The Return of Kings has had one of their recent articles, 5 Reasons To Date A Girl With An Eating Disorder, blow up: so much so, even the Daily Mail has written a piece on it.
I think the arguments in the post is rather stupid. Aurini outlines why you should not date a girl with a dating order. Essentially, she is a disordered, self-destructive person who will destroy everything around her, including your relationship with her.
This is not a defence of the article, rather it is a short analysis of the response to this article and the response to a previous RoK intitiative, #FatShamingWeek.
Both obesity and anorexia are disordered; both are unhealthy, self-destructive lifestyles.
Yet, when RoK shames the former self-destructive lifestyle, RoK is decried as evil, but when RoK preaches acceptance of the latter, RoK is also decried as evil. As usual, Jezebel best exemplifies this lack of logical thinking
How can both acceptance of self-destructive eating habits and shaming of it be evil?
Or, to turn it around on the social justice types, why is it acceptable for people to body-shame anorexics?
This is perplexing to me: how can being unhealthily skinny be worthy of shame, while being unhealthily fat is not?
The best answer I can find comes partially from here:
Easy: change is hard.
It is a lot easier to come to accept (and possibly overcome) your self-loathing mentally than it is to overcome the pain of diet and exercise. Self-loathing is vague and amorphous, pain is immediate and direct.
Self-loathing can be reasoned at, self-justified, denied, and overcome by other emotions. There is no reasoning with, denying, or ignoring pain: pain is.
Instead of facing the pain, it is easier to accept the self-loathing.
Being obese is easy, being anorexic takes willpower and self-control.
The social justice war for fat acceptance and against anorexia has nothing to do with health, nothing to do with proper eating, nothing do do with a balanced life; it has everything to do with self-control and responsibility.
What the modern social justice warriors hate more than anything is personal responsibility. They do not want to be held responsible for their choices, they do not want to have to accept the consequences of their actions, they do not want to have to change, and, above all that, they do not want to feel shame or have anyone to judge them for their failings.
But how can they avoid shame when they are fat, which is shameful?
They can try to make obesity seem good, which they try but fail at because nobody can deny the disgust they feel at seeing a morbidly obese landwhale and the landwhale can’t help but notice the poorly-hidden looks of disgust often directed her way.
The second method is to deny people, themselves, agency; they have to deny that people are capable of controlling themselves and their destinies. How can they be responsible, how can they feel shame, when they have no control over their situation?
But, the anorexics show this for the lie it is: the anorexic takes complete personal responsibility for her weight, to a disgustingly unhealthy degree.
The anorexic shows extreme, unhealthy levels of self-control and self-discipline.
So, for the social justice warriors to maintain the lie that people become fat (or poor, or unsuccessful, or failures in other manners) for reasons beyond their control they have to pathologize the anorexic.
They can’t pathologize normal levels of self-control, because most would see through that, but they can pathologize unhealthy extremes of it.
To the social justice warrior, the fight against anorexia is a fight against the concept of self-control.
The health aspects of it are only secondary.
This is the only reasonable explanation I can think of as to why being morbidly skinny is somehow much worse than being morbidly obese.
