reduce this but not that
Upon reading Cacie’s guest post regarding her breast reduction over at Shapely Prose, I want to put something out there. It will probably start a shit storm but hey, what’s a bit of controversy between FAers?
The general consensus at SP seems to be that a breast reduction is all good if that is the path you want to tread. However if Cacie was planning to have gastric bypass or gastric banding or lipo or any other number of procedures aimed at reducing particular parts of her body, I am pretty sure the response wouldn’t be so positive.
Why?
Why is it ok to have a breast reduction but not to reduce any other part of your body? Is it because women don’t generally have their breasts reduced in order to lose weight (not primarily anyway)? The women I know who have had reductions did so because of pain and aesthetics. Not so different to many people who want to lose weight (by whatever means). There ARE people who are fat who are in physical pain because of the extra weight they are carrying. Losing weight won’t necessarily remedy the problem but extra weight can exacerbate it. By general FA standards, trying to lose weight is not an acceptable exercise (no pun intended). Not for any reason. Yet a breast reduction can result in the same outcome (less pain, more “acceptable” aesthetics) and is largely considered acceptable by FAers. Why is that? There are many problems that can come with a breast reduction, just as there are with weight loss. Yet still the double standard. Again I ask, why is that?
What do you think?
(I don’t have a strong opinion on this one. I tend to lean to the “It’s your body” camp but I do find the obvious dissonance occurring to be intriguing).
I was wondering about that myself. I’ve considered having a breast reduction done (wearing a size 52H is not something of which I’m proud and it kills my back and shoulders). But I’m not fond of surgical procedures and the complications that can arise from them. Whether a breast reduction will work for someone depends a lot on how much of their breasts are made up of fat and how much is actual tissue. In other words, if a woman loses weight and her breasts get smaller (meaning the fat cells there shrunk?), is a reduction going to do much good? Will it be fat cells that are removed, or breast tissue? If the fat cells are removed, it might be a permanent fix, but if it’s tissue……………will the fat cells just get bigger and then it’s not a fix at all?
On the other hand, if a woman loses weight and her breasts don’t shrink at all, maybe a breast reduction would be the way to go, for her physical comfort (I knew a girl who was thin, wore a size 2, but her bra size was a 32 DDD, she was in some serious pain most of the time). So why would it be ok for a thin woman with huge breasts to get a reduction, but not for a fat woman with huge breasts to get one? They’re both in pain because of large breasts, but because one is fat and supposed to love all of her fat, she can’t reduce her breasts? Just my 2 cents’ worth.
Well, I have had both done. Well all three. I had a breast reduction, and a breast uplift, I also had some lipo suction. I believe as we get older and more busy in our lives, its a bit difficult to stay in the gym for 3 hours a day! Oh yes and I have had a band fitted.
I would do anything that I needed to do, to make myself look and feel better.
Well, from a purely practical point of view I guess the complications arising from a breast reduction, (assuming there even are any), aren’t likely to kill you, shorten your life, rebound or affect your quality of life in any majorly adverse way.
As to the philosophical aspect of the question, I pretty much agree with you. I sometimes feel the fatosphere is in denial about those who suffer pain or exacerbation of pain due to their weight and I’ve noticed a bit of hypocrisy here and there. (call it HAES and pretend you don’t want to be thinner and it’s fine. Practice what is in essence HAES and tell people you hope to lose some weight by doing it and you cause a shitstorm like Hanne Blank). But this stuff isn’t easy or clear cut and I try to judge every person’s story on their own merits. On balance I would try to talk a friend out of WLS 99 times out of 100. I wouldn’t feel driven to talk them out of a breast reduction, despite the fact I’d feel saddened and a little offended in exactly the way that I do when someone tells me it’s okay for me to be fat but not them because their fat’s disgusting.
I suffer from fibromyalgia and carry a ton of stress in my shoulders and upper back and suffer ghastly headaches as a result – all of which isn’t helped by having whoppers. But I would hate to have my rack reduced, even if it alleviated the pain. From an aesthetic point of view I feel I need them to balance me proportionately. I’ve also been indoctrinated to believe big charlies are teh sex and are – so I guess I keep ‘em for the partiarchy, (heh. said this stuff wasn’t simple and clear cut, didn’t I?) But then I also like the way they look and the FA aspect of me would feel like a traitor to myself to think about getting a reduction.
I’ve often wondered the same thing, and I applaud your raising the issue.
breast reduction and wls both share risks common to all significant surgery, but then wls has more. wls, by design, mutilates an essential body system. breast reduction does not. a breast reduction will not cause the patient to starve to death. breastfeeding is an important function, but it is technically optional. realistic alternatives are available to ensure any hypothetical infants are adequately nourished. breast reduction surgery does not have a post-op honeymoon period where the procedure seems to have fulfilled its purpose, followed by a sudden resurgence of pain. wls has initial weight loss followed by regain, in combination with nutritional malabsorption and a host of common, serious complications. it also, by the admission of parties encouraging wls on their disclaimers, does not cure many of the health problems it is popularly said to fix. i don’t know anyone claiming that breast reduction surgery will cure diabetes. it really isn’t a fair comparison.
having watched a friend go through breast reduction surgery, i know that for her, pain was the deciding factor. if she could have kept her original cup size and eliminated the pain, she would have. if i were to go to a hundred fat people considering wls and offer them a choice between the elimination of all their health problems and the resultant physical pain BUT leaving them fat, or wls, an awful lot of people would choose the chance at thinness.
for an unacceptably large number of people, wls ultimately decreases their health and overall quality of life (if they aren’t part of the 1.whatever % who die within six weeks of the surgery). for breast reduction, the risks aren’t nearly so great and the odds are far more favorable. one procedure, although frustrating to go through and with an aftercare regimen and post-op recovery period of several months, is generally safe. the other causes an awful lot of harm.
i’d say i’m applying the same standard to both procedures. one passes the test, and one fails.
… Interesting. Not sure if this would have occurred to me, but i never read SP anymore anyway. Not enