Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
All moral and political objections to 'fat-shaming' aside, attempts to trigger self-loathing are officially useless.
It's a rare day that passes on the internet in 2014 without some major media outlet trying to make people feel bad about who they are. This week's Exhibit A is a Daily Mail article headlined "Why are today's young women so unashamed about being fat?" It's such a blatant and – yes! – unashamed example of the form that its author, Linda Kelsey, deserves to be quoted at length:
Un-PC of me as it may be ...
Actually, forget it. I changed my mind. You know exactly what it's going to say, because the shame-journalism genre is just so ... straightforward: single out some demographic – much more often women than men – then argue that they should feel awful about how they dress, look, behave or otherwise offend various retrograde expectations about how people ought to be.
The standard objections to this sort of argument are well-rehearsed by now: shaming (even if it's true that the word gets over-used) is politically regressive, emotionally damaging and in other ways morally bad. But let's not lose sight of a straightforward empirical fact: making people feel bad about who they are is actually a really, really ineffective way to get them to change.
http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...11/making-people-feel-bad-fat-shaming-studies
It's a rare day that passes on the internet in 2014 without some major media outlet trying to make people feel bad about who they are. This week's Exhibit A is a Daily Mail article headlined "Why are today's young women so unashamed about being fat?" It's such a blatant and – yes! – unashamed example of the form that its author, Linda Kelsey, deserves to be quoted at length:
Un-PC of me as it may be ...
Actually, forget it. I changed my mind. You know exactly what it's going to say, because the shame-journalism genre is just so ... straightforward: single out some demographic – much more often women than men – then argue that they should feel awful about how they dress, look, behave or otherwise offend various retrograde expectations about how people ought to be.
The standard objections to this sort of argument are well-rehearsed by now: shaming (even if it's true that the word gets over-used) is politically regressive, emotionally damaging and in other ways morally bad. But let's not lose sight of a straightforward empirical fact: making people feel bad about who they are is actually a really, really ineffective way to get them to change.
http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...11/making-people-feel-bad-fat-shaming-studies