#unsolicited: fatties talk back

[softandorsweet]

just ~ if you haven’t listened to the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back GO DO IT!!! it’s a group of Fat liberationist discussing everything fatness and anti-fatness. plus they all exist with multiple marginalizations, most hosts are queer and trans. it’s so brilliant i’ll never get over it!!!! god

[thefatfemme]

does anyone know if the Unsolicited Fatties Talk Back podcast is coming back, or did it end? It's been months since they posted but I can't find anything saying if they're just on break or if they're not coming back. I caught up on the episodes and it's the best fat lib podcast I've found so far!

[wreckitremy]

"as someone who has had been friends who has had fat friends who have wanted to be thin, who has, you know, like engaged people in general, like, and of course, all of us have engaged, random people on, on the internet for different reasons who are just antagonistic towards fat folks.

We, we know, I know, like how these conversations you usually do go, right? Where it it's always "the fat person is to blame." And fat people's feelings don't matter around these issues and, and you know, like you're being extra, you're, you're being dramatic, or this is like an unnecessary response to, to like my personal journey.

But I don't think that people actually start to think about how their personal journeys do play a significant role in the general systemic upkeep of antifatness.

Which is not to say that you, you can't do what you want with your body, but it is to say that what we do with our bodies do not have consequences for other people around us um, and people who are not around us, right."

-Da'shaun, Unsolicited Fatties Talk Back

[wreckitremy]

"More than one justice movement has tried to sort of subsume fat politics under its umbrella and be like, 'oh, you're an arm of this.'

And I find that when fatness is tried to like... when a justice movement that isn't fat politics tries to pull fat politics under its umbrella or say like, 'this is one arm of us,' it sort of erases fatphobia as its own unique oppression. And it also diminishes connections between fatphobia and other oppressions"

- Unsolicited Fatties Talk Back - Solicited: The Disability Question

I hate when people are like “You can’t be fatphobic and progressive because fatphobia is rooted in [lists every single form of oppression].”

When people do that, they’re saying the only reason why fat people’s oppression matters and why we should treat fat people with respect is because of the oppression of other groups. Because fat people’s oppression doesn’t matter on its own. If fatphobia did not have ties to any other forms of oppression, then it would be a-okay to abuse fat people. 

Can we please fucking stop with the whole “You should care about fat people because fatphobia is ACTUALLY just [oppression against other minorities], so if you care about them then you shouldn’t be fatphobic. Oh, and if you care about fat people too, I guess. But more so if you care about other more important oppressed minorities who are REALLY oppressed, unlike fat people. I am so inclusive and progressive uwu”

You don’t actually give a shit about fatphobia if whether you care about fat people is dependent on how other groups are affected, especially since this logic is based on the idea that fat people don’t actually face oppression and that other minorities “have it worse.” Please stop with this bullshit.

[crippleprophet]

how do you manage the isolation that comes with being housebound? I keep finding myself slipping into unhealthy behaviors to manage because most people's advice is like. "get outside even a little bit!" and I am stuck in bed most days...

this is a good question by which i mean i don’t. um but an assortment of things that help:

i’m very fortunate to have a roomie who is home most of the time as well so i’d be remiss not to acknowledge how big of a difference that makes & ik not everyone is in that position

talking to people online - tumblr, discord, i keep in touch with a couple folks via monthly emails

zoom calls 1-2 times a week when i’m feeling up for it

listening to people talk with each other even when i don’t have the spoons to participate in conversations myself - for me this is usually podcasts (listening to unsolicited: fatties talk back lately) but ik other homebound folks swear by video game livestreams

setting your boundaries & sticking by them!!! for me this means filtering every possible iteration of “leave the house” “log off” “touch grass” etc etc, & i’m trying to get better about being like yeah please don’t tell me about your covid-unsafe events when i’m messaging people. it’s okay to unfollow people for making you feel like shit about being housebound and/or bedbound.

