I agree. The worse, nastiest "fat-shaming" almost always comes from individuals who have eating disorders themselves—they're furious and deeply threatened that there are people who don't obsess over every calorie the way they do.

The thing is, people already know that it's better for them not to smoke and they it's better for them to eat healthy and exercise. I'm all in favor of increasing access and affordability of healthy foods and fitness because those are barriers that prevent people who want to eat healthy from doing so (see: food…

Honestly, if I were to put my armchair psych hat on, she hates other people because she hates herself. Her vehemence and unwillingness to stand down is part of what makes me think she has her own mental and eating disorders. It's a pretty natural eating disorder arc. You're taught to hate yourself, potentially for…

Yeah, but I don't. Soo. Fuck off.

That's part of the 'fatphobia' that Dodai was talking about. Some people are terrified of becoming fat so they look at somebody who is and can't help but place their own insecurities onto them.

Quite honestly, I think some people are threatened by the notion that appearance, which they work really hard to get/maintain, is not everything. I think they feel threatened if a person simply does not care about being overweight or chooses not to spend hours in the gym or eat a restricted diet in order to get a…

How To Survive Holiday Breakup Season: Step One. Stop entering into relationships involving love or sex with other people. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As long as the end game is me being able to get green tea ice cream delivered to me at 2AM by a robot that won't judge me for answering in door in my underwear - I approve.

There's a reason we don't prosecute 12 year olds as adults.

After spending about an hour on the anomalopotamus thread wherein everyone dog-piled her for reminding us that all violence is wrong, I think I have actually come away with a few valuable wisdom-gems thanks to this story and the discussion it has brought forth.

First, life lesson: if a story makes you uncomfortable,…

Here's the thing about that whole gender flip thing: it presupposed that men and women in our society are equal and that there's no historical inequalities.

I honestly think it's just meant to be a short story based on the author's experiences. Not an allegorical tale. Nor a moral lesson. She's not saying 'And this is how you deal with an abusive arsehole who is dating your mother'. She's saying 'This is what I did at this age when this thing happened.' I've read…

I just got out of the hospital like an hour ago, so I apologize if you respond back to me and I don't have the energy to keep up a dialogue, but I wanted to briefly give my thoughts on some of the points you raised, as I think they are important questions. In my view and experience (and again, this is from what I've…

I wasn't responding to the story, I was responding to a comment.

Agreed. Only all gender bets are off when it has to do with child abuse. Why should it mean anything different? There is no patriarchy context with an abused male child but there would be a reaction to him taking a photograph of a woman to document it. This girl is not a usual girl and he would not be a usual boy. …

I have in feeling in 99% of cases, that would be a false equivalency, though. A 12 year old boy taking a picture of a 22 year old woman would mean something entirely different; just reversing the genders rarely works because of the context. We live in a world where a 12 year old boy taking a picture of a 22 year old…

I dunno that it's a problem with the context of the post (a "Trigger Warning: emotional abuse" at the top is never a bad idea anyway), but it's definitely a problem in the way we discuss abuse in our culture. When I talk about the abuse I survived, people often don't get it — there was no physical abuse, so they just…

Ooooo, they should do that!!! I would LUFF that. And that's basically how we have evidence telling us that people have trouble recognizing women's violence as real violence - you give the study group the same basic story, but with all four gender pairings, and see how they rank them. Female-on-male consistently shows…

Sometimes I feel like they should actually flip stories. Write a whole post with the gender reversed to get people frothing at the mouth about the violation. Maybe an hour later go in and add an ETA that actually the genders were flipped in real life and see if the comments still make any sense. They would never do…