You should chew your food until it is small enough to swallow easily,

The Guardian, paper of the enlightened, tells its readers how to chew food.

Also, open thread.

Update:

In the comments, via Darleen, behold the bedlamite dance.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this item of possible interest:

As the fat-positivity movement has gained momentum, so, too, have debates around how fat folks should lead healthy lives. [Sonalee] Rashatwar, though, considers how sizeism is affected by racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, and she counsels people against intentional weight loss.

Well, we mustn’t be practical. That wouldn’t be woke. And regaining viable proportions, such that one’s health is not at risk and one’s lifespan needlessly shortened, sounds way too much like work and responsibility. Instead, attention is displaced to a more theoretical, and conveniently improbable, project:

Rashatwar traces contemporary fatphobia to colonial brutality and how enslaved people were treated. Citing researcher-advocate Caleb Luna, Rashatwar said curing anti-fatness would mean dismantling society’s foundation: “I love to talk about undoing Western civilisation because it’s just so romantic to me.”

Hm. Lose weight, or topple Western civilisation? It’s the fat person’s eternal dilemma.

Ms Rashatwar is a “community organiser” and “Instagram therapist,” a self-styled healer and woman of insight, and is therefore not at all grandiose, self-excusing or pathologically unrealistic. And so, her therapeutic endeavours include posting “really, really political and radical content” about how terrible capitalism is, how terrible the police are, and how righteous it is to be obese and consequently to live with needless limitations and increasing discomfort.

Ms Rashatwar has chosen to blame her own health issues, including high blood pressure, on “weight stigma” and “white supremacy,” rather than on her size and prodigious eating habits. When not equating routine health advice with eugenics and “Nazi science,” Ms Rashatwar, a self-described “donut queen,” claims that “diet culture and fat phobia are forms of sexual violence.”

The being named Caleb Luna, mentioned above, has cropped up here before. Readers are welcome to ponder said being’s credibility as a “researcher-advocate,” an authority to cite.

Somewhat related.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this girthy lady and her list of complaints:

Smaller plus-size people, please check your privilege. That includes a mid-fat like me who is FAR more privileged than folks larger than me. I’m honestly so sick of people including small fats and thinking that’s enough… and I’m sick of small fats not calling out the fact that they are the biggest people at the event/shoot/meeting or whatever it is. Fat people above a 20 exist, and we fucking matter. We deserve to be included and seen. Super fat people deserve to be included. Infini-fat people deserve to be included. Fat people of colour deserve to be included. Disabled fat people deserve to be included. We all matter too. Your body positivity isn’t shit if it doesn’t include us.

Setting aside the intersectional hierarchy of fatness – small-fat, mid-fat, super-fat and infini-fat – there is, I think, something odd about the chosen language. In woke usage, the word privilege implies arbitrariness, some random quirk of life, an attribute or circumstance unrelated to one’s own efforts or choices. As if becoming sufficiently vast to engage in fat activism, and bang on about privilege, were merely a matter of the planets aligning a certain way. As if anyone might become colossally fat spontaneously, overnight, with no warning, and through no action, or inaction, of their own. Which doesn’t sound terribly plausible. In fact, it sounds like an attempt to displace responsibility and thereby deceive.

Also, open thread. 

In niche eatery news:

A feminist-owned and operated cafe that made headlines around the world after introducing an 18% “man tax” on male customers will be closing its doors at the end of the month. Handsome Her, a vegan establishment located in Melbourne, Australia, will be going out of business on April 28, according to an announcement on its website.

It turns out that “brazen public discussions of structural inequality and oppression,” rules about women having “priority seating,” and serving turmeric lattes with macadamia milk, isn’t in fact the basis of a thriving business. Even in Brunswick, Melbourne. However, the empowered proprietors insist that the mockery aimed at their pricing policy merely “showed us how fragile masculinity is and solidified the necessity for us to confront and dismantle patriarchy.”

Via Orwell & Goode.

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Among The Little People. 

Feminist academic Dr Jane Bone has “intra-active encounters” with children’s furniture.

This traumatic and “haunting” experience – being a grown-up among lots of small chairs – apparently reveals “the undervalued nature of teaching young children.” A point Dr Bone underlines with an anecdote involving a teacher who, during a meeting, perched on a chair intended for children, rather than searching out a more suitably proportioned one. Damning and conclusive, I think you’ll agree. And Dr Bone’s mental reach extends beyond mere anecdote: “In order to recapture this [experience]… I went to IKEA to sit on some small chairs.”

Turf War. 

Charles Murray attempts to speak on campus. A riot ensues.

As one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)

Feign Diabetes, It’s The Only Way. 

The Guardian’s Sarah Marsh is being oppressed by free cake.