "boy soldiers" in African militias.
On a different but related topic, has anyone noticed that fall from grace (and adulation) of Graham Platner makes a mockery of due process? I do suspect that he richly deserves his fate for raping a woman, but I don't actually know that because the only evidence against him has come from "credible" accusers, not from sworn testimony by witnesses in a court of law. The vigilantism of MeToo lives on, because even his former Democratic supporters now acknowledge (under pressure and out of political expediency) the need to "believe women." This reinforces the ideological premise that any means can justify a worthy end. What a mess.
"The vigilantism of MeToo lives on"
Nearly seventy percent of accusers during the witch hunts were women. There was a tendency to believe them too.
Your point is well taken, Greg. I would add only that those were usually witch trials, not witch hunts (screaming mobs with torches and pitchforks). Their legal standards for evidence were far from ours, but they were at least argued in ecclesiastical or secular courts of law--and not all were convicted. The feminist vigilantes of today have no need for torches and pitchforks but also no interest in due process under the law.
The burnings were largely lynchings as you say. Over about 170 years in Europe there were about 80,000 formally accused witches, conviction rates in the low 50% range and the punishments were generally a couple of years in prison which would not have been fun. Adam Jones did some interesting writing about such events in his work "Gendercide".
Interestingly the further north you go the higher the ratio of accused males. I always wondered if the mythologies in various regions and the types of "mischief makers" present in them affected this.
Witchcraft is still technical illegal in my environs - VIC, AUS. I wouldn't be surprised if our pollies have left it there as a joke.
No, Greg, the burnings were not exactly lynchings. Burning was a legally established punishment (although the witches of Salem and many other places were hanged, not burned). Courts tried the accused and then, if the accused were convicted, burned or hanged them. Lynchings in the American south during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were, at least in theory, illegal. They were carried out secretly, therefore, by vigilantes. Lynching was a form of mob terrorism, not of state-sponsored persecution.
But yes, Greg, men were often accused of sorcery (meaning the same thing as witchcraft), especially before the early modern period in Europe. Very often, these men (and women) belonged to suspect populations such as heretics (or crypto-heretics such as the Christian descendents of Jews who had been forcibly converted in Spain and Portugal) and infidels (openly practising Jews and Muslims). The early modern period, however, began with the Black Death, which suddenly destroyed medieval civilization but eventually led to a new one on many fronts simultaneously: theological (Reformation and Counter-Reformation), socio-economic (a rising urban middle-class), political (the modern nation-state), technological (gunpowder and eventually the steam-powered Industrial Revolution) and so on. Meanwhile, the survivors experienced profound disillusionment, anger and fear. They projected their fears mainly onto outsiders (some of whom, were imaginary and others, notably the Ottoman Turks, really were attacking Europe). I wrote what follows as my comment in an earlier Fiamengo File. I'm adding it here in case you haven't read it.
Yes, Greg, men were often accused of sorcery (meaning the same thing as witchcraft), especially before the early modern period in Europe. Very often, these men (and women) belonged to suspect populations such as heretics (or crypto-heretics such as the Christian descendents of Jews who had been forcibly converted in Spain and Portugal) and infidels. The early modern period, however, began with the Black Death, which suddenly destroyed medieval civilization but eventually led to a new one on many fronts simultaneously: theological (Reformation and Counter-Reformation), socio-economic (a rising urban middle-class), political (the modern nation-state), technological (gunpowder and eventually steam power) and so on. Meanwhile, the survivors experienced profound disillusionment, anger and fear, projecting their fears mainly onto outsiders (some of whom, notably the Ottoman Turks, really were attacking Europer).
I wrote what follows as my comment in an earlier Fiamengo File. I'm adding it here in case you haven't read it.
For one thing, not all of the witches were women. From ancient times until the fourteenth century, roughly equal numbers of men and women were tried (not necessarily executed) for witchcraft (a.k.a. sorcery).
It’s true that one target population included women (often old) who lived alone and supported themselves as midwives or abortionists. They were suspected of using supernatural methods (such as the “evil eye”) to harm or steal the children of other women. Because they prepared and sold herbal medicines, moreover, they were suspected of practicing the “old” (pre-Christian) religion and thus of being either heretics or infidels who conducted satanic parodies of the mass.
And there other populations either remained or became targets. These, including both men and women, were still interchangeable in the late medieval period because of intense anxiety about God during and after the Black Death but also intense anxiety about increasingly threatening “others.” Among these others were infidels. Jews had long lived “apart” in Europe, for instance, and were therefore targets of suspicion and resentment. By the early modern period, moreover, aggressive Muslims were invading southeastern Europe. Closer to home were many heretical movements. Heretics included the Cathars but also Protestants or Catholics (depending on political geography). It’s worth noting that all of these outsiders (some of them allegedly threatening and others truly threatening) were accused at the local level of similar crimes: poisoning wells, spreading plagues, desecrating the host, kidnapping and murdering Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes. When Jews were being attacked or exiled for these crimes, not surprisingly, heretics were left alone; when heretics were being attacked, Jews were left alone. This sense of peril from outsiders came with Europeans to the New World, moreover, where infidel tribal peoples sometimes (though not always) seemed to be sinister “outsiders.” It was in this context that the Salem witch trials—not hysterical “hunts” with torches and pitchforks but carefully litigated trials—occurred. The easiest targets were not tribal warriors, however, but their own children (most of whom, at this stage of the collective pathology, were girls or young women). At this point, the phenomenon began to die.
The underlying problem was not, Young and I argue, anxiety over “gender.” No one, especially after the Black Death, wanted to depopulate communities by murdering women. The problem was a series of dramatic historical changes, which were experienced as threats of subversion from both within (including the rise of science along with what would become secularism) and without (mysterious and therefore threatening outsiders).
Let the Courts deal with Platner. Your suspicion is irrelevant. You might even be wrong in your suspicion.
Making an allegation, is in most cases, risk free with no consequences for the accuser. Proving innocence is extremely difficult. Major damage is done even if no Court case results or even if a not guilty verdict is given.
That's true, Seamus. My personal suspicion is indeed irrelevant, both legally and morally. That's my point. But truth is not irrelevant in any community that values justice. This is precisely the danger that vigilantes have posed (at least) since biblical times. Only 250 years ago, the founders of American democracy realized the need for due process--fair trials for every citizen, no matter how unpopular--as a way of avoiding what they called "mobocracy." As you say, "Let the courts deal with Platner." Trouble is, they might not. And any lawyer who defends him in court--this is the legal duty of any prosecutor--will have to pay a heavy price for doing so.
Actually, public and private property rights have nothing to do with this, and I fail to see how the concept is in any way applicable to either arguement. They refer to land.
"women are tired of their bodies being treated like public property"
Oh, I'm sorry you had to register for Selective Service.
My first thought too.
Whenever I read an assertion such as “women are tired of their bodies being treated as public property” I look up to see a scantily clad blubbery female shoving her mammaries and bits in everyone’s faces.
Because the irony is that it’s always these vulgar types who say shit like this.
"We live in these bodies. We know when we feel strong, tired, heavy, inflamed, anxious, attractive, disconnected, all of it."
If only you knew when you'd eaten too much.
"tired of their bodies being treated like public property"
- Bits hacked off my body before reaching one week in age.
- Molested as a seven year old - legal because a woman did it.
- Grew up facing a very real prospect of conscription during the Vietnam war.
I was "tired" before I reached nineteen. Many didn't make it that far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGDhzVi1bqU&list=RDmGDhzVi1bqU&start_radio=1
"The issue is that women are tired of their bodies being treated like public property."
You think men are not tired? Or have you not given a fuck what men think or feel?
"The issue is that women are tired of their bodies being treated like public property." - Bunkum
Ding ding ding
You probably have a more legitimate beef with the post Cold War liberal political system that enabled the rampant objectification of women under the banner of corporate consumerism, rather than the rather wooly 'men bad' - most western societies and especially big business have been matriarchal for quite some time, and yet the objectification continues......
I think this essay dramatically oversimplifies a remarkably complex area of research.
We know that chronic shame, self-loathing, weight stigma, and repeated weight cycling are associated with poorer physical and psychological outcomes. We also know that hating yourself has proven to be a remarkably ineffective long-term health intervention.
Contemporary obesity research is far more nuanced than this essay suggests. Weight is one variable but it is not the only variable. Health is influenced by metabolic factors, physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, sleep, trauma, medications, socioeconomic conditions, chronic stress, genetics, and access to healthcare. Two people with the same BMI can have very different health profiles.
That doesn't mean obesity is irrelevant. It absolutely deserves thoughtful clinical attention. But reducing an extraordinarily complex biopsychosocial issue to "feminism wants women fat" is neither good science nor good public health.
The essay also ignores where much of the field has moved over the past decade. Increasingly, clinicians are talking about body neutrality, not body positivity. The goal is not to convince people to love every inch of their bodies. The goal is to help people care for their bodies without making weight or appearance the center of their identity. That is a very different proposition.
I'd also encourage reading more broadly across the obesity literature. One book worth considering is "Big Fat Lies". One of the ongoing challenges in obesity research is disentangling the effects of adiposity itself from the effects of weight stigma, discrimination, healthcare bias, chronic stress, repeated dieting, and the lived experience of being an obese person. Those variables are extraordinarily difficult to separate in longitudinal research, which is precisely why sweeping claims should make us cautious.
Finally, I think this essay replaces one reductionism with another. It rejects one ideological narrative only to substitute a different ideological narrative. Women's bodies deserve better than becoming the latest battleground in someone else's culture war.
If we're going to write confidently about women's health and public health, we owe readers the breadth of the evidence not simply the evidence that confirms our preferred worldview.
And perhaps the better question is this:
Who benefits when women spend their lives believing their bodies are projects to be fixed?
The answer is not simply "feminism." It is an entire ecosystem of industries, weight loss, wellness, beauty, pharmaceuticals, social media, and yes, parts of medicine that profit from women's dissatisfaction.
That is the conversation I wish this essay had taken seriously.
But the problem for you is: feminism is full of these reductionist narratives, and you are a feminist. How can you support an ideology that lies repeatedly? My essay doesn't claim to address all the issues relating to women and obesity; it merely claims to show that feminism lies and profits from lying.
I don't think that actually addresses the point I was making.
Can you name a single intellectual, political, scientific, or religious tradition that is entirely free of error? Before we go further, it would also help to define what you mean by a lie. That's a strong accusation, and it shouldn't be used interchangeably with "I disagree."
I wasn't arguing that feminism is beyond criticism. Quite the opposite. Like any broad intellectual and political movement spanning more than a century, feminism contains competing schools of thought, internal disagreements, ideas that have been revised or abandoned, and claims that have proven more or less persuasive over time.
The existence of flawed ideas or flawed people within a movement is not, by itself, evidence that the movement as a whole is fraudulent. If it were, we would have to discard nearly every major intellectual tradition ever developed.
Your essay presents a highly complex area of obesity research as though there were a single explanatory cause. The current scientific literature does not support that conclusion. If your thesis is that some feminist writers have made claims about weight or body image that are unsupported by evidence, then cite those claims and evaluate them. That's a fair argument.
But moving from "some feminists were wrong about X" to "feminism wants women fat" is a conclusion that requires far more evidence than your essay provides.
I'm interested in following the evidence wherever it leads, even when it challenges my own assumptions. That's why I think discussions of obesity should reflect the full biopsychosocial literature rather than reducing a multifactorial health issue to a single ideological explanation.
And if we're going to ask who benefits, then let's follow the money. The industries profiting from obesity, weight loss, cosmetic procedures, wellness products, pharmaceuticals, social media engagement, and even parts of healthcare generate billions of dollars every year. That ecosystem is driven by incentives far more powerful than any single political or social movement. Reducing it all to "feminism" oversimplifies the evidence in exactly the same way you criticize others for doing.
"The existence of flawed ideas or flawed people within a movement is not, by itself, evidence that the movement as a whole is fraudulent."
Gee, I hear the sonorous rhythms of AI! Are you a bot, or are you just using AI to write your responses?
The AI statement is true, but when the movement is LED by flawed people with flawed ideas, and when the vast majority of the movement's foot soldiers enthusiastically support those flawed people and flawed ideas--then yes, the movement can legitimately be seen as fraudulent.
I quoted directly from major popular and academic feminists claiming that fat is a response to patriarchy, that obese women challenge the patriarchy, and that there is no causative relationship between obesity and poor health. There is fraud for you! I suggest you spend your time challenging the highly influential feminist narratives that have failed to address a major health crisis for women, rather than feeding my essay into ChatGPT, or wherever you fed it, in order to come up with your canned responses.
