The Fascists Want You Thin

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Hi, it’s Monday, November 24th, 2025, welcome to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. I don’t know about you but my For You Page has been dominated by discussions about the rise in popularity of extreme thinness, perpetuated partially by the current press tour for the second installment of the Wicked franchise. Many people have noted the extreme changes in body fat percentages of the cast members, specifically Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, and Michelle Yeoh, all of whom have appeared on red carpets recently looking especially gaunt. This has sparked a larger conversation about how extreme thinness is actually re-enforced and perpetuated by fascism, and that it is no coincidence that thin is once again in now that we have a fascist regime controlling the government. But is that true? Is there really a massive government conspiracy to keep women thin and hungry so that we can’t fight back when the revolution comes? Commentary about bodies online tends to trend towards black and white thinking, and I think that is also happening here. It also tends to ignite a firestorm of back and forth, of debate, in a way that few other subjects online tend to do. I made one off-handed single-sentence comment in a video a couple weeks ago about how I don’t like diet culture because I think there are better things to be doing than starving yourself and y’all had more to say about that single comment than about the entire rest of the video, and there’s a lot to unpack there, which we’ll get into. So I wanted to get to the bottom of this discussion and figure out correlation vs causation, cause and effect, are we all getting more obsessed with thinness because of the fascistic takeover in the White House????

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This headline from CNN caught my eye, “Cynthia Erivo shields Ariana Grande from barrier-jumping fan.” It is this video that has helped spark the discussions about thinness and fascism online. Using the Ground News browser extension, I can see that in the US CNN is considered “left leaning.” To get the big picture, I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

My partner on today’s video, Ground News, uses 3 independent monitoring organizations to assess the bias rating for each publication. Each news monitoring organization has their own methodology - including editorial reviews, blind bias surveys, independent reviews, and third party research. These are legit INDEPENDENT organizations, but they are limited by the data available to them: their analysis is done in the context of the U.S. political system. Our overton window has shifted so far right that CNN is considered “left leaning.” That tells you a lot about the context within which the media you’re consuming operates. And thanks to Ground News, I get even more context, including how factual each publication is and who owns it, giving me a well-rounded idea of the motivations, biases, and accuracy of the news I’m consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in America had that much information about the news they consume??

Because depending on where you or your family members get the news, you’re going to get very different takes on the same story.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture. I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective. And listen I’m not the only one who loves Ground News, the Nobel Peace Center even called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.”

I’m always really impressed with Ground News and genuinely think they’re a great resource. If you want to stay informed on US Politics and more Subscribe through this QR code or my link below at ground dot news slash leeja for 40% off this unlimited access Vantage Plan. It comes out to $5 a month for unlimited access to ALL the features I’ve mentioned. Thanks Ground News!

First, let me take a step back to quickly define fascism because it is a term that has been thrown around a LOT lately, and I think for good reason, but people tend to dismiss it as just an epithet that doesn’t mean anything because we use it as a label for everything. And the reality is that fascism is hard to define, it doesn’t fit into a box like other “isms” tend to do, and it is entirely dependent on the situation in which it arises. Robert Paxton’s book The Anatomy of Fascism helps to give us a kind of definition. Under Paxton’s interpretation, fascism is a “mass anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force” where nationhood and membership in a dominant class is put above all-else, and where national unity and distinction from a class of deplorable “others” is reinforced by the state. And by “anti-liberal” he didn’t mean liberals like we use the term in the modern US, like liberals vs conservatives. He meant the term “liberalism” to mean liberal economics, the idea of unrestricted free trade, a la neoliberalism, or what some might call “globalism” today. So an anti-liberal, anti-communist, pro-nationalist movement that revolves around membership to a proscribed group, and anyone outside that group is seen as a threat, as “others” in need of elimination in one way or another. The unique thing about fascism is that it matters where it develops. Because 1930s Germany was far more susceptible to the argument in favor of putting the nation above the individual, whereas, in 2020s United States, fascism is wielded by appealing to the rugged individualism that is so engrained in US culture. But the pieces are all there. The tariffs to reinforce protectionism, bring back manufacturing, and fight against globalization. The radical willingness to use force exhibited on January 6th 2021 and perpetuated in our streets by a growing gestapo made up of untrained militarized masked men who kidnap people off the streets as our government cheers. And those people being taken, the immigrants, the “others” seen as such a threat to the nation, to the sense of nationhood that they claim is eroded by our open borders, constantly vilified and stereotyped in seemingly never-ending propaganda pumped out by the government. The pieces are there. Robert Paxton himself, after January 6th, determined that Trump’s regime can rightfully be called fascistic. Okay so it’s important to take a moment to acknowledge that it is not an overstatement to call Trump a fascist or his regime fascistic, leading scholars of fascism use the term to describe this regime, we are not being hyperbolic when saying we are living under an increasingly fascist regime. Okay.

And it is true that historically fascist regimes like Hitler’s, like Mousolini’s, placed great emphasis on bodies, on the physical human form, as symbols of nationhood. Arno Breker was Hitler’s favorite sculptor and helped create the mythology of the Aryan race in Nazi germany–perfectly proportioned, lean, muscular male figures and slender, athletic women. The agile, athletic body ideal was directly tied in Nazi propaganda with the strength and health of the nation, which was a really enticing image in a country that was struggling to regain its strength after World War I. The first president of the Weimer Republic in Germany between World War I and the rise of Hitler, Friedrich Ebert, was photographed in a bathing suit next to Defense Minister Gustav Noske and the two were openly mocked for YEARS afterwards because of how unfit they both looked, the public seeing this as a metaphor for the weak and flabby state of the government of Germany after the first world war. Of course, Hitler wasn’t exactly the model of perfect athletic Aryan beauty but we’ve all seen Trump in his golfing whites, that doesn’t seem to matter. As Robert Paxton told the New York Times, quote “Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.” … Fascist movements succeeded, Paxton wrote, in environments in which liberal democracy stood accused of producing divisions and decline.”

That was true in post World War I Germany and it sure as hell is true today in the United States where income inequality is at an all time high and people are going bankrupt trying to pay for housing, food, education, childcare, and medical bills, the basics to keep themselves alive. The MAGA movement has capitalized on this desperation and directed it into hatred for their chosen “other”, immigrants. And much like the current milieu in the United States is ripe for fascism, it is also ripe for the re-emergence of the heroin chic aesthetic. But the thesis I would like to present to you today is that, while I think it serves the fascist agenda, I think that is merely a happy coincidence for the fascists and not the result of some vast conspiracy. Because, it turns out, we’ve been policing bodies and weight for a long long time, and that policing serves not to uphold fascism but instead to uphold the various ideologies that happen to serve fascism, like eugenics, the patriarchy, and neoliberalism. AND I CAN ALREADY PICTURE THE COMMENTS SECTION–some of you may think it’s really not that deep.

In fact, I went unwillingly into the bowels of Reddit to understand some of this ideology and I found myself in a subreddit called “FatLogic” which as far as I can tell is a community of 35,000 weekly visitors who see themselves as “healthy” or aspiring to be “healthy” and promoting “health” and feel they are diametrically opposed to what they call “FA’s” or “fat activists” who are engaged in quote “lengthy diatribes about how everything is society’s fault.” According to the page’s about section quote “Falling victim to fatlogic means accepting misinformation that will harm efforts to keep your body at a healthy weight (or lose weight if you need to do so).” There is so much to unpack about this but I noted some common objections that these health warriors had to so-called “fat activists” equating thinness with fascism, because I have seen these same ideas swirling all over the place on line including in my own comments section. Those objections include that it’s not that deep–not everything is political. I feel like if you’re watching my content you probably already understand that nothing happens in a vacuum and everything is political if you take a second to rub two brain cells together and think about it. That’s not to say that everything is a conspiracy, but everything exists within society and the way we think and feel about ourselves and our bodies is absoLUTELY influenced by the society we exist in, to pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant. Okay and then a lot of the other arguments they had against the idea that thinness serves fascism I think stems from this idea, which again I’ve seen all over the internet, that there is a strict binary here: anyone who isn’t preaching the gospel of maintaining a “healthy weight” is instead advocating for everyone to be so immobilized by their obesity that they can hardly get off the couch. Which is also I think a willfully ignorant interpretation of the body positivity movement. Is there problematic behavior within the online body positivity movement as well? You bet your ass there is. But from my experience consuming that content for literally a decade at this point, whether I wanted to or not, the general idea that is most often touted by people in the body positive community is that a person can be healthy while not fitting the stereotypical ideals of what a “healthy” body “should” look like. That the BMI scale doesn’t actually dictate a person’s lived experience in their own body–because some people can feel fine, have perfectly healthy test results, exist and function normally, and still be considered “obese” on the BMI scale. That thin people who DO fit the body ideal could be incredibly ill. That judging a person’s worth based on the size of their body is problematic and that there is discrimination that happens against fat people because our society has placed certain levels of worthiness onto people. That “calories in versus calories out” doesn’t capture the whole picture of a person’s weight and health, that things like poverty, childhood trauma and mental health disorders and auto-immune disorders that are, especially in women, criminally understudied and misunderstood, play a huge role in someone’s weight and someone’s ability to lose weight or maintain weight loss. At its best, the body positivity movement helps to complicate the conversations we have around weight and health, because it’s not black and white and we actually know very little about nutrition and how the body works, despite all the advances in modern medicine that do exist.

But for the people in the “FatLogic” subreddit, and in comments sections across the internet, having those conversations just glorifies being unhealthy and is nothing more than a misunderstanding of the basics of biology and physics. Okay but instead of fully engaging in those arguments I actually want to take a step back, because this is a symptom of a larger issue that we should have a conversation about when we’re talking about bodies and how they are policed in order to serve the ends of the government. Because what ALL of these conversations revolve around, whether within the “FatLogic” subreddit or the body positivity movement or elsewhere, is this ideal of being quote unquote “healthy.” Not only that there is one singular ideal of what “healthy” looks like but that it is assumed that all self respecting people should strive for that singular ideal of “health.” And whether or not someone strives for “health” determines their worth on some level. This pervasive obsession with “health” or trying to convince people that “health” can exist at every size kind of turns us into the proverbial fish that is so surrounded by water they don’t even realize they’re swimming in it. In trying to convince people that fat people can still be “healthy” we are taking for granted that “health” is and should be the ultimate end goal for anyone, and that someone’s failure to at least attempt to BE “healthy” is a deep moral failure. Once we step back and identify that assumption, NOW we can start having conversations around the politics of bodies. Instead of infighting in the comments section over whether or not Ariana Grande is “healthy” let’s discuss WHY we have placed so much emphasis and morality on health to begin with. Because THAT is its own social construct that HAS been orchestrated and promoted by governments for centuries.

I am of course NOT the first person to ever make this point, there’s a great book called Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Doctor Sabrina Strings, so if I haven’t convinced you that it IS in fact that deep, please consider giving that a read, it’s really revelatory. Because when we start examining how notions of “health” and what is the “correct” body to have have shifted and changed throughout history, that’s when we start to see how these notions perhaps are not orchestrated by fascism but are certainly convenient for fascism to thrive.

If we go back to the Renaissance, which was the 1300s through the early 1600s, the aesthetic of the “Rubenesque” woman was the European beauty standard–these women were STATELY to say the least, often somewhat muscular thanks to the influence of Greek art on the Renaissance, but also full figured, some might say, god forbid, fat. Fatness equated to wealth where you have a societal system dominated by feudal lords and the peasants who served them. Then came the trans-atlantic slave trade, the growth of the sugar cane trade that allowed for imports of larger and larger amounts of sugar into Europe, making it a lot more affordable and accessible to the everyday commoner. It was the increase in sugar consumption that helped precipitate a growing awareness of fatness and body mass. But it was the othering of enslaved Africans that helped precipitate the FEAR of having a higher body fat percentage. The European fascination with the wild, uncivilized black body is best exemplified in the use of a South African woman named Sarah Baartman, who was put on display as a kind of freakshow in the early 1800s. People from all across Europe would come to gawk at her because she was, allegedly, double cheeked up, and the Europeans saw it as a sort of living natural history museum, not a human but simply a freakish example of the exoticism of the African continent. She died at the age of 26 in 1815 and afterwards her remains, including her brain, genitalia, skeleton, and a body cast were put on display in various museums, her skeleton and body cast displayed facing away from the viewer to emphasize continued interest in her exotic proportions, and remained on display until the mid-1970s. Her remains were eventually repatriated to her homeland in South Africa and officially buried in August 2002. Like history is not that distant from us, you know?