looking out the window with the cats

nature documentaries

i’m a big fan of maxims so i’ve been telling myself on repeat “life is in your house too,” “your bed is also part of the world” etc. made some posters saying that when i was having a better hand day

just generally hearing stories about Other People That Exist. my gf tells me about her shitty coworkers & the latest Quaker meeting drama, my butch tells me about academics being horribly unethical, my roommate tells me about faer family’s latest bullshit

OH i forgot to mention, it is in your best interest to become disproportionately invested in a silly little mobile game. i have a lot of hand problems but castle story is accessible for me so i’m very obsessed with that, the new events ~weekly give me something to measure the passage of time by + look forward to

i hope some of that is helpful! feel free to dm me - i’d love to have more homebound friends & i’m also happy to add you to my bitter cripple discord if you’re 18 or older. much love to you & i hope it gets a bit easier 💓💓

[alittlepudge-neverhurtnobody]

it is … so disappointing to see br*ndan fr*ser, an actor I had nothing but positive feelings about before now, have his “comeback” at the expense of fat people. I don’t know what intentions he approached this project with but OH MAN does the whole thing come off as a display of total disdain for and dehumanization of the people with whom the movie professes to empathize. it’s honestly so disappointing to see this movie rewarded at all, especially at this level. it’s 2023. isn’t it embarrassing to pin your entire movie on a cgi-assisted fat suit? isn’t it embarrassing to make a movie that admits so blatantly that no one involved realizes how much fatphobia is baked into it or cares to even imagine fat people as human beings?!

lots of fat writers, activists, content creators have discussed and critiqued this movie and its flaws far more eloquently and I highly recommend reading, watching, and listening to their work: daniel franzese, bryan guffey, lindy west, roxane gay, kivan bay, kate manne, katie rife, the fat culture critic, lindley ashline, and michelle allison, to name a handful. unsolicited: fatties talk back did a whole episode on it, as did more than tracy turnblad. caleb luna also compiled a list of media that portrays fat characters and actors in better, more interesting ways. also a good thread on being fat and having an eating disorder by blakeley payne.

anyway. I’m mad and disappointed that stuff like this is still being made and rewarded and that fatness is still held up as the pinnacle of tragedy and I’m sending very much love to the fat people in and out of this community. you deserve so much better.

[your-subby-creature]

Hi there, do you have any podcast recs? :3

Oo yes, you have stumbled upon something that I humanly cannot shut up about! I love a lot of podcasts, I tend to separate them out by fiction, nonfiction, and sleepy

Fiction: Camp Here 'n' There, Welcome to Nightvale, The Magnus Archives, Mnemosyne, the Silt Verses

Nonfiction: Knowledge Fight, Trillbilly Workers Party, The Dollop, New Books Network, Maintenance Phase, Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, Death Panel, Just King Things, Off The Cuffs, All My Relations, Congressional Dish,

Podcasts to sleep to: Boring Books for Bedtime, The Empty Bowl, Dormirse,

Thank you for your ask!! Have a lovely day, anon <3

-your Creature

[campgender]

been listening to unsolicited: fatties talk back & caleb luna just said “i do not identify as a festive person” & i’m like meeee

[thaenad]

I agree with all of these points - especially the lack of understanding of fetish in the first place. My initial reaction was disappointment that the perspective of the fat kink community was left out, no one even did research before this episode.

Caleb’s idea of WHY feeders have the kink is that they enjoy watching someone do something that they do not allow themselves to do - eat a lot of food. which first off, erases fat feeders, people who identify as both feeder and feedee, as well as feeders who enjoy food and have divested from diet culture. And I am uninterested in general in trying to “get to the bottom” of fetishes because that rhetoric is pathologising and overall unhelpful. Science has never proven a root to developing fetishes, just like it’s never proven a root to being homosexual, which used to be considered a mental disorder.

Caleb says that “there’s so much projection” and I think that they’re on the nose with what that means for fatphobes - thin people getting angry at fat people who don’t “discipline” themselves. But you can’t conflate that with kink. The earliest documentation I have of my fetish is a drawing I made at 4 years old, when I had next to zero understanding of diet culture and kink only existed in my mind as cartoon animals. How would Caleb use this idea to explain feedees? It’s just a load of nonsense.

There’s also zero discussion of ed recovery through kink when the feeder in the advice column literally says that they’ve struggled with an ed. Just not in the wheelhouse I guess.

The conversations about power and the abuse of fat desperation that exists because of systemic fatphobia/desirability politics are important and ones that our community regularly have. And I appreciate the conversations about boundary setting regarding ableism and the loss of social capita when a thin person partners with a fat person (but again, a major generalization).

At one point Bryan mentions that the power that a thin person holds over a fat person is at the FOCUS of the kink. It just boils my blood to hear such well spoken intellectuals debate an identity that they know nothing about.

And they go on to say that kink can be a way to cope with trauma but “on the flip side, can be used as a way to punish themselves.” I don’t disagree with this statement, but they use it to straight up gaslight feedees’ experiences - When we move into the conversation about how pleasure doesn’t equal liberation, Da’Shaun says that feedees are consenting to something that they THINK they want.

This is the same rhetoric that removes sexual agency from fat feedists. It assumes that fat people can’t possibly enjoy being fat. Da’Shaun mentions folks who do cam work have to call themselves bbws in order to get engagement - this is a real issue, but this is a separate conversation from feedism. This is a conversation about how fat people who are NOT into fat kink are pressured into fat kink spaces because there is such a divide in the culture. There are hardly any spaces for fat people to engage with fat-attracted people who aren’t into kink. Mikey expressed that she felt like she was “supposed” to be a part of the fat kink space. And it’s something that we as feedists are aware of, it’s something that’s been used as a generalization against our community, but it’s a reality and it’s still worth bringing awareness to, especially to fat folks outside of kink spaces.

Caleb said something that I think is worth noting - it shows that they understand that the gainer experience can be a much different fat experience and one that is alien to them. To grow into fatness intentionally and feel sexy and empowered in it. Caleb makes a statement about drawing boundaries about what’s okay and what’s not is in the same world as policing queer sexuality and I completely agree. When we think about what is okay to fetishize and what isn’t - muscularity, big dicks, whiteness are all fetishes, they’ve just been normalized.

I lack the political enlightenment to be able to truly understand Da’Shaun’s conversation on the inherent violence that is desire. I need to read their book Belly of The Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness to grasp the points they were making there. But it does concern me that they believe that it’s harmful and violent to be introduced to fat liberation because of fetish, because your care for fat people is tied to their body. That feels extreme. I think that it’s something that can be unlearned just like any and all biases. But I want to hear more on that before I can respond.

The panelists seemed to disagree with each other in a lot of ways, but I think the collective message here is that feedism cannot take place without critique, when thin and privileged feeders DO engage in kink with fat partners, that can be dangerous/violent if they haven’t done the introspective work. We know this and it’s such a tired conversation to those of us who are doing that work.

It’s just disappointing to me that these scholars with PhDs in Fat Studies are giving out uninformed personal opinions about a demographic of fat people without including our perspectives. Everyone in this panel belongs to two or more marginalized identities, you would think that “nothing about us without us” is something they’d be conscientious about. But I guess the problem here is that they assume that feedists are the oppressor.

good lord Unsolicited FTB just released an episode about feedism I’m biting my nails

[spidergirl2000]

Hey y’all. So there are plenty of folks who want to get into fat liberation but don’t know where to start. I would recommend starting off with these two books: “Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness” by Da’Shaun L. Harrison (they are nonbinary and they use they/them pronouns) and “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings. I also recommend listening to the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Audible and any other app you use to listen to podcasts. They also have a website so you can listen to all of the episodes they post. Just type Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back and you’ll find their website. They post a new episode roughly every two Sundays.

[prettyputrified]

Hey have you heard of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back? It’s a podcast made by fat liberationists. It’s really good😊

I haven't I've been meaning to get into more podcasts! for some reason i struggle with them but i've been starting with [REDACTED] History and More Than Tracy Turnblad so I'll have to add that to my list, thank you so much. any episodes you'd recommend? or just go in order?