I assure you, Elizabeth isn’t AI and she doesn’t use AI to make her point. She is an intelligent person who can articulate herself by using her own brain. I’m sure that’s scary for you… 🤷🏼♀️
An intelligent person who does whatever she can to protect the false victimhood status against all facts. LOL.
Elizabeth's comments are clearly AI-generated.
For what it’s worth, I think the author is attacking feminism because she thinks (practically says) that desire is only “natural” if it suits her preconceptions of such. The attack on feminism reads more as a cover for personal bias.
Very well said!!
I think we've reached the end of a productive conversation because the discussion has become increasingly reductionist.
The idea that health disparities have nothing to do with feminism or with social, economic, and patriarchal structures is simply not supported by the evidence. Public health research has spent decades demonstrating that health outcomes are shaped by far more than individual choices or voices, for that matter.
What also seems to be getting lost is that feminism is not a single, unified ideology. Like conservatism, liberalism, Christianity, psychoanalysis, or economics, it contains competing schools of thought, vigorous internal debates, and ideas that have evolved over time. Treating "feminism" as though every feminist agrees with every other feminist misunderstands how intellectual movements work. Isn't this in political science 101 courses?
This very same oversimplification appears in the discussion of obesity in the essay and on this thread. Very few serious researchers or thinkers argue that obesity is irrelevant. The debate is about far more nuanced questions: the limitations of BMI as a screening tool, the role of weight stigma, metabolic health, body neutrality, social determinants of health, and how we measure health risk accurately. How many times do I have to write this here?
A handful of provocative writers do not define an entire field. I would think an academic would understand this point.
By that logic, Donald Trump would represent the totality of conservative thought simply because he is a Republican. I don't think many conservatives or former President George W. Bush, for that matter would accept that premise. Intellectual traditions are always more diverse than their loudest voices of the time...or the most annoying ones.
We should extend that same courtesy to feminism. Anyway, reductionism prevails here. Once again.
"How many times do I have to write this here?"
As many times as you feel like it, I guess. No one is forcing you to keep on repeating the same old denials and obfuscations.
Janice, Janice, Janice....I can go at this all day.
The points I have made and my voice are genuine and rooted in my work and the research I have done to support it. I'm not quite sure why a nuanced and complete response to your essay reads as AI-generated to you. Research on the consistent use of AI indicates that it leads to a decline in the ability to apply critical thinking and inordinate trust in AI-generated material.
I would also like to add that ‘the thin ideal’ is mostly perpetuated by other women. Men usually like a variety of healthy body types and tend to prefer women who appear to have healthy hormones.
It's true that women compete with one another to be thin, often far beyond what most men prefer (certainly beyond what they 'require')--but I think most women who struggle to reach an ideal are thinking of a male viewer appraising them. The feminists are wrong that it is something imposed by men; it has to do with the psychology of femininity.
As a man, I can state without hesitation: botoxed lips are what gets us going.
My husband once got me this giant-lips-shaped face exerciser we saw on TV as an “As Seen on TV” gag gift. I keep it in a drawer I open frequently, and whenever I see it, I laugh
LOL
As evidenced by the fact that no matter how you explain to them that it's not your preference, they persist in that belief. The ideal is not imposed on them by men. It's internal, and stubbornly immune to any external input.
Yes, women and girls impose a ruthless hierarchy on each other based on attractiveness. I suspect it's more intense than the pressure men put on women.
The most handsome men tend to be jocks and jerks who wouldn't give a plain girl a minute's conversation, but the average man certainly would.
Women punch down more than men! Men are more likely to just ignore down. Anxiety among Gen Z girls is epidemic; among boys not as much.
According to feminists that's the fault of men who control everything. This is news to the majority of men, of course. In my experience, men are much more accepting of average/normal women as potential partners than women are of men. However, this is reframed by feminists as men not noticing, caring or only after sex etc. so Gentlemen you can't win!
No, the women men should avoid do that, not all women. I take exception to any assertion that these are the general rules. I've personally known too many women (and men) to lazily group them in this manner.
In fashion the ideal seems to be the body type of a 14 year old boy
Most fashion models are literal teenagers. They are not even using adult women to model adult clothing. 🙄🤬
Basically all supermodels (the models you actually know of) are indeed adult women. They likely started in their late teens but they gained notoriety as an adult.
Go look at any ad now and it’s teens modeling. I’ve been following fashion for years, and many models are teens. I’m not talking about “super models.” No teen should be modeling adult clothes. It makes no sense.
I just flipped through my latest issue of Vogue and there are teens in a few of the ads, but most of them were adults. It's pretty normal to wear regular, adult brands once you're 17, and definitely by 18-19. Designers feature young women because our idea of beauty (for women) is intrinsically tied with youth. It makes all the sense.
I've reported several ads in recent weeks as "child porn" or very near it. The models were definitely children but the posing was very "adult". Serves me right for playing games on my phone I guess.
Some "female" models are literally boys...
One of Bill Maher's routines years ago had a bit about how the models were buxom and hourglass-shaped until the 1960's and then suddenly Twiggy was the turning point. I think what really happened is that the fashion industry figured out that clothes hang a certain way on long-limbed slender women that creates much allure. Not seeing the curves is somehow more fascinating than seeing them, especially in younger women who still have the glow of fertility.
So I think it was mostly about selling clothes and magazines, not anything started by men; the fashionistas figured out that thin worked really well for sales -- to women.
Before then most men were into big breasts, small waists, and big hips, a pretty rare combination so it's hard to sell clothes for such hourglass figures. Whether men naturally liked that form or whether women had put that ideal into the heads of men I have no idea.
There's an awful lot of pederasty in this world.
Powerful ending.
Two axioms of feminism on display here that permeate all feminist thought and "scholarship":
(1) No matter the topic, always blame men (the patriarchy). No woman has agency; all are being puppeteered by an unseen male hand, in all things.
(2) Never consider the topic from the male side. Are obese men mistreated or ignored by women, including feminist women? Of course. Do men feel pressured by women to work out, build muscle, and also to not have protruding fat? Of course. Are men bombarded with images that make us feel inadequate? Absolutely. Just looking at leading men in movies, we see most, if the character is portrayed as sexually desirable, to be ripped, with six-pack abs.
As feminism wallows in self pity over this topic, same as all topics, if they realized it was similar not different for men, that might give them solace and provide some of the peace they seek.
I'm not sure they do seek peace. They need to believe that men have always had it better. There is a deep pleasure in resentment and outrage, in believing one's group to have been targeted for unjust treatment. If men are treated just as badly (or, as we know, much worse in many regards) in our societies, then the entirety of the ideology falls apart, and with it all the grim satisfactions and self-pity of righteous victimhood.
you are 100% right Janice.
Whilst in Germany and watching some TV, I saw a show about medical emergencies. A woman had been stabbed in the back and to remove it was seriously dangerous for her life.
Very delicate situation where any movement could kill her because the knife might make her bleed..
Anyway, I didn't see the end,. but it worked out, apparently.. but at one point a woman appeared and started talking about 'Gewalt gegen Frauen' - 'Violence against women' and that it is mainly women that get violated.
I was shocked.
I thought, you ladies must bring everything back to 'females are worse off'.
It turned out that it was a man that stabbed her.
But for my part, all this in German, was that it was a show about Medical situations that were very complicated and certainly dramatic and showed the situations that Ambulance people find themselves in,
and at that point I didn't give a damn about gender anything. Using a show like this to prove some point.
At that point it was about saving someones life and the people that were doing the saving, at one point, were all men.
This non sense surely ends.. soon...
anyway, I stopped watching. changed stations.
Women want equality! Except when they can get special treatment
Nope categorically wrong, Mark. I have yet to meet a feminist arguing for "special treatment." I've met plenty arguing for equal pay, equal legal rights, freedom from violence, reproductive healthcare, paid parental leave for both parents, and the ability to participate fully in civic life.
If that's "special treatment," we're using very different dictionaries.
Sorry, you are perhaps, like a fish, oblivious to the sea of privilege you are swimming in. Here are a few examples.
* All the major universities have a Gender Studies depatment, formerly Women's Studies, which is not expected to abide by the normal academic commitment to truth but is openly activist, and supports women, despite the fact that women outnumber men in academia.
* Schools have been redesigned to suit girls. The difference in performance that boys had before that has been exceeded by the current advantage to girls. But that difference is not being addressed.
* There are many female-only scholarships but next to no male-only, despire the fact that women have surpassed men at every level of study
* Female teachers, who are by far the majority, mark papers with a male name lower than if it has a girl's name.
* Family courts tend to accept any false accusations by mothers and to give default custody to her
* The field of psychology is dominated by women and the female mode of feeling and reacting is taken normal while the normal male ways are seen as inferior or pathological
* Only men get called on to put their lives on the line militarily. In the US you cannot vote unless you sign up for selective service
* On the Titanic being a woman was a greater privilege for getting onto the life boats and surviving then being upper class
* Men get harsher penalties for the same crimes
* The domestic violence industry tends to completely ignore male victims, excuse female violence, and assume men are evil. In fact, more women commit DV than men
* DEI supports women in careers where men are the majority, but areas where men are a minority do not offer quotas for men.
* We keep hearing about the pay gap, even though women in their 20s outearn men, and men are more committed to work and making money
* In France it is illegal for a man to do a paternity test on a child that he is raising. Hospitals get sued if the wrong baby is handed to a mother
* A study was done into gender equality around the world and it produced the Basic Index of Gender Equality (BIGI). It found that in all the western countries women were ahead of men. So of course it was not discussed much in public and the website was soon taken down.
I meant to add that I don’t think the Selective Service system is a good example of the hardships of men:
—it has never been activated since put in place after the Vietnam War and both men and women have argued it should be universal; if it’s a hardship for men because they have register in order to vote, then convince the decision-makers to change it, don’t blame women
—social reality is that only a tiny portion of American youth meet standards for service; if the Selective Service is ever activated for an existential threat, it will include men and women in order to give us a chance
—we have a volunteer force that is made up of both men and women
—women had to struggle with Congress and the Pentagon to get the right to serve in combat roles because men thought they weren’t capable and needed to be protected behind the lines. You might retort that women don’t have the same PT requirements but if that’s the issue, recognize that you’re saying men have it hard because women are excluded from roles they want to serve in.
All of which is to say, I hope that I’m helping by providing factual underpinnings to your claims.
I disagree. There are a number of things here that you are simply wrong about--and I've done my research. For example:
--Some careers are dominated by women, such as teaching. That is not because women are favored but rather that teaching has historically been considered a low-prestige and is a low-paid profession, as well as one of very few options for women to be employed. Women now have more options, but teaching remains low-prestige and low-paid.
-- Drawing on France as an example to make your point simply begs me to note that in some countries, female genital mutilation is a normal and involuntary practice not matched by any mutilation of males.
-- The pay gap accelerates permanently if women take time away from work to give birth. So the same people who think women need to have more babies also say that women have too many privileges. If women earn more in their 20s, part of that is because more women are entering the STEM professions and that pay gap reverses over time. The pay gap is also due to the different jobs men and women are able to access.
-- There are many people, myself included, that are concerned about the structure of schools and the need to ensure that they meet the needs of all students. A major challenge has actually been the effects of No Child Left Behind as implemented, not some feminist agenda.
There is so much more I can write here, but I'm concerned that your response will not further a constructive conversation. If you choose to be constructive, I will respond constructively because I am interested, as I hope all of us are, in making the world a better place.
Swim well.
A story of two victims...
Twins, male and female, sexually abused as children by the same individual at the same time.
SHE has free mental health services available in their home town.
HE must fly hundred of kilometres at his own expense and pay expensive private psychologists for the same help.
Governments had made the mistake of giving all the money and resource to feminist groups who promptly excluded males, including little boys, from all service provision for decades.
Through recent royal commissions we've learned of many suicides which might have been avoided had those victims been able to get the help they needed. That may or may not have involved "special treatment" but it certainly puts blood on feminist hands.
Nope. That's not how this works.
And, as a feminist, I'll add something that may surprise you: healthcare is a human right. For everyone.
If what you're claiming is accurate, this mini incomplete case study, that lack of access contributes to suicide deaths, which it does, then we should be asking why people cannot get the care they need, not using those deaths to score ideological points.
Look at who is actually doing the work: researchers studying suicide, clinicians on psychiatric units, therapists, social workers, crisis responders, and those providing care to people living on the streets. Men and women alike are dedicating their lives to reducing suffering and expanding access to treatment.
Your reductionist "us versus them" framework obscures a real issue you introduced here and I will not let you cheapen it with your antifeminist musings: healthcare inequity. It keeps us arguing with one another instead of addressing the structural problems that cost people their lives.
Of course feminists aren't arguing that they need special treatment; instead, they're insisting that they've been so badly oppressed that they thus deserve every special - oops, I mean necessary - accommodation they can possibly extort from society. So it's not demanding unearned preference, it's social justice! Laughable...
The entire universe seeks peace. Like a bee seeks a flower. Like an ideology seeks a victim. Like a river seeks the ocean. Like a bird seeks...something.
This is astute and persuasive. I concur!
I think this comment can be true of many minority groups not just feminists. It can get to a stage when it’s toxic and wallowing in resentment and bitterness.
I was lol'ing the other day driving past a billboard for the upcoming Chris Brown/Usher Raymond tour. Women will literally lose their shit over male performing artists they consider hot no matter how awful they are, meanwhile no female artist ever can count as her core fanbase men who lust after her.
In response to your #1 example. Feminists want women to swap the puppetering male hand, for a puppeteering female hand. As another commenter pointed out, women are way more judgmental of other women's (and men's) bodies & life choices than are men.
This strikes me as a red herring.
Women can absolutely police one another's bodies. There is good research on that. But it doesn't answer the question feminism is asking.
The question isn't, "Who criticizes whom?"
The question is, How do social structures, institutions, media, economics, and cultural norms shape women's lives, and who benefits from those arrangements?
Those are different questions.
And if we're broadening the conversation beyond body image, then we also have to ask who disproportionately perpetrates intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and homicide against women. Those are empirical questions with empirical answers.
Do you do gaslighting professionally?
You've set up a straw man.
Feminist scholarship isn't fundamentally about blaming men; it's about examining systems, incentives, and power including the ways those systems constrain men.
Men's body image, eating disorders, and pressures around muscularity have been studied for decades, including by feminist scholars.
It's much easier to argue with caricatures than with what people actually write.
"Feminist scholarship" is an oxymoron.
Seamus, you're free to keep going if you wish.
But you've just demonstrated that you don't appear to understand what scholarship actually is.
The nice thing about public conversations is that there is a record. Anyone reading this exchange can decide for themselves whose arguments are grounded in evidence and whose are not.
Please, continue if you feel the need.
Scholarship is simply the educated talking. Education does not, in fact, make people correct in their opinions.
Earlier you pointed out that my statement about feminism pulling off a bait & switch as to who we now allow to criticize our (female) chooses as a 'red herring' & a "straw man". Then proceeded to ask "empirical" questions that you insist have "empirical" answers. I'm assuming you're using scholarship to get those answers.
The problem with feminist scholarly research is that it only asked the questions you referenced. It does not ask how women negatively effect those spaces. How women, in the search for the empirical answers you are so sure exist creat a world of blame & negativity.
Feminism refuses to admit that in the pursuit of "equality" the movement has created a society of conformity, pressuring females to live in a prescribed way. This may not matter to you, if you prefer to live for a career & internalize the opinions of other women as the truth. Which leads me back to my prior argument.
Feminism is about creating in women a fearful victim mentality. Yes men kill women. Women also kill men, research shows in increasing numbers. Yes male run institutions exclude women. Female run institutions exclude men in increasing numbers. Women are not victims of male superiority, we are victims of female psychological manipulation.
And yet, in the feminist trial of the century, pictures of Harvey Weinstein's naked, overweight body were used as evidence the no woman could voluntarily find him attractive. Fatness was proof of guilt. No fat-acceptance there.
I always wondered if the debacle had been Brad Pitt behaving as Weinstein did, whether the 'survivors' would be reminiscing wistfully and smiling about their encounters.
There was a media interview with one 'survivor' I recall well, who couldn't factually describe her experience with Weinstein. Totally incoherent, she clearly had no clue what would constitute criminal behavior versus not criminal behavior, the entire point of the ongoing trial.
She just went on about 'ick' factors like his greasy skin and the way he "waddled." By those metrics Brad Pitt would definitely not have been found guilty of crimes.
It is interesting the "me too" thing barely touched the Rock world. Pretty amazing given the well documented excesses of bands and stars from the 1960s onwards.
The difference is with Weinstein it was tit for tat (pun intended), a transaction of sex for future roles. When the roles didn't come or weren't good enough, vengeance kicked in.
I have thought a lot about the Weinstein case, which is fascinating. I hope that one day in the future, a truly dispassionate person might write a book about what really went on.
The manner in which so many women turned on him, after years (decades) of going along with the playbook, may at least partially be explained by female psychology. Women tend to react as their peers are reacting, and suddenly it was time to take revenge on the man who had once controlled Hollywood.
In the meantime, perhaps, some might revive their own lagging careers and sexual cachet.
But I think more was going on. He was aging. They were aging. I don't think it mattered whether he had come through on what he promised or not. He was now older, frailer, uglier. Their fear or obeisance or admiration turned to hatred. Perhaps a surge of shame at their own previous mercenary behavior played a role. Or perhaps they merely wanted the chance to say, "I was once gorgeous enough to be coerced by this man!"
All of the testimony about his ugliness and misshapen genitals, etc. was pure feminine vengeance. Feminists think men hate women's bodies; once again, that is pure feminist projection. Women both envy and despise men's bodies, and seek evidence of weakness.
I suspect, also, that there is a great deal of self-hatred in Hollywood. Acting itself must at times induce a sense of one's own craven hollowness, made worse by the money to be made and the desperation around it in that place. The attack on Weinstein was a massive purgation and scapegoating of that hatred.
Brilliant. I think you nailed it. I also recall the unbridled hysteria that carried the year 2017, the #metoo moment it would come to be called. Given the trivial nature of many of the offenses, and how people like Aziz Ansari and Charlie Rose and Al Franken were vastly over-punished, it wasn't a moment of justice but more of a pogrom.
It was a national hysteria of women by the millions, in many cases reinterpreting innocuous male behaviors as if malicious.
I think women's tendency toward mob justice (an oxymoron) and groupthink were why societies limited women's participation in government for centuries, not misogyny. Decision making just works far better when people feel free to take an adversarial argumentative position without fear of being mobbed, which clearly isn't the case in the feminist movement. That's about lockstep agreement or keep your mouth shut. I recall one of your videos about a female professor who dared to say positive things about white men and how she was mercilessly mobbed by other academics. Such movements that severely punish the innocent are always as corrosive as acid against a functioning society.
