{The Body Liberation Guide} The fat bone’s connected to the race bone

Hi friend,

I’ll be giving an art tour at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival this Friday, April 26 at 8:30 pm! Come hang out with me for an hour for:

Aspirational Erotic: Body Size, Shame and Aesthetics

Join photographer and body liberation activist Lindley Ashline to explore the origins and history of body image and weight stigma, and which bodies are seen as erotic. We’ll apply what you learn to some of the works at the festival and examine how aesthetics and representation play out in this year’s art selections. Finally, we’ll spend a bit of time sitting with discomfort around bodies outside mainstream beauty standards.

Lindley Ashline is a fat artist, activist and round unicorn friend. She creates photographs that celebrate the unique beauty of fat bodies and uses those images to change the world. 

Now, to this week’s letter:

I recently wrote a little introduction to how weight stigma and racism are intimately connected for The Eating Disorder Journal. When you’re done reading it below, hop over to EDReferral.com and sign up to get future issues of the free journal.

Loving, admiring, and respecting fat bodies can be really hard for people.

As a culture, we have been trained by centuries of sexism and racism that women are sexual objects, 75 years of diet culture taught that thin is beautiful and sexy, and decades of commercials that thin is easy to attain.

(And that failures to attain that status are entirely due to individual willpower, as opposed to normal human biology).

This means it’s very easy to ascribe moral value and worth to thin bodies and the opposite to fat bodies.