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Life in the FAT Underground
Southern Californians have a reputation for going to extremes, and for getting there before anyone else. It is no accident that Hollywood, purveyor to the world (via cinema) of the thesis that only the slender deserve respect, also produced its first radical antithesis: the Fat Underground.
The Fat Underground was active in Los Angeles throughout the decade of the 1970s. Feminist in perspective, it asserted that American culture fears fat because it fears powerful women, particularly their sensuality and their sexuality. The Fat Underground employed slashing rhetoric: Doctors are the enemy. Weight loss is genocide. Friends in the mainstream-sympathetic academics and others in the early fat rights movement--urged them to tone it down, but ultimately came to adopt much of the Fat Underground's underlying logic as their own.
PRECURSORS
Radical means "root." Radical liberation movements rarely try to change discriminatory laws. Rather, they demand change at the level of fundamental social values, which are seen as the root cause of all human laws. These values not only shape legislation, they also affect the way people view one another and treat one another in day-to-day interactions. These values influence the individual's selfimage, fostering self-hating attitudes and self-defeating behaviors in members of groups that society considers "inferior."
This insight was the driving force behind the Radical Therapy movement, a major precursor to the Fat Underground. Radical Therapy developed in the early 1970s as an in-your-face rebuke to the mainstream mental health profession. Conventional psychotherapy places the burden of change on the "maladjusted" individual; radical therapists condemned this as a "blame-the-victim" approach. "Change society, not ourselves," they urged. Practitioners of Radical Therapy (or Radical Psychiatry, as some called it) prided themselves on having no professional credentials. The "problem-solving groups" wherein they conducted therapy were also training grounds for social activism.
A major concept of Radical Therapy is that oppression goes unchallenged if it is "mystified." That is, its true nature is concealed. The oppressors do not say to the victims, "We will torture you until you submit to our will." Rather, they say (and often believe), "This treatment may seem painful or unfair, but it is for your own good." An example would be the practice of "protecting" women from sexual harassment...