Yes, Rachel Fulton Brown, 'Three Cheers for White Men' at the University of Chicago. Amazing example of women's viciousness to women.
This is consistent with the observation in this post that women want to remove male dominance of women and install female dominance of women.
Al Franken felt-up a sleeping woman, with photographic evidence. In the real workd, that's a crime.
Lose the partisan rose-colored glasses.
> Perhaps a surge of shame at their own previous mercenary behavior played a role.
I do wonder how people who do certain things to acquire wealth / status feel years removed, when they've grown used to the results (the hedonic treadmill) and have to reconcile what they did to get there.
Throw in the fact that the peak advantages of fame (for most these actresses) are extremely youth oriented: at 22, everyone is jealous of the TV star. At 50 - in the circles many of these successful actors are mixing in - not so much.
The roles of the purported victims were secondary to the business interest at the time to reduce the value of Weinstein's interest in his film enterprise and force his resignation. All the shock and horror provided justification for this outcome.
The media ate the lamentations alive, with full knowledge that it was ever thus in Hollywood.
No one ever seems to mention that it is insulting to women to see women as cowering victims, or to see women as incapable of understanding the reason for an invitation to a private room. If there was such great interest in protecting other women, that interest was not served by failing to report assault. All concerned said the mogul's vulgar (to be kind!) behavior was an open secret.
This was my first thought at the time. If it was an open secret, then how could the women who went to his hotel rooms be victims? They went there knowing what was going to happen and prepared to deal with it. Some (including the two complainants in his New York trial) even wrote him love letters for years afterward! ("I miss you, big guy").
I know the feminist answer: it was still coercion. Will we ever get to the point at which we acknowledge that women can and have since the beginning of time engaged in sexual transactions with powerful men, and that this is not the same as rape or harassment? If Weinstein is to be punished for that, then they should be punished also, for betraying other women and corrupting the casting process.
This is an extraordinary amount of motive-reading presented as psychology. The Weinstein cases were about allegations of coercion, abuse of power, and consent not an invitation to speculate that dozens of women were motivated by revenge, vanity, or envy.
Just because you deny it doesn't mean it ain't so.
Remember the attack and legacy destroying of Bill Cosby? The same women that waited in line to have sex and do drugs with him, and take a chance at him divorcing his wife and marrying them - 40 years of bitterness that he didn't find their Sex-parts as great as those women were sure they had 'gold platted' ones ..
But, did a little and you find the Lawyer Witch that 'collected' women to mobb him and the symbol of good fatherhood, manhood, career professional, .. that his character played on mass-media and many boys took as a father substitute mentor.
Here is a quote from my Apologetic article found below ..
---------
VI. BILL COSBY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF A PATERNAL SYMBOL
The Bill Cosby case presents a different species of argument than false accusation in the straightforward sense, and it is more important for that difference.
The Cosby Show aired from 1984 to 1992. For eight years, at the precise cultural moment when the two-parent middle-class family was being dismantled across demographic lines — offshore job elimination gutting single-income blue-collar wages, no-fault divorce removing the legal barriers to family dissolution, welfare policy creating multigenerational fatherlessness in urban communities — the Huxtable family stood as a counter-image. Dr. Cliff Huxtable was educated, employed, present, engaged, affectionate, and authoritative. He was funny. He made fatherhood look like something worth aspiring to. Children of all races, from all family situations, absorbed this image as a model of what a father, a husband, a man could be. For the millions of children growing up in fatherless households — whatever their race, whatever the cause of the absence — this was often the only sustained image of involved fatherhood available to them.
The destruction of that image, beginning in late 2014, was accomplished through mechanisms that no court has ever fully addressed.
The sequence is documented. In October 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress performed a routine calling Cosby a rapist. He had performed the same routine for six months with no significant response. This particular performance was captured on video and posted to Philadelphia Magazine’s website; from there it spread rapidly through coordinated media amplification.²⁷ Within weeks, Gloria Allred — who would ultimately represent 33 of the accusers — was hosting simultaneous press conferences producing waves of new complainants: three at one press conference in December 2014, three more at another in January 2015.²⁸ Sixty-plus accusers eventually came forward publicly, alleging incidents spanning from 1965 to 2008 — 43 years of alleged conduct producing virtually no contemporaneous police reports, then dozens of simultaneous public accusations within weeks of a specific media trigger.
The timing compression alone is a legitimate observation. Phylicia Rashad, Cosby’s co-star and someone with direct knowledge of his world, stated in January 2015 that the accusations constituted ‘a coordinated attack to hurt the comedian’s legacy.’²⁹
The criminal case that was actually prosecuted — Commonwealth v. Cosby — was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2021 on due process grounds. The Court found that a 2005 district attorney had made an unconditional promise not to prosecute Cosby, that Cosby relied on that promise when he testified in a civil deposition without invoking his Fifth Amendment right, and that a successor prosecutor then used that testimony to convict him. The Court ruled: ‘When an unconditional charging decision is made publicly and with the intent to induce action and reliance by the defendant, and when the defendant does so to his detriment, denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness.’³⁰
Additionally, the first jury to hear the case deadlocked and could not reach a verdict in 2017. A second jury — empaneled after the MeToo movement had transformed the cultural atmosphere — convicted him at retrial in 2018.³¹ The interaction between political climate and jury composition raises legitimate questions that were never adjudicated.
The argument here is not that Cosby was innocent of all conduct attributed to him. The record is too complicated for that claim. The argument is this: the cultural effect — the destruction of the Huxtable model, the erasure of aspirational fatherhood from the cultural landscape for a generation of fatherless children who had used it as a navigational star — was accomplished through mechanisms that operated independently of what any court ultimately found. The campaign produced its cultural effect before the first criminal charge was filed. It has produced it permanently, regardless of the due process findings that followed.
The specific form of the attack — targeting a symbol of paternal authority rather than a politician, a businessman, or an entertainer of a different kind — was not incidental. Whatever Cosby may have done in private, the Huxtable model represented something specific and threatening to the cultural forces that Clark documents: evidence that masculine authority, fatherly presence, and domestic stability were not only possible but aspirational. Its destruction served interests that had nothing to do with justice for any individual victim and everything to do with the erasure of a particular kind of masculine paternal authority from the cultural landscape.
--
Entire article is here.
