A woman named Jill Strasburg appeared on Oprah in 2005 to confront her fat-phobic father for being a giant garbagey dickweed rather insensitive about her weight. She was the youngest of his children, her father, Kirk, explained, and always the fattest. She was always chubby, always bigger. Childhood photos reveal a normal, seemingly happy kid—swimming, playing outside, not impeded by her extra pounds. Nonetheless, Kirk was ashamed of his daughter's size, and was proud to admit it on fucking national television. It is honestly shocking to watch.

Via HuffPo (and there's video at the link):

I just have this built-up hatred, like, 'What is wrong with you? Why don't you love me?'" Jill said, through tears.

Oprah posed the question to Kirk. "Is [Jill] good enough the way she is, if she never lost a pound? And gained 10 more?" Oprah asked. "Would that be okay with you?"

"No," Kirk answered. "It wouldn't."
DOOOOOOOOOD, THAT GUY. That fucking guy.

Jill, essentially blackmailed by her father, proceeds to lose 170 pounds via a gastric bypass surgery.

"I [had the surgery] because I wanted to feel good about myself," Jill told Oprah. "I wanted to lose the weight and I also wanted a relationship with my dad."
They return to Oprah for a follow-up. Jill explains that, via extensive therapy, she realized that her father did what he did (which, in case you forgot, was withhold love until she resorted to an invasive major surgery to become the conventionally "hot" daughter he thinks he creepily MUST HAVE) "out of love."

Yeah. 'Kay.

I am so, so happy that Jill is happy. But I think that the route to her happiness—rooted in inarguable emotional abuse, and bolstered and openly validated by our culture at large—is downright barbaric. People often treat body image advocacy as a frivolous concern based in laziness, in lack of accountability, in recreational victimhood. To those of us who actually understand what body positivity (or, god forbid, the dreaded fat acceptance) is all about, those objections are downright alien. The oppressive expectations placed on women's bodies—combined with the assumption that it is a woman's lifelong duty to starve, cut, and sweat her body into an "acceptable" shape—literally ruin women's lives. They keep us hungry and distracted, they riddle us with self-doubt and self-hate, and, not infrequently, they kill us.

http://jezebel.com/woman-cant-have-kids-after-gastric-bypass-still-happy-1513428193?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow