unilateral

Man the days slip by. The poor man the ship. My filth accrues then I clean my room, over and over. I really miss other people, but let's get down to it.

I was recently talking with a friend about Charlotte Clymer and I feel I pulled a lot of my punches about her out of a sort of concern that I might be unfair to her. I wanted to make fun of how mannish she looks, I wanted to talk about the shame I can imagine her feeling, and how or if that plays into her public persona.

There's a certain line of thinking that says we shouldn't make fun of the president for how he looks, fat, psoriatic, diseased. Doing so will make the good fat, psoriatic, diseased people feel bad and contribute to some invisible infrastructure of bodyshaming, which in turn has some negative effects on people's ability to live full lives, so the story goes.

But I still want to, but I'm not sure why. A problem I have with the above line of thinking is that it divorces people's bodies, their corporeal selves, from their, dunno, ethereal selves. As if when I am making fun of the president's disgusting face, I am making fun of those extensional contours in a vacuum with no relation to him. To see people as so divorceable from their bodies is is in my opinion a soulless, empiricist, maybe even technophilic gambit that is not obviously more moral than anything else.

Another aspect of this proscription is the idea that you can't/don't/shouldn't convince people of arguments based on appearance, but instead based on 'the facts'. I think this is just dumb and indicates a toothless view of the world where people are rational actors making objectively informed decisions. dumb.

If we care about making arguments, winning people over to some side, we shouldn't unilaterally rhetorically disarm. Maybe we should take some ideas from the dopey newagers and do the all-is-one thing with bodies and people

Why should we celebrate bodies? Because they're inextricably bound up, and imo indistinguishable from people. Otherwise who cares?

There's more to say, obviously, I'm gonna read that body fascism thing again and come back to this