Oregon State University is now offering “fat studies” courses to students. The courses regard the concept of “weightism” and “fatphobia” as a hot-button civil rights issue. The courses further examine how body weight, shape, and size play key roles in societal privilege and discrimination.
Details on the new courses via Breitbart:
The course will be taught by instructor Patti Lou Watkins, who penned an articlein European Health Psychologist, which argued that humans can be healthy at any body weight, an endorsement of the widely-panned “Health At Any Size” movement. Body size isn’t a good indicator of health, she argues. To Watkins, even individuals who can be classified as morbidly obese could be healthy.
Watkins also dismissed the effectiveness in dieting. “The validity of HAES is supported by research over the past decade that reveals the continued ineffectiveness of dieting interventions targeting weight loss along with the potential for harm associated with these strategies,” she writes. Surely, thousands of Americans who have lost weight and lowered their risk for certain medical conditions beg to differ with Watkin’s argument.
“I grew to embrace feminist pedagogy in terms of course content as well as classroom practices,” Watkins explains. “My course now frames body image disturbances more as a function of oppressive societal structures than of individual pathology.”
A separate course from Wakins’ entitled “Women, Weight, and Body Image,” examines “weightism” from the intersectionality perspective. This is suppose to mean that women who suffer from being overweight as well as being part of another minority group (black, trans, LGBTQ, etc) allegedly suffer from compounded discrimination.
This is a prime example of the downward spiral of the social justice movement. Once derived from the reasonable and powerful civil rights movement of the 20th century, it has now taken on an ugly form of its own, being used to make half baked excuses for the lazy, deviant, and self interested losers on the Left.
An odd and baffling discussion on “fatphobia”:
