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So fun fact, I hate when people make fat jokes or ableist insults or whatever about Donald Trump or anyone really, and a lot of people argue you shouldn't do that because it hurts good fat or disabled people, but that's not my problem with it. My problem is that those values suck
See it's not that I'm worried how Trump feels and frankly while the shit you say about his body can be hurtful to others it's not really uniquely hurtful and I expect most of us with non normative bodies have heard it before. That doesn't make it okay but it's not my focus
When you say that shit, whether you realize you are doing this or not, you are revealing a value you hold about the nature of disability or fatness and morality. Here in the west it tends to be tied up in goofy christian ideas about the body as a pivot to salvation
I've ranted at you before about how descartes can eat my entire ass but the christian idea of an embodied soul is also v weird because it gives all these ideas that we're meant to "overcome" the "imperfections" of our flesh in order to be rewarded with eschatological perfection
Anyway, when people argue that their ableism or fat hate is excused when targeting a bad person, they tend to be consciously or unconsciously expressing that idea that the body is a lesson from god and in death we attain the form of the normate if we have been sufficiently moral
And while that all sounds like it wouldn't have too much effect on our day to day, there are Ways we treat disabled and fat people if we perceive that to be their fault
Whether it's seeing HIV/AIDS as punishment for sexual immorality, cancer as a failure of moral character, fatness as a failure of willpower and an expression of simultaneous ravenous greed and weakness, all of that has direct effect on how people are treated on mass scale
Denying healthcare, the allocation of funds to study, the treatment of individuals in public, in the workplace, in their doctor's office, all of these things are both reflective and instructive of these values
Anyway. What I'm saying is I'm not worried about a hypothetical person's hurt. I am worried about the reinforcement of a system that kills people. The idea that there is some ultimate moral dimension to our health rather than our health being a spectrum of experience and identity
Or put another way, do you want to reinforce oppressive body norms because this is how you end up reinforcing oppressive body norms
So for new followers who don't know what eschatological perfection is, eschatology is the study of the final destination of the soul in theology. The idea of eschatological perfection is like the thing that had people drawing Hawking standing from his chair walking into heaven
Obviously the idea that one is made "whole" in heaven reinforces the idea of disabled bodies as broken or incomplete
Anyway hooray I read too much please hire me or just like dom/me me but just like as an editor who forces me to finish writing a book