[fatliberation]

love your page so much! have you read any work from Da’shaun L Harrison? they are so so amazing and have written an amazing book called the “belly of the beast: the politics of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness” they also co host the fat liberation podcast called “unsolicited: fatties talk back” with other fat liberationists whom i love like Caleb Luna, Bryan Guffey, Marquisele Mercedes and Jordan Hall! most of them are also trans! thought i’d share <3

Yes!!! I adore Da’shaun’s work as well as everyone else you just mentioned! I follow each of them individually and when I found out they were hosting a podcast together I geeked out SO HARD. I’m currently making my way through Unsolicited FTB and it is feeding my soul. What an incredible group of people. I highly recommend listening!

[librarycards]

what incredible company! i'm flattered and a bit overwhelmed. i'm going to add a few resources you might be interested in:

Pipe Wrench Magazine's Fat Issue, particularly Mikey Mercedes' piece on fatphobia in gynecology. Massive, MASSIVE trigger warning for that one.

My dear friend and comrade, Rachel Fox, has a number of written works published on antifatness and/as medical violence. She's one of the foremost new scholars in critical fat studies today.

Regan Chastain's Weight and Healthcare Newsletter reliably summarizes and critiques developments in so-called "obesity medicine" from a body liberation perspective. Chastain is author of the old-school fatosphere, still-going-strong blog Dances With Fat.

The podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, features five fat activists/public scholars, including Da'Shaun Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, offers a superb and unvarnished takedown of thin supremacy, including but not limited to its constitutive medical violence.

One notable absence in the fields of disability/Mad/fat studies is the particular violence against fat existence/fat people in the areas of "eating disorder treatment." This absence points both to a kind of organized abandonment (h/t Ruth Wilson Gilmore) by the medico-psychiatric industry....a kind of antifat necropolitics in which fatness both constitutes and forecloses the possibility of a deadly eating disorder - there's a lot to say about this in regard to "deathfat"ness and the literal categorical impossibility of the fat anorexic (de jure, as it were, up until the DSM V and still de facto).

Simply put, there aren't enough works in Mad studies/disability studies on disorderly eating practices, and when there are, they are focused on thin, white anorexic women and generally oriented around performances of starvation/refusal and the tired old arguments about their role in feminist discourse/organizing. Yawn. We desperately need more work on fatness and medical violence that takes disorderly eaters explicitly as its subjects, and looks to the ways in which disorderly eating is both the base underlying assumption of fat pathologization (obesity as "disease" that can be "cured" via lifestyle change, and increasingly, biomedical intervention) and is also strategically refused as a means of refusing "care."

There's a lot more to say here, but I'll leave it here. I need to go back through my readings (also my fat studies tag) and vet papers that do mention fatness/eds before i actually recommend them, but I do know that kelpforestdwellers and @bioethicists speak about this in regard to medical ableism. You may also be interested in @worth-beyond-a-number-scale, as I believe the blogger is also in social work school and posts regularly about antifatness and thin privilege. There's also their other blog, @fatphobiabusters, which does the same.

Hi Mac! Sorry to bug you, but do you happen to have any literature/reading about medical fatphobia on hand? (the prevalence, people’s experiences with it, etc.) I’m a fat disabled person and I’m currently talking to some of my friends about it, but I’d like to be able to provide some more info outside of my own negative experiences, if possible! No worries if not though, ofc <33 Thanks in advance for your time!

not a bother at all!! in addition to my fatphobia tag (link 1), i really loved & learned a lot from Anna Mollow’s article “Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies” (link 2). cw for discussion of oppressive violence, particularly anti-Black police violence

this one is not specifically medical fatphobia & is definitely in my fairly niche interest as a conversion therapy victim & ex-christian interested in the sociology of evangelicalism, but Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America by Lynne Gerber was a fantastic read that really shaped my thoughts on a lot of these topics

i also recommend checking out @librarycards + @heavyweightheart + @bigfatscience ! lots of great resources & starting points there, in terms of statistics etc but also towards developing a framework of analysis + locating our experiences within broader systems of oppression

[softcuddlekitty]

So, let's talk for a minute.

