Via Peter Risdon and Feminist Bullshit, here’s a little something from the fat-activist blog Fierce Fatties, “home of the nouveau-bese”:

My friend was completely oblivious to how her actions [losing weight] could affect me at all. I chalk this up to pure self-centredness. 

I believe it’s called projection.

The disgruntled author, “hlkolaya,” aka Heather, describes herself as,

Avant-garde, serial activist, political, fat model, and vegan baker extraordinaire. 

And,

I weigh almost 300lbs and I have anorexia.

A selection of Heather’s activist ruminations, and her modelling portfolio, can be found at Fat Girl Posing. 

It occurs to me that previous visits to the pages of Everyday Feminism may have led readers to suspect that said publication is a haven for the competitively pretentious and neurotically unemployable. Well, this latest article by the non-binary pronoun nightmare known as Kris Nelson™ is sure to shatter such idle preconceptions: 

As a follower of Diana; as a worshipper of the sun, the moon, and the earth; and as a witch, it is my responsibility to engage in radical politics.

In case you missed it,  

I am a witch.

Therefore, naturally, the non-binary pronoun nightmare known as Kris Nelson™ “seeks community building, universal respect, environmental protection, and alternative forms of healing and living.” And obviously, 

All of these aspects of my craft are feminist and revolutionary. 

It all sounds terribly radical.

My religious beliefs are inherently radical.

In fact, readers are informed of this radicalness no fewer than nine times. Repeatedly describing oneself as radical is, of course, a sure sign of throbbing iconoclasm. And as a creature of immense and non-conformist insight,

aligning myself with feminist politics is necessary.

Well, our greatest minds have always been drawn to The Indignant Sisterhood.

As you’d imagine, our radical healer is gifted with strange energies and uncanny knowledge:

There are many amazing things that modern medicine offers us that herbal, crystal, and energy healing cannot… 

The words efficacy and survival spring to mind.

However, it can’t be denied that the medical industry is just as much a site for racism, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, fatphobia, and ableism as any other institution of systemic oppression.

There’s so much sin to purge. Someone fetch the healing stone.

Prostate cancer is a first-world problem.

Alex Manley, writing in the campus newspaper of Concordia University, Montreal: 

Let me be clear — I don’t want anyone to get cancer. I don’t think a man getting cancer is less tragic than a woman getting cancer.

However,

The [‘Movember’ prostate cancer awareness campaign] is just a really well-disguised tantrum that guys are content to throw to make it seem like prostate cancer research is as important as research towards curing women’s cancers.

And,

Prostate cancer is a hallmark of privilege. Deal with it.

Because he cares, you see.

Via Ace. 

Over little toys and little boys:

A kindergarten teacher in Bainbridge Island, Washington, actively denies her male students the opportunity to play with Lego blocks in order to encourage her female students to play with them. Karen Keller bars the boys in her class from playing with the colourful blocks, even going so far as to lie to them about their opportunity to play. “I always tell the boys, ‘You’re going to have a turn’ — and I’m like, ‘Yeah, when hell freezes over’ in my head,” Keller told the Bainbridge Island Review.

Because “unstructured play time” must be structured to conform with “promoting gender equity.”

Lego and “social justice.” We’ve been here before, you know. 

Via the pages of Everyday Feminism, Rachel Kuo instructs the dull masses on how to avoid “cultural appropriation” while eating: 

When we talk about “ethnic” food, we’re not referring to French, German, or Italian cuisine, and definitely not those Ikea Swedish meatballs.

I suspect few people think of German cuisine as particularly mysterious and alluring. There are, I fear, very few German restaurants beyond the borders of Germany. Good cars, though.

Usually, we’re talking about Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, and Mexican food – places where food is cooked by the “brownest” people.

As is the custom with articles in Everyday Feminism, the density of assumption in what follows is quite high. For instance, when my family ventures out for a meal, table for twenty, I can say with some confidence that the choice of restaurant isn’t determined by the melanin levels of the people cooking it.

What happens is that food becomes the only identifier for certain places. Japan reduced to ramen and sushi, Mexico reduced to tacos and burritos, India reduced to curry, and so on.

Again, note the loadedness, the questions begged. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten, say, chili while convinced that said meal was an adequate distillation of the entire population of Mexico and Texas, past and present. Nor can I recall “fetishizing the sustenance of another culture.” Or “subsuming histories and stories into menu items.” It’s a meal, not an attempt to absorb world history or to flirt with some notional brownness. Yet this is asserted as “what happens,” as some universal fact. And then promptly contradicted:  

Eating food from another culture in isolation from that culture’s history and also current issues mean [sic] that we’re just borrowing the pieces that are enjoyable – palatable and easily digestible. 

Um, isn’t that rather the point? You know, tastiness without baggage? Isn’t that what makes foreign cuisine commercially viable, a livelihood of millions? Or is ordering takeout only acceptable following lengthy, brow-furrowing investment in each and every vendor’s ancestral culture and current politics? Should every visit to, say, a Pakistani restaurant entail a stern lecture on the pros and cons of European colonialism and a lifetime subscription to the fever dream of Islam? Would that aid digestion? Stated plainly, it sounds a little silly. But Ms Kuo wishes to appear concerned, deeply concerned, that people of pallor might enjoy falafel and a spot of hummus “but not understand or address the ongoing Islamophobia in the US.”