The point is that it was around this time, the late 1700s, early 1800s and beyond, when the trans-atlantic slave trade was at its peak, when Europeans were being indoctrinated with the “savagry” of Africans, that body policing away from full figured women and towards a thin ideal began to first take shape. Victorians were real weird about labeling and categorizing everything, and a lot of pseudoscience sprung up to attempt to reinforce the differences between Europeans and Africans, to try to create categories of people based on physical differences that in turn represented something inherent in the person with the physical difference. In time, the accumulation of body fat was equated with the out of control and barbaric black race, and it was the duty of the European woman to get as far away from that body type as possible. To be thin, to control one’s intake, was a sign of refinement, of racial superiority, of godly self control that no African could ever possess. Body policing coincided with the invention of “races” as a means of justifying continued enslavement of human beings–it’s fine because they are different and worth less than us Europeans–and attempting to reinforce the supremacy of Europe and of the white race over others. This is of course also when eugenics was invented to give an official air to the racism through the creation of a pseudoscience that sounded legitimate but was based on nothing. This is also when the early Body Mass Index or BMI scale was invented. Remember how those Victorians loved categorizing and making shit up? Yeah this was one of those instances. In fact the BMI scale was heavily relied upon by Fancis Galton, one of the primary developers of eugenics. It was originally created by a man named Adolphe Quetelet who was on a mission to determine the social ideal of the “average man.” His index was never meant to be used as a medical test but instead was simply a measure of the average normal distribution of weights of men in 1835. And not even men generally. His data was taken from Scottish Highland and French soldiers, all male. It was, as is still the case for most medical studies, a metric designed for European men. The term “BMI” was coined by Ancel Keys in 1972 in a paper in which Keys also noted that the BMI was not fully satisfactory but was “as good as any other relative weight index as an indicator of relative obesity.” Not of health. Of “relative obesity.” He also noted that the BMI scale was a useful tool for POPULATION studies but not appropriate to be used for individual evaluations. So for studying population trends and data, BMI numbers may prove useful, but for evaluating the health of an individual it is not a particularly useful tool. But because it’s so simple and has been repeatedly published since it was originally created, it has been adopted as a tool to judge individuals based on their weight as compared to the average Scottish or French soldier in 1835.

Okay but that’s kind of an aside, the point is that the popular notion that thin is preferable has origins in the transatlantic slave trade, fear of being associated with blackness, and religious ideals of piety and self control also as a means of differentiating and distancing one’s self from blackness. In a piece for AfroPunk, Leslie Vargas writes “Over time, thinness has transcended race, becoming a symbol of wealth and privilege across communities. For Black women, thinness now operates as a form of social capital, a means to navigate a world that polices Black bodies with even greater scrutiny. In spaces where thinness is equated with success, health, and desirability, Black women are pressured to conform to these standards, further erasing the rich diversity of body types within Black communities.”

But I would argue that it is actually “health” that has become the status symbol, the commodity of the rich. Women can be trailer trash and also skinny, for example. But it is HEALTH that is put on this pedestal because it is so unattainable for the average person who has high cortisol from the stress of working and trying to pay for rent and healthcare and everything else that’s expensive but necessary for living, who doesn’t have time to go to the gym or meal prep or have the energy to eat three balanced high protein high fiber meals per day. The monied class with leisure is the only class capable of truly attaining “health” at the level that society has deemed correct. This is not a product of fascism or being caused by the rise of fascism. This has been an issue since before Trump got elected. Heroin chic existed in the 90s under a Democratic President. Our boomer parents are “almond moms” with fucked up relationships with food and their bodies because beauty standards in the 50s and 60s were so specific that weighing 10-15 pounds more or less than you “should” would lead to ridicule and public shaming. That our fascist overlords can get away with more because we’re all starving ourselves into oblivion is merely a happy coincidence of years of conditioning us to police each other over “health.” That RFK Junior was able to capitalize on years of crunchy granola liberals falling down the MAHA pipeline into antivax land where “health” has been twisted and contorted to fit an anti-science worldview that’s based partially on well-founded fears that our world is full of contaminants from major corporations that don’t care about our health and partially on conspiracy theory and pseudo-science, is not a plan formulated by the Trump regime but instead the Trump regime thriving where body and “health” policing had already taken hold. This racism, this patriarchy telling us to stay small and quiet, this was all already within us. Fascism just stepped in and said how can I exploit this.

