UPDATE: It turns out Mr. Tong's whole pro-anorexia thing was a "hoax"... http://www.twitlonger.com/show/82t0bf
Obviously it was still ridiculously stupid thing to do, and I suspect there are those who have experienced psychological ramifications, but at least the vile things he said weren't genuine, I suppose. This post remains, as a statement against thinspiration and the others who still promote "managed anorexia".
Oh, Irony Gods. How thou doth mock me.
Obviously it was still ridiculously stupid thing to do, and I suspect there are those who have experienced psychological ramifications, but at least the vile things he said weren't genuine, I suppose. This post remains, as a statement against thinspiration and the others who still promote "managed anorexia".
Oh, Irony Gods. How thou doth mock me.
I hadn't even heard his name until today, but now the mere sight/sound of it fills me with rage. Kenneth Tong. As a classic example of the hurtful, hateful lies this man is smearing into the world, refer below:
"Don't listen to your family. They're lying to you. You are not beautiful. You eat too much. Stop. You need to be skinny. You deserve it."
"Wake up. Your disgusting. Your so fat you don't deserve sleep. Go look in the mirror & hate yourself. I don't want you eating today."
For more of the fun, take a butcher's at his Twitter page...
Okay. Commence deep breathing.
I think the feelings I'm feeling have now been sufficiently transmitted to you, so I'll try and move away from the anger.
Instead, have some counteraction:
ONE: Thin and beautiful are NOT the same thing. Thin people are sometimes beautiful, thin people are sometimes not beautiful.
TWO: No concept of "beauty" is anything other than subjective anyway. It doesn't matter in the slightest how many people tell you you're ugly, there will always be someone who thinks you're gorgeous.
THREE: Physical beauty is never worth compromising your health for.
FOUR: Move you thoughts away from contemporary celebrities for a while; think of the legends. The writers, composers, musicians, speakers, politicians who lived decades or centuries ago, whose work we still appreciate today. Did they succeed because of looks? Of course not! For the majority of them, we can't even remember what they looked like. Because it doesn't matter.
FIVE: If no women had curves (by which I mean breasts and hips), the human race would die out, because no-one would raise children.
I know most of that seems entirely obvious, but there are those who believe otherwise; about themselves and others. Tong and his hordes of female teenage victims being prime examples. That's why these sentiments are so dangerous.
Tong promotes something he calls "controlled anorexia." The very nature of anorexia is that it cannot be controlled- it is a mental illness, a phobia of eating that takes you over and eats away at your life. Promoting any kind of anorexia (as you might have guessed from my title) is like promoting heart disease or clinical depression- the latter probably being a more appropriate example.
Tong's self-declared mission in life boils down to manipulating teenage and other insecurity and pushing them towards self-destructive action- with the ultimate intention of selling a pill.
Yes, commercialism dooms us all once again.
You make me sick, Kenneth Tong. Infinitely more sick than any overweight person would ever make anyone.
I know that there are serious health problems with being genuinely overweight, but the fundamental problem with Tong's take on weight is that his definition of "too fat" is anything over size zero. Which, it goes without saying, is a far stretch from medicine's definition of overweight.
If you have enough insecurity about your weight that you would consider starving yourself, please, for the sake of everyone who loves you, talk to someone- preferably an adult- that you trust. DON'T keep the self-loathing bottled up inside, and DON'T let it drive you to self-harming. Yes, starving yourself does count as self-harming. You need food, a hell of a lot more than you need to display your rib cage to the world.
And if you have twitter, please bombard Mr Tong's feed with rational thought via the process of @-messaging, and thereby provide a visible counteraction to his bile for any self-hating girls, boys, men, or women that are reading. I don't have twitter myself, so can't join in, I'm afraid.
...well, that was surprisingly coherent!
I know a lot of you my age have exams at the moment, so good luck with them. Particularly if you're one of those people who horribly freak out about any exam- I pity you deeply.
Happy Monday, hope you're all eating well! *slight tongue in cheek*
I love how the only importance of women's curves to you is the continuation of the human race - you're such an adorable little gay sometimes :P
ReplyDeleteHush, you. I'm trying to have make a serious point about not starving to death here. :L
ReplyDeleteMy thought here is how come - at a time when we are told of the vulnerablity and depression of children and teenagers - there seems to be a continual accelration of what is the right body/look/relationship/degree of success?
ReplyDelete