I'm sorry I haven't been replying to DMs and Asks very much recently. I just haven't had it in me to do more than I had to. Last week was not good for me. I'm just feeling very overwhelmed and it stops me from doing what I need to do, so tumblr is on a back burner for now. I will get back to replying to messages daily again eventually, but it won't be right now.

I also just wanted to say that now that I've been doing this for about a month, I've learned what I like and don't like.

I like being complimented. I like positive words associated with my weight gain. I like dirty talk when it doesn't go too far. I like a little teasing.

I don't like being called fatty or piggy or pig very much; it doesn't make me feel sexy. I don't like being demeaned. I don't like getting unsolicited pics; it just makes me uncomfortable.

I do this for myself, not anyone else. I thank everyone who has given me support because you boost me up and give me to encouragement to keep doing this. Please just be patient with me and if you're ever not sure if I'll like something, just ask.

With love,

Kitty

[pickyperkypenguin]

some reflections on dying hair with henna (lawsonia inermis)

i’ve had dyed my hair red with henna/lawsonia inermis (sometimes with added amla/emblica officinalis, and jatropha) for four years, since i was about sixteen year old ‘til i was about twenty. somewhere at the two or three year mark i roped up my mother into dying her hair with henna too. so, i’ve been dying my own and then my mother’s hair with herbs for the last ten years every month or two. i feel like i might have the right to talk about it just because i’ve done it so many times and got consistent results

it took me long enough to figure out my perfect recipe, but the amount of misinformation i see on the internet in regards to henna dying process is staggering. i thought, okay, maybe ten years ago it was relatively knew in the polish corner of the world wide web, but now? sure it should be more popular? and okay, i did manage to find some info faster than those years ago (boy, let me tell you it was some google-fu required to get into that information back then, and all was, like, crowd-sourced from experimentally-inclined hair bloggers - a sub-type of beauty bloggers - and wise, old and jaded women who knew henna as chna, because they’ve used it back in the socialist times, when it was still imported from the east, hence the different spelling). but still, it was not much, however, there were some more professional sources involved than cosmetics forums. i’ll check the anglophone side, i thought. sure it should be much better, yeah? no misinfo?

goddamn, was i wrong. like, on one hand it was much better, because you have those amazing sources from especially indian women, for whom it is very much a traditional thing so the technique was perfected for, like, millenia. they know what they’re doing. but - and here comes my surprise - there was much of the same simply wrong bullshit from other sources? and i was like, what the hell, why do you even do that, why do you spread information that is clearly wrong - and you’ve had the chance to cross-reference it with very good sources without learning a whole other language in the process? so, like, why? why do people do that? i do not understand.

*if you are curious and want some unsolicited advice from a person who is not an expert, then, here, have my completely unprofessional opinion that’s based solely on years of experience and observation of dying first never previously dyed hair, and then naturally grey hair, which was (is) also getting regularly permed, because my mother has never left the eighties:

the perfect recipe is this:

add sugar and lemon juice when using pure henna or when you combine it with amla and/or jatropha

don’t use acids when you add indigo/indigofera tinctoria, because it needs alkaline environment. you can add either some black tea or a bit of salt

but do not add that salt, to be honest, because it’s not good for your hair, it dries it out

i’m not sure if adding sugar would be bad when dying with indigo (idk about its acidity level - is this a thing in this case?), but sugar is generally a humectant, and really helps the dye to have a lot smoother consistency. 

also, sugar might moisturise your hair, but i’m not entirely sure about that - even if one moisturises hair with something, the hair cuticles (is that the word in english?) should be then closed/smoothed down with something else, oil or silicone, to keep the moisture in? otherwise you’re just preparing your hair to be frizzy as hell, because porosity and different level of humidity in the air is a thing

the consistency of the dye should be adjusted to your own preferences and the thickness of the hair, don’t feel like you have to get that arbitrary greek yogurt thickness. that literally doesn’t matter, it’ll work anyway as long as you cover it and keep it moist. don’t let the dye dry, you might get uneven patches of colour. keep it covered with plastic wrap and put a towel on, herbal dyes like warmth to develop properly

speaking of warmth - about 80 C for henna, no more than 40-50 for indigo, maybe even less, around 30 C. never want the dye to be boiled

what also matters is not adding oil to the mixture. it will hinder the dying process. so, no fatty yogurt, no coconut oil. you can do it after, at least a day or two (for indigo at least two, maybe even three) days after

honey will not 'clog’ anything, i have no idea where did it come from. it’s not a fat, it shouldn’t do anything except for the same thing that sugar does

idk, you may add honey instead of sugar if you’re feeling extra, but no, it will not make the shade any different (i’ve seen stuff like adding honey will give you that honey-blond lustre. it will not. cassia might, for grey and very fair blonde hair. but won’t change much when you’re using something much stronger, like henna). and if you think it will give you some health benefits? i mean, i do think honey is healthy for you, but i very much prefer to eat it, simply as that

i have no idea how does that work, if it builds into your hair, if there is some magic with herbal proteins and hair proteins, but herbal dyes, henna especially, thickens your hair. which is marvellous. i believe that ridiculous statement only because i happened to be gross that one time and lost a hairbrush before i managed to clean it, and it was just after my first two or three henna dyes. i found that brush four years later, after consistent dying every single month, and i compared my hair from the brush with the ones in my head - and the ones on my head, despite comparing the very ends - you know, easily reachable when you have hair reaching your butt - and the ends of hair that long are thinner and split in my case - were still thicker (almost twice as thick!) as those from the brush. it was fucking wild

it builds up and darkens overtime, so your ends might be darker than your roots, if you dye the whole thing, as i did

i never dyed with indigo, but relaying on second-hand experience - if you have hair on the lighter side, do the two-step process and pre-dye with henna first. if you don’t, the blue of the indigo and the yellow that your hair contains combine, and you might end up with something green-ish on your head 

although, you know, that’s basic colour theory, i don’t know what people expect when they do that and then act surprised - herbal dyes only cover what is already there, they don’t bleach or strip your natural colour before. that’s why henna ends up very bright on bleached or grey hair and yes, you should very much do the two-step thing, if you want your grey hair black not green

also, never understood what’s so wrong with green hair. go and be that nymph, live your true forest god life, eff society

a quick guide for colours:

henna - pure red

henna+jatropha - fox-red, as in warm, yellow-ish, brassy, beautiful for skin with warm and olive undertones

henna+amla - red but cooler, not exactly a cherry, but much different shade than pure henna or h+j, awesome for cooler and neutral skin tones

henna+amla+jatropha - idk what you’re trynna do, mate, but it’ll be somewhere in the red region, depends on proportions

henna+indigo - depending on proportions, anywhere from cooler brown to dark red-ish brown

indigo - black with blue-ish tinge, on lighter hair should be used on pre-dyed with henna hair

cassia - might give you warm, blonde-ish shade on grey or very fair hair, might do absolutely nothing, you can add it to henna mixes to ensure the warm tone

[spidergirl2000]

OP, if you don’t mind I would like to add some resources for people. I recommend everyone to read these two books: “Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness” by Da’Shaun L. Harrison (they are non-binary) and “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings. I also recommend everyone to watch Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. It’s a podcast made by fat liberationists and you can watch on any app or website you watch your podcasts on. They have a website that you can watch all of their podcasts episodes, just look look up Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back and it will pop up. They have a new episode about roughly every two Sundays. With that being said, the fat liberationists are also disabled so they won’t always upload on schedule. Their health matters more so please be patient with them.

of course you have a fat fetish, with all your internalized misogyny. really need to unlearn all that to be a woman

Imo the funniest part of radfems trying to weaponize random parts of my personality against me by labeling them male behavior is that they inadvertently made the argument that it's sexist to think fat women are sexy. Like read that sentence again and really take in the implications