So while I do LOVE to blame the fascists for the ills currently being inflicted upon this country, this one can be blamed on something else, something that implanted itself in America long before today’s fascist takeover, say it with me: neoliberalism!!! Okay stick with me here. Midcentury America saw post-war prosperity and a blossoming middle class. That combined with free market neoliberalism to emphasize the individual, the entrepreneur, the bootstrapper, the American Dream. The self-reliant individual who relies on their own dedication and hard work, letting the state off the hook for providing much of anything. That was put on steroids thanks to, say it with me, Ronald Fuckin Reagan who brought rugged cowboy individualism to the White House and sold America on the lie of trickle down economics, deregulating industries from sea to shining sea leading to the monopolistic deregulated hellscape that has catapulted the wealth of the 1% into the stratosphere while leaving the rest of us with stagnant wages, a predatory health insurance industry, and a depleted housing market. Thanks to that deregulation and the rampant capitalism of the last century, we are now sicker than we’ve ever been and we can’t trust businesses or our government to do anything about it. But thanks to that rugged individualism it’s actually all our fault as individuals if we can’t muscle through, literally, the impossible societal odds and just be healthy. Much like MAGA today and Reagan last century taught us to fear the Welfare Queens and the immigrants mooching off the system, anyone who is unhealthy because of anything that might be attributable to “lifestyle choices” is simply mooching off the system because of their own ignorance, stupidity, and laziness. And listen let me acknowledge there is definitely personal agency when it comes to your individual health, I’m not saying people are just the hopeless hapless results of their environment and they should just lay down and accept the nihilism of their situation. Moving your body more and eating vegetables is a conscious choice that some people can make. But it is the oversimplification of being “healthy”, it is able-ist as fuck to decide that everyone can just CHOOSE health, and the self righteousness with which “healthy” people speak about “unhealthy” people, the moral judgment placed on people who are “unhealthy” and assuming that body weight is the best test of someone’s worthiness for empathy, that shit is toxic, and it mirrors the thinking and worldview of fascists. It helps to normalize seeing certain people as more worthy, as worth more, than others. And that is the central tenant of fascism, that is what leads to people getting kidnapped off the streets into unmarked vans because they speak Spanish and might not have their documents in order, which is not a criminal offense, by the way. But we are able to look the other way because we are more worthy, we were born here, we aren’t criminals, we are more human than they are. And the capitalists and billionaires and major corporate shareholders benefit no matter what, no matter who’s in office, because this creates impossible standards that we are all chasing, that we are willing to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to attempt to attain, and all they have to do is tap into that desire and promise us a cure. So that when Ozempic, the miracle weight loss drug, comes onto the market, promising to fix all our ailments, to give us the thinness we so deeply desire so that we can finally prove our worth, well the perfect storm is already there, and the drug manufacturers are simply cashing in. And it is us, online, in the comments sections, in our communities, doing the policing work that benefits the fascists and the capitalists by commenting endlessly on whether or not people are living up to the “healthy” ideals they are morally supposed to live up to. Including Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh, who have gone too far and uh oh I’m not sure they’re healthy, and therefore they are worthy of criticism. Which lets everyone in society watching the conversation unfold know, puts them on notice, that if they too step out of line of the ideals of “health” in either direction, this mob of criticism will come for them, too. All this does is help the capitalists accumulate more wealth oops I’m so sorry that every video lately has turned into a marxist criticism but yeah here we are, your obsession with policing the “health” of everyone around you only reinforces the narrative that individuals are solely to blame if they fall outside the confines of what you think is “healthy” and in fact what you think is “healthy” has been dictated mostly by centuries of men just making shit up, usually influenced by the patriarchy or racism or both. And therefore it is up to individuals to force themselves to conform to these body standards and if they can’t manage to do that then they are bad and lazy. Because the end goal isn’t REALLY “health” because if these people policing other peoples’ bodies genuinely cared about their “health” that would require a level of empathy that people seem incapable of extending to those who have been “othered” those seen as morally reprehensible because they aren’t “healthy.” And it abdicates the state’s responsibility to provide for its people the basics necessary to sustain life, which is what I think the state ought to be responsible for but for capitalists the primary usefulness of the state lies in its ability to protect property and nothing else. So by assigning blame to individuals and letting the state off the hook you are playing into the hands of the 1% who say yes good shrink the state so that I can continue to exploit peoples’ labor and pay no taxes while everyone who works for me remains just sick enough to be too tired to organize against me but with just enough access to modern medicine to remain alive to continue to labor for me because they have to because otherwise they will have no health insurance and no home.

And oops here we are, back where every single episode has ended lately, and that is at class struggle, hello. A person can be perfectly healthy and also technically obese based on their BMI. Whether or not a person is healthy does not and should not determine their worthiness for empathy and respect. You can be the epitome of health and die of a heart attack tomorrow. You can struggle to maintain your health through no fault of your own. There are so many huge industries that depend on keeping us unhealthy in order to make their money that the odds are frankly stacked against us. You actually can’t tell a person’s health by just looking at them that’s literally why we have doctors and scanners and blood tests and urine tests and DEXA scans and all the other shit we rely on so that doctors can try to see what’s actually happening in our bodies because turns out it’s really complex. And while we all fight each other over whether or not we’re healthy enough to deserve empathy or food stamps, meanwhile Elon Musk has made $10 million dollars in the time it’s taken you to watch this video. You may think it’s not that deep but it so fucking is. Okay so what do we do about this.

I would challenge you to decenter capitalism from your life as much as possible–that is kinda a major fix for a lot of the ills of society. Can you borrow the thing instead of buy it, can you make do with what you already have, do you actually need the thing to begin with. When it comes to your body and the impossible standards being set around what is and is not the perfect health that you are supposed to be in, that is being capitalized on by various industries to try to sell you shit. Whether its protein powders or greens powders or at home workout equipment or protein bars or special weight loss programs or weight loss drugs or an at home infrared sauna from Costco like we are inundated with SHIT all fucking day because it’s our responsibility to make ourselves healthy and if we don’t then we’re bad people so we’re willing to impulse buy shit to try to make it happen. Speaking from experience a lot of the fatphobia that has been engrained in us we used to self-police, to shame ourselves, and it doesn’t work. If shame worked every fat person would be skinny as hell okay because this society provides enough shame to go around and yet we have an incredibly unhealthy population. So a major step is also trying to contend with the preconceived notions you have about your own worth inside your own head. Food deserts, childhood trauma, stress, anxiety, expectations of productivity from 9 am to 5pm every day, none of this is conducive to being healthy. The food industry spends billions every year on food science that is literally specially formulated to fuck with your lizard brain so that you cannot stop eating even when you want to. The system is specially formulated to make you ill and then make you feel bad for being ill. And the standards of “health” we are all being held to were largely made up and based off of centuries of misogyny, eugenics, and racism. That is SO MUCH to contend with, it’s okay if your relationship with your health and your body varies from day to day. It’s okay if you can’t “overcome” the entire system while you are actively being oppressed by it. “Health” looks different for different people, you are not a moral failure if you don’t live up to made up health standards, and you deserve to feel good about yourself no matter what you look like. You do not “owe” anyone your health. You also deserve to have the tools to have agency over your own health in a way that is not easy to attain the way the world is currently set up, and that fucking sucks. But you also do have some agency–this is a “yes, and” situation. We can acknowledge the societal hurdles and bullshit and also work towards feeling better in our bodies if we do not feel healthy. Whether or not you choose to do so does not make you morally superior or inferior, however. I personally have worked through my relationship with my body with a therapist and some EMDR sessions, which is a privilege not many people have access to but if you do I HIGHLY recommend unpacking the self-loathing, perfectionism, and self-policing that comes with especially being a woman in this fucking cesspool. And then I’ve found spite to be incredibly motivating when it comes to my health. Like I do it for me, too, but learning about how the BMI scale was just invented by some dude and was never meant to be an individual indicator of anything, learning about how racism and sexism shapes how society places worth on individuals based on body type, learning about how white nationalism benefits from enforcing gender norms wherein women should be small but not SO small because we have to be HEALTHY because we must BEAR THE ARYAN CHILDREN, all of that I find really inspiring to never have children and instead figure out how to be able to deadlift a small vehicle, ya know? I also have hypermobility and experience joint pain no matter what my weight is so I’m on a mission to figure out how much muscle it takes to no longer experience joint pain, which also makes me acutely aware of the aging process and concerned with having mobility well into my old age. So I try to extend myself empathy while also maintaining a sense of hope and agency over my own wellness, over feeling GOOD in my body, while maintaining realistic expectations and not buying into the unrealistic standards for “health” or thinness. And it’s a lot to juggle and I often really struggle with all of that. But doing that work inside of yourself means that you will also be less likely to extend that judgment to other people, who are likely dealing with things that are not apparent just by looking at them. And once again we come back to empathy and community as an antidote to the fascist hellhole that has currently engulfed this stupid country. Become ungovernable by showing empathy to yourself and your neighbors. Now THAT’s radical.

And if you’d like to support my work, consider joining here on YouTube by clicking the big join button below, or supporting me over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja miller, where you get access to all these episodes completely ad free. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about why rich people are obsessed with Saudi Arabia.

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