The Judgment of Paris Forum - ''Ditching Dieting'' Protest

The Judgment of Paris Forum (http://www.judgmentofparis.com/board/index.php)

- 2012: January - December (http://www.judgmentofparis.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=17)

- - ''Ditching Dieting'' Protest (http://www.judgmentofparis.com/board/showthread.php?t=2402)

''Ditching Dieting'' Protest

Finally! If there was ever a worthwhile protest, this was it: a group of women taking the poisonous publications of the diet-starvation and exercise torture industries and throwing them in a rubbish bin marked "toxic material":

The background? As reported in The Guardian last week, a number of body-image groups in the U.K. organized the above protest against the starvation-torture industry last Monday:

Quote:

Women who say they have been failed by weightloss programmes sold to them by diet companies are planning a demonstration outside parliament on Monday to hit back at the multimillion-pound industry for "wreaking havoc with appetites and lives while it builds huge profits".

It is calling on women who have been negatively affected by dieting to attend the protest and bring diet plans, slimming magazines, calorie counters or anything else associated with dieting so they can be ditched in a hazardous waste bin at the heart of the demonstration.

The Endangered Bodies spokeswoman Amy Anderson said: "The dieting industry presents itself as a benign force but actually it causes people a lot of misery, so we're highlighting the toxic nature of diets and how they're damaging to our mental and physical health."

Nina Bennet, a singer from Croydon, says..."If you're not conforming to the thin ideal then the diet industry is just lurking in the background waiting to prey on that insecurity."

Applause. The Judgment of Paris has long termed the effects of the diet industry to be "toxic," and this group is brilliant in having (validly) played off of that premise in a literal way.

Here's the Web site of the group that organized the protest:

http://www.endangeredspecieswomen.o...eting-campaign/

It features a memorable banner,

as well as an effective write-up of the group's premises:

Quote:

Endangered Bodies is a global and local initiative to fight the culture of body anxiety, body hatred and fear that is pervading all parts of our society.

This month we are starting a campaign to expose the role of the diet industry in de-stabilising women and girls’ appetites and desires. We believe that eating disorders and the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ are merely more visible extremes of a much bigger, everyday phenomena: that we are accepting fear and hatred of our own bodies like gravity, that we are accepting ‘I am not good enough’ as a fact.

In the past weeks we have once again been swamped with headlines announcing an obesity crisis and we have seen news stories with the message that children may be taken away from their parents if the kids’ BMIs are deemed offensive or threatening. This ‘crisis’ is constructed from research funded by the industries that can make money from it, such as pharmaceutical and diet industries.

THESE INDUSTRIES ARE MAKING OUR BODIES THEIR BUSINESS

The diet industry claims to offer solutions – to the ‘crisis’ it has just funded researchers to determine.

DIETS DON’T WORK

Diets are set up to fail us so we will return to them again and again. The health risks of yo-yo dieting are higher than those of being overweight or ***** (catergories on the BMI scale).

Every word is true. I particularly admire the emphasis on the fact that the fictional weight "epidemic" is a hoax, which (like so many hoaxes that govern modern thought) was constructed for money-grubbing purposes, heedless of how it ruins women's lives.

Here are a couple more images from the event, found on Google Images. It seems to have been remarkably well attended:

Apparently, the group took their protest right to the doors of the Palace of Westminster, seat of the British Parliament.

I find the slogan on the placard at the left, "Occupy Your Body," to be especially clever, both as a take-off on "occupy" movements and as a reminder of how personal this issue is, for all full-figured women and for the men who love them. The idea is that women's bodies have been occupied by the agenda of pernicious industries, so it's time for women to take back ownership of their bodies from these hostile foreign elements, which, as the mission statement puts it so well, "are making our bodies their business."

I wish all women would realize that every publication ever created which tells them that they should diminish themselves, and provides a how-to guide for inflicting such self-torture -- i.e., every diet-starvation book ever published -- is indeed toxic. As such, it should be disposed of immediately.

And furthermore, like all toxic materials, starvation-torture publications (i.e., "diet guides") should be banned outright as public health hazards -- which is exactly what they are.

The entire diet industry is a blight on society, and it's way past time for it to be stopped.

Re: ''Ditching Dieting'' Protest

The Washington Post also ran an article about the event.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...id92P_blog.html

It suffers from a share of mixed messages, but the general thrust of the piece is affirmative:

Quote:

The protest is intended to highlight “the toxic nature of diets to our physical and mental health.” And what better way to do so than by encouraging women to bring along diet plans, slimming magazines, calorie counters, and any other dieting gimmicks they’ve amassed over the years and dump them in a hazardous waste bin outside Parliament?

Love it.

What I found most interesting in the article is the following quotation, from one of the event's organizers:

Quote:

The commercial exploitation of the body by the beauty, dieting, fashion and pharmaceutical industries, [Susan] Orbach noted, is one of our most “nefarious exports.” “We can measure modernity,” she said, “through the rise of disordered eating in the developing world.”

This is remarkably in line with the themes of the Judgment of Paris, which has consistently linked the androgynous emaciation pushed by the fashion industry and the body-diminishment mantra of the the starvation-torture industry together as toxic expressions of modernity, which has as its goal undermining the cultural heritage of the West and eradicating tradition in general. Not all body-image organizations have recognized this link -- indeed, many themselves buy into modern ideologies -- so Orbach's comments are most welcome.

Once we recognize modernity as an alien development, an invasive cancer, one which first blighted the West and suppressed its cultural traditions (such as the Classical ideal of full-figured beauty), then piggybacked, like a virus, on Western media to infect other nations, destroying their cultural traditions of full-figured beauty, we realize that modernity itself, and the rootless, alien politico-social agenda behind it, is the true evil that is facilitating these harmful assaults the healthy ideals of yore.

Hopefully, this will prompt the public to realize that the values and traditions of the past, which the ideologies of modernity (cultural Marxism, feminism, etc.) have so relentlessly assaulted, were in fact the noble building blocks of healthy, harmonious societies. Then people may finally start taking the part of heritage against modernity, and recognize the need to restore the much-maligned ideals which underpinned social thought until a half-century ago, in order to free the modern world of toxins such as the diet industry, and restore the well-being of the culture in which we live.

With that in mind, I found this image of the protestors below a Westminster lion -- the lion being the traditional symbol of Britain -- to be especially powerful:

It's as if this protest is a battle being waged by the indigenous population of Britain to rid itself of the hostile, alien elements of modernity, as expressed by the diet industry, and to restore its own native, traditional appreciation of full-figured beauty.