When Fat-Shaming Gets a Presidential Platform

I had no idea who Marianne Williamson was until I started hearing her name in a positive light after the first set of Democratic Presidential debates. Mostly people seemed to consider her a joke, but apparently she had scored some points during that first debate. So as the second debates grew closer, I started paying closer attention to the people further afield from my chosen favorites. That’s where I came across this opinion article from MSNBC and learned that Marianne Williamson isn’t just far afield in political polls; in my opinion she’s far afield from reality.

It’s true that she says some things that make sense regarding social, cultural, and racial justice, including advocating for slavery reparations, which her fellow candidates seem hesitant to do. But the MSNBC article does a very good job of taking apart her dangerous rhetoric that centers all bad things on the individual for not “loving” themselves or their enemies or apparently anything enough. In Williamson’s world, depression can be cured by increasing spiritual wellness, so that antidepressants aren’t necessary and patients with HIV can cure themselves by trusting in God.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/marianne-williamson-s-democratic-debate-performance-raised-eyebrows-she-s-ncna1035956

There’s really no better example of her toxic rhetoric than her approach to fat people. Williamson has written several self-help books, and of course one of them is geared solely to women on losing weight.

The article provides a link to Williamson’s book on Google books, so you can poke around it for yourself. I thought that it couldn’t possibly be this bad, but it is. This is just from the first few pages of the first chapter:

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=9QCpUYKTwKwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+course+in+weight+loss&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihip-457njAhXSK80KHcGJDYkQ6wEIMDAB#v=onepage&q&f=false

This is abhorrent and the implications of it make me want to vomit. On the surface, Williamson’s beliefs are all about “love”, but dig just a little bit and it’s the gaslighting “you’re this way because you don’t love yourself enough” kind of love. It’s hate masquerading as love and concern, which is something that fat people have had more than their fill of.

It’s not a leap to think that people who believe in Williamson’s way of thinking would feel free to stigmatize fat people, to their faces, which as I previously wrote, is actually more harmful than the fat we carry around.

There has always been a fat-shaming problem, and politics is certainly no exception. The rhetoric on the left about Trump’s body has shown that over and over again. Williamson is certainly not the first person to be running for president that hates fat people, but to have someone running for president who has written a whole book on how fat people are just full of twisted and disordered thinking is just another symptom of this weird political time that we are in.