Here is an Audio AI overview of article as YouTube Mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYxpU0su25c
".. The Invisible Weapon, Covert Aggression, Institutional Blindness, and the Architecture of Male Destruction", https://stevenwork.substack.com/p/multiverse-journal-index-number-2242, https://archive.is/SWAtj
All those years, all those accusations in 2014, but "virtually no contemporaneous police reports." The mind boggles. There is no "innocent until proven guilty" when some women band together and get shrill. No proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" required.
It's actually impossible in a non-consent case to prove non-consent with no physical evidence. But they don't care if an innocent man rots in prison.
Yes-but who would want to destroy the strong role model and image of Dr. Cliff Huxtable? And why? ???
I have seen videos of the excessive drug taking and sex with young women which attempt this. However, Weinstein was very wealthy and influential and more importantly worth suing. I've read claims that the main thrust behind it all was to take down his studio which sounds credible.
The MeToo movement perhaps appeared to have a smaller impact on much of the rock music world, but plenty of musicians were accused of misconduct, some faced significant professional consequences, and several prosecuted. Maybe it just fades into the background.
Gene Simmons, Ryan Adams, Marilyn Manson, Morrissey, Blood on the Dance Floor, Jesse Lacey, Chris Conley, Justin Sane, Jack Barakat, Alex Gaskarth, Austin Carlile, Tilian Pearson, Ronnie Radke, Tim Lambesis, Ian Watkins, Twiggy Ramirez, Pinegrove, The Orwells … Should I keep going?
“Take down his studio” only sounds credible if you’re conspiracy-addled. Miramax did more than fine - acquiring, merging with and being acquired by Lionsgate, Spyglass Media, Viacom, Paramount, etc.
The inconsistencies and incoherencies with this "movement" (if you can call it that), were, and are, through the roof. It's a convenient and cunning power play, the "arguments" employed in one situation, ignored in the next, at female whim. Zero credibility.
And the excesses of the Groupies?
Respectfully, I think this misses the central issue.
The Harvey Weinstein trial was not about whether he was attractive or whether women found him desirable.
It was about allegations of sexual assault, coercion, abuse of power, and the complicated dynamics of consent when one person controls another's livelihood and career.
Reducing that case to a discussion of body size trivializes what the women who testified were actually describing.
And yet his physical appearance was presented as factually unattractive, and was used in the prosecution's arguments to prove their case. So his desirability was part of the trial.
I'm not sure that follows.
AND -- Attorneys introduce all sorts of arguments in court that are intended to persuade a jury. That doesn't mean those arguments accurately reflect reality.
Pointing to what an attorney argued about someone's physical appearance in a trial doesn't establish that the argument is factually correct or scientifically meaningful. It tells us what the attorney thought might persuade a jury, not what the evidence ultimately supports.
Courtroom arguments are not the same thing as empirical evidence for your argument.
THIS. The goal of both sides (defense and prosecution) is to get the jury to believe their case. But “facts” as they’re presented in court are not the same thing as scientific facts
Accept oops! Medical details, witnesses, emails and messages were also presented in court to convict him. C’mon, man!
Weinstein's ex wife was extremely attractive and didn't stick around long when the going got tough. "So Mrs Weinstein what first attracted you to the multi millionaire Harvey Weinstein?"
DJT is no Adonis but there are millions of women who would lie with him - willingly.
I observe lots of fat, ageing skinheads with tattoos who have no problem finding mates. Most of them with little cash. Go figure.
Harvey Weinstein was extremely attractive to many women, who commodified their bodies. The oldest profession.
It all boils down to what you've always said, Female reproductive strategies by nature seek to destroy competitors. What better way to eliminate them than by making them repulsive.
There is definitely that happening here.
Women hate any woman more attractive than them. It’s vicious to say the least. It’s why my wife has so few female friends.
And let’s not forget leftists are akin to biological human waste. Not smart, not attractive, unmotivated envious nasty people who want nothing more than to destroy all that is good and beautiful.
Orbach's book was one of several that appeared in the 70s which seemed to be bestowing blame on all men. So I make women fat, eh? It's one of the silliest cases of falsely subscribing to an external locus of control - and repudiation of one's own responsibility.
I know! How is it remotely empowering to cast oneself as a victim in all circumstances?
It's not exactly empowering, but it brings sympathy and attention and a certain authority, and many women enjoy such things.
And not to forget, it provides a "free pass" for terrible behaviour and lack of responsibility. The allure of this cannot be underestimated.
Common nonsense has traditionally offered that fat women have such nice personalities. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 'free pass' provides cover for all manner of sadism. Sword and shield both: how convenient.
“How is it remotely empowering to cast oneself as a victim in all circumstances?”
Have you been asleep for the last decade?
Being the oppressed victim is the favored thing for leftists.
Because it is what woke Critical Theory / DEi / intersectionality teach: that the evil straight white male Christian (or Jewish) capitalist patriarchy are oppressors and responsible for all evil - and little to no good - in our zero-sum, power-based world.
And that the oppressed have a right to overcome their oppressors BY.ANY.MEANS.NECESSARY.
So being the oppressed is good. And being straight is bad, especially if you are white.
Which makes it not at all coincidental that there has been an explosion of teen girls who identify as bisexual and who identify as trans.
I agree with everything you've said. My point was that this is not empowering. And I stand by that assessment.
Then you will be cast out of the group of good little leftists.
Here in the U.S. at least I am protected by First Amendment free speech rights. I see now that in the U.K. you are not that lucky, and that thousands of Brits have been arrested for wrongthink posts on the Interwebs, so you’d best be careful… 😏
Oh I'm in America, and not even remotely a leftist of any stripe. The UK is truly nightmarish.
lol, I knew you were not a leftist.
But from the flag by your name I did assume U.K.
Fat women are victims of their gluttony and subsequent fatness. Blame men, Whats new
I remember when fat acceptance exploded onto the Internet. Seems to have died down now with more people pushing for health, fitness and self-improvement (sometimes to the extreme). Funnily enough I posted a recent article about body positivity. The whole thing is just sick. Yes of course it's not polite to constantly nag overweight people about their weight by my god, since when was promoting morbid obesity as "positive" a good idea?? Would we promote "skinny acceptance" and say anorexic people "deserve to be accepted as they are"? What nonsense. It's ridiculous.
