A woman whose Instagram name is "The Fat Sex Therapist" gave a speech at St. Olaf College on Thursday in which she compared fitness instructors to Nazis and putting children on diets to rape.
"I truly believe that a child cannot consent to being on a diet the same way a child cannot consent to having sex," Sonalee Rashatwar said in her two-hour speech at the college's main stage.
"We should be critical of the use of science and the production of knowledge to continue promoting this idea that certain bodies are fit, able, and desirable . . . is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?" she asked the audience.
She then took it even further, calling the science that states that obesity is unhealthy "fatphobic" science, saying that it is "often actually eugenic science . . . . eugenic science is Nazi science."
"I do not think it's surprising that the man who shot up Christchurch, New Zealand, was also a fitness instructor," Rashatwar said, adding that the shooting was "a clear communication that there's still an idealized body."
"Nazis really love this idea of an idealized body, and so it makes a lot of sense to me that a fitness instructor . . . might also think about an idealized body in this thin white supremacist way," she said.
The two-hour speech was sponsored by the college's Wellness Center, Women's and Gender Studies Department, and Center for Equity and Inclusion, and the topic was "radical fat liberation."
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