#BodyPositive Propaganda Roundup: Twerking Icon Lizzo Rage-‘Quits,’ Cites Fatphobia

Documenting the meatiest, juiciest cuts of “fat acceptance” propaganda from corporate and social media.

Lizzo ‘quits’ music, cites fatphobia

“This isn't a for-real suicide-thing. This is probably one of those cry-for-help things.”
-Marla Singer, Fight Club

Via Entertainment Weekly:

“The Grammy winner shared a frustrated Instagram post on Friday afternoon, venting about ‘lies being told about me for clout and views’ and concluding with a cryptic announcement: ‘I quit.’

‘I'm getting tired of putting up with being dragged by everyone in my life and on the internet,’ Lizzo wrote in her post. ‘All I want is to make music and make people happy and help the world be a little better than how I found it. But I'm starting to feel like the world doesn't want me in it.’

‘I'm constantly up against lies being told about me for clout & views,’ she continued. ‘Being the butt of the joke every single time because of how I look. My character being picked apart by people who don't know me and disrespecting my name. I didn't sign up for this s---. I quit.’

The vague announcement came with little warning, though Lizzo did admit she was contemplating quitting music last June after being on the receiving end of a stream of body-shaming remarks. It remains unclear if Lizzo is merely taking a step back from social media or her career amid ongoing legal troubles or whether she intends to leave the music industry altogether. Her representatives did not immediately respond to EW's request for clarification…

In recent months, Lizzo has been mired in controversy, after three of her former back-up dancers filed a lawsuit suing the artist, her production company, and her dance captain for alleged sexual harassment, weight-shaming, racial discrimination, and creating a ‘hostile work environment.’”

Frankly, although I still can’t endorse the practice in principle, it’s refreshing to see a non-white, non-male celebrity get sued for the old “hostile work environment” racket.

       Related: Lawsuit Filed: A Fat Activist and Her Three Backup Dancers Walk Into a Brothel…

The whole “I’m quitting because you called me fat” routine is rich coming from a morbidly obese fat icon who got famous bragging about being a slobby human-walrus hybrid as a novel form of feminist self-empowerment.

For all the legions of Lizzo fans in the Armageddon Prose audience, fret not and rest assured the diverse Slay Queen will be back into the spotlight to gyrate her disgusting ass on BET tout de suite.

Like a moth to flame, she can’t stay away from the warm embrace of the limelight.

Slimmed-down Oprah does Ozempic infomercial dressed up as a television program, cries about fatphobia

Oh, the irony of lamenting fatphobia while selling the fats expensive drugs to fix their obesity!

The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one — assuming she can hear herself think over the cash register clinking sound effect going off in her brain off of her latest (probable) multi-million-dollar pharma sponsorship deal.

          Related: Oprah Winfrey, ‘Panel of Experts’ Convene to Hawk Drug to Fats

Via Healthline:

“’For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport,’ Oprah Winfrey said during the opening monologue for An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, which aired Monday on ABC and is now available to stream on Hulu…

‘I come to this conversation with the hope that we can start releasing the stigma and the shame and the judgment, to stop shaming other people for being overweight or how they choose to lose – or not lose – weight and, most importantly, to stop shaming ourselves,’ said Winfrey, who in late 2023 revealed she was taking anti-obesity medicine and received both support [and] backlash.”

More cognitive dissonance:

·       we need to stop “stigmatizing” and “shaming” fats for their obesity, and

·       it’s a great idea to sell the rubes drugs that cost in excess of $1,000/month to eliminate said obesity.

These are mutually contradictory tenets that would give an honest person with any sense of integrity or shame pause to reconsider. But let’s not delude ourselves regarding the caliber of person we’re dealing with here.

Anyway, here is Oprah with a theatrical parade of former and current fats — probably themselves also handsomely paid by the industry to put on the show — lauding the Ozempic miracles they witnessed conjured up by the pharmaceutical gods, channeled through their diverse meat puppet Lady Holy Virgin Oprah in her pristine baby-blue pantsuit:

And now an unrelated word from Armageddon Prose patron-saint, Bill Hicks:

“If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Just a little thought, I’m just trying to plant seeds… Kill yourself… There’s no rationalization for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, okay? Kill yourselves. Seriously… There’s no ****ing joke coming… You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with vile and garbage, you are ****ed… Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your ****ing soul. Kill yourself. Planting seeds… I know all the marketing people are going ‘he’s just doing a joke’; there’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tailpipe, ****ing hang yourself…. I don’t care how you do it.”

                 Related: Bill Hicks and I Have Some Life Advice For Marketers

Bamboozled fats try to get off Ozempic treadmill, pharmaceutical industry refuses: ‘We’re done when I say we’re done’

You make a deal with the devil, it’s for life, as my Midwestern Irish-Catholic grandmammy used to say.

Via Yahoo! News:

“Millions of Americans who have dropped pounds and boosted their health using popular obesity drugs like Wegovy are facing a new dilemma: What happens if they stop taking them?

Many worry, rightly, that they’ll regain weight and revert to old habits. In clinical trials, patients who paused the drugs put back on most of the weight they lost.

But others are gambling on a do-it-yourself strategy to ease off the drugs and stay slim by stretching out doses, taking the medication intermittently or stopping and starting again only if needed.

‘To me, it’s a help, it’s an aid,’ said Donna Cooper, 62, of Front Royal, Virginia, who lost nearly 40 pounds in nine months using Wegovy along with diet and exercise. ‘At some point you have to come off of them. I don’t want to be on them forever.’”

Donna, bless her heart, appears to be a bit confused about how this hustle works. She might not want to be on Wegovy forever, but its purveyor most certainly does want her on it forever. That’s the whole business model.

Continuing:

“But many people don't stick with it. One recent study published in the journal Obesity found that just 40% of patients who filled a prescription for Wegovy in 2021 or 2022 were still taking it a year later.

Doctors who treat obesity stress that the disease is a chronic condition that must be managed indefinitely, like heart disease or high blood pressure. The new injection drugs work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. They were designed — and tested — to be taken continuously, experts said.

‘We are not an injection shop,’ said Dr. Andres Acosta, an obesity researcher and medical adviser at the Mayo Clinic. ‘I don’t think they should be used in intermittent fashion. It’s not approved for that. They don’t work like that.’”

‘Hunger: A Memoir of My Body’: Fat activist pens elaborate apologia for gigantism

The extent to which morbidly obese feminists will reach to justify their appalling BMIs under the auspices of Social Justice™ or whatever never fail to disappoint.

Such is the case with “Hunger: A Memoir of My Body,” in which the 49-year-old (relevant fact) “Bad Feminist” author pins her obesity on a gang-rape from childhood.

Via Goodreads:

“From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

‘I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.’

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as ‘wildly undisciplined,’ Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.”

The essential thesis of this book is that the author’s obesity — again, at age 49 — is the reductionist result of a gang rape she experienced at the age of 12.

I don’t want to come off as unempathetic. I do believe, taking this woman’s account at face value, that a gang-rape of a child would probably have traumatic effects that reverberate across time.

But I’m not sure of the usefulness or veracity of the self-defeating takeaway that her obesity is her fate, based on factors outside of her control as a victim, serves. She appears to suggest, based on the interview above and the synopsis of her book, that her morbid obesity is something to be accepted as is because there’s nothing that can be done about it due to an event that occurred 37 years in the past.

What kind of a message does that send to the reader, aside from capitulation and fatalism as a paper-thin facsimile of feminist empowerment?

The vast majority of obese individuals didn’t end up that way because of emotional trauma following childhood sexual abuse — some, probably, but certainly not most or all — and I imagine the majority of gang rape victims don’t go on to develop obesity or any kind of eating disorder.

So what this woman is doing is taking a very personal, specific narrative and making sweeping, self-serving generalizations about its societal implications to the detriment of the health of anyone who soaks it up uncritically and takes it as a license to live out their short lives weight 300 pounds on account of real or perceived psychological trauma.

Whatever this genre of feminism is about, it’s not empowerment or self-actualization.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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