I denounce Trump and everything he stands for.
When I became vocal about this on the Fuck It Diet platform last November, it resonated with many, but pissed off lots of people too, and I lost lots of followers.
They told me to keep politics out of it. They just wanted to heal their food issues, why did I have to alienate them by talking about Trump and taking a side?
But see, you can’t keep politics out of it. You must see the connection if you want to heal your food stuff. Your food stuff is not merely about food, it is connected to a big wide web of societal beliefs and structures and prejudices and cruelties, turning you against yourself.
It is about the way you have been taught to see your worth as it stands up against the cultural beauty ideal – thin and white.
We are talking about a man who owned Miss USA, who talked about women as if they are meat, bragged about sexual assault, then said that the women were to ugly to sexually assault. He insults people for being fat, actively incites fear of the other, and has about as much racial sensitivity as Michael Scott from The Office, with none of the charm or willingness to improve.
We have raised up a man who seems to have no genuine empathy and shows absolutely no remorse.
Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with our relationship to bodies (and by proxy, food). This has everything to do with everything. These are all parts of the cultural piece that keep us hating our bodies, and afraid of being ostracized and insulted for what we look like, and who we are.
Social justice and the way women’s bodies and fat bodies are treated, intersects with the way race, class, and gender are treated. Body politics and the fuck it diet are both political. They just are.
And recently Neo-Nazis and the KKK, marched without hoods. One of them killed and injured peaceful counter-protesters.
These are hate groups and terrorists, chanting racial slurs, oblivious of their deep privilege, mad with rage and hatred against the minority groups they fear will replace them. Or whatever makes a nazi a nazi and a KKK member a KKK member. Pure evil maybe. Or deep displaced understanding of how happiness and the world works. I try to understand, and I fail to.
I am not an expert on racism in the USA. Not even close. But I see the connection between body politics and race politics and feminism. They overlap, they affect each other, and they are very real and hold a great deal of weight as we go forward – no fuckin’ pun intended. I never intend puns.
You can’t keep politics out of it. Normalizing your relationship to food is body politics. And the way our president and his buds talk (and act) matters.
And it has everything to do with everything.