u/illixxxit

…and there’s a THIRD thing: online “body positivity” and/or “fat activism” convos often belittle people like us who struggle at the opposite end of the bell-curve and do not include us in their “positivity.”

Beauty standards around weight always work against the people whose bodies are policed. Back in the 2000s, tabloid celebrities were always +/- 10lbs from being “bulky” or “needs a cheeseburger.” (Consider Renee Zellweger, “Bridget Jones or Bridget Bones?” if she was a UK size 6 or a UK size 2.) Jokes about girls having one “fat” attribute like “cankles” or a big bum, and therefore being undesirable, show up even in ‘family-friendly’ media. Meanwhile being “too skinny” has its own gruesome logic of taunts that often evoke prepubescent desexualization, or ED, in the rudest ways possible. I’m not gonna try to exhaust the ways in which it is generally awful to have a body in public as a woman. You can be too thin and too fat at the same time in the mass-culture eye.

Okay, so what about r/xxs? I’m posting this because I’m increasingly seeing this subreddit become less about recommending clothing brands that fit, sharing strategies for shopping, or venting frustration about misleading size charts, and more about taking an “anti-fat activist” position. It’s like people want to invent a culture war between “plus size individuals” and small-size individuals.

In general, both demographics are in a shitty position relative to clothing manufacturers, not actually in a shitty position relative to each other. It is not a zero sum game! You do not get better-fitting XXS clothing by snarking at people of other sizes!

Some (niche) fat-activist circles online mistake small bodies for their enemy. That’s wrong. The enemy is in fact cultural logics that equate women’s size and shape with their worth or desirability. CLEARLY sizing is not working for most of us. This is not the level to which we should sink.

tl;dr: Can we please not do the culture war thing? It’s really embarrassing

I’m pretty good at finding stuff but this has been a doozy for me.

It was a first-person essay or article written by a man who had been in and out of treatment for alcoholism. Definitely set in a city, probably New York City, likely from a city paper. The piece shared his “strategies” for concealing his drinking — I specifically remember him **talking about being out to brunch/lunch/dinner and ordering drinks at the restaurant bar, or going across the street to quickly drink** — this was not presented as good behavior, just compulsive, and furtive. There were numerous examples. I read this online but it may have existed in print.

Thank you.