Nonsense and ridiculous have always been the stock in trade of feminism. I originally thought many feminist ideas were a literal joke, that they weren't serious. Then I thought well it's an attempt to gaslight everybody, the old get them to not believe their own eyes.
Finally to my horror I had to accept that leading feminists really do believe their own nonsense. Any flaky idea as long as it blames men will always have traction.
My brother, same height as me and 26kg heavier lost all the excess about 6 years ago. Got down to a very healthy 70kg.
Dimwits started to tell him he was too thin. No one, including the dimwits, had ever told him he was too fat.
Fat acceptance is far too accepted.
Failure to desire fat women is simply one of the ways that all aspects of male sexually are sullied by feminists as undesirable, shameful, yuck, patriarchal and so forth. This has extended into criminalising and misconducting normal male sexual courtship, especially from men considered less desirable. The rules distinguishing acceptable male courtship from criminality are now deliberately both subjective on the part of an accuser and vague. This renders men vulnerable to prosecution, workplace discipline or career destruction for innocently motivated communications seen to be in error.
Allegations of sexual harassment now don't even require a woman to make clear in any way that a man's approaches (or was it his physique, status or wallet?) are unwanted. Claimed power differential is put forward in itself as evidence of harassment even when there was no suggestion of punishment or reward for the accuser's response. Sure, some behaviour might be so socially abnormal or disrespectful of the recipient that it reasonably could be defined as harassment; e.g. lewd offers of sex to someone relatively unknown. However, most allegations of sexual harassment don't involve such behaviour. Many criminal prosecutions for male sexual behaviour are now based on fine interpretations of 'consent', interpretations that over time have allowed consent to be judged as lacking regardless of contrary evidence. Misandry in full splendour.
One consistent goal of feminism is the desire to turn men and women against each other. This is another aspect of that. If enough women can be convinced that being massively overweight is in their interests, there will be fewer male-female relationships and more reasons to blame men. That such an outcome would be detrimental to women is, as usual, not an impediment to feminist ideology.
I clicked the heart, but it won't register, so please count this as a reply and an up vote.
I so agree about the goal of feminism being to turn women and men against each other (or, at minimum, just turn women against men, for similar results). Only from that standpoint does the complete incoherence of feminist thought make any kind of sense. One would think that a group of people as smart as the smartest men, over a time frame of centuries, could have concocted a doctrine that would be internally consistent.
"Feminist thought" is an oxymoron and very definitely incoherent.
I recall somebody saying years ago that feminism was invented so fat girls could get invites to the prom. I have no idea if it worked.
I've started to believe that perhaps rigid norms (objective standards, judgment, social penalty) are a reflection of masculine control (even when they're ENFORCED by women). The feminization of society is therefore leading to an erosion of norms, including a perverse and contrarian kind of joy in promoting ugliness, ill health, and disadvantaged identity groups.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-war-on-norms
Wow--what a great essay! It could be a small monograph.
James, this is wonderful.
Have you looked into the work of Joyce Benenson (her book Warriors and Worriers), and those of Tracy Vaillincourt and Dani Sulikowski?
They focus on intrasexual competition between women and men. Your observation that women teachers are more uncomfortable choosing among better and worse students has deep evolutionary roots discussed sensitively by these scientists, and indeed they are supported by Darwin’s work in this area. You and Janice Fiamengo both have hit on such precise descriptions of what this looks like on the cultural level that you seem most poised to check how the biological explanations find consilience with culture, and if they do, how.
An amusing paper Sulikowski wrote can be found here, about women’s competitiveness in cutting off each other’s hair, called “Off with her hair” (paper 51)
https://www.danisulikowski.com/publications
Tracy Vaillincourt studies female competition and coaches girls soccer teams. One arresting observation she mentioned was how girls would not shake hands after a game with the opposing team if there was beef during the game, whereas boys just let it go and shake hands at the end.
Joyce Benenson’s book is hated (naturally), but is absolutely chock full of many years of study, with fascinating detours into animal behavior:
https://www.amazon.com/WARRIORS-WORRIERS-BENENSON/dp/0199972230/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1OFS7K3EUKKJL&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.kePesbk02UPrBHXWwVrqD9Q77DLRAKbkzL7vCyMxOwnut57h2L4oGfRREuGBYn6T3M76yMpZM71wE0_HuHlBYA.p7YCnvvkyS0uU27amrPK8XbqpdAL9nBcViBZyxROIng&dib_tag=se&keywords=joyce+benenson&qid=1783434769&sprefix=joyce+benenson%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1
If we are to be honest, we would have to say that we are witnessing a grotesquerie in progress—which is what feminism has become. Indeed, fat is fab, if we only knew it. The feminist cathexis on weight as a positive attribute is a sign, if I may put it this way, of conceptual fatuousness. The culture itself has grown fat, bloated with an overabundance of feminist theory and commuting the question of identity to, among other things, body image and a celebration of body diversity, at the expense of the many faculties, qualities, and affective valencies that make us truly and fully human. An exclusive focus on body image is the simple-minded expansion of merely one particular attribute, given an ideological spin. The celebration of female fat—or as they sometimes put it, of those “at the higher end of the weight spectrum”—is a heavy weapon in the feminist arsenal. This is sizeism with a vengeance, which is ironically mentally reductive, a form of intellectual anorexia. Believe it! We have entirely transcended the realm of reason, sanity and common sense, and tossed the question of health and the concept of personal responsibility into the cultural dumpster.
Brava Janice!
My guess is this article may be the only thing that corpulent feminists have a hard time swallowing.
LOL
A few things stand out as contributing explanations:
1) Self-image - if you are X and X is not the current standard, it helps you feel better about yourself if you can bully people into believing X is good, actually.
2) Confusion that male sexual attention is not the same as relational investment, leading to some women assuming that they're 'enough' as they are and do not need to consider the desires of men (which is suicidal, given men are the target audience)
3) Women are often more fluid sexually and lesbians like creating more lesbians to widen the pool. Making women less attractive to men creates more single women, more single women who may try bi means more potential mates, and conversely
4) Intrasexual competition from straight women who meet the traditional standards for size who benefit by pushing as many women as possible out of the pool of possible mates for the top 5% of men that women fiercely compete over.
> Why Does Feminism Want Women Fat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
....describes the mindset of people who try to prevent others from gaining a favorable position, even if attaining such position would not directly impact those trying to stop them. It is usually summarized with the phrase: "If I can't have it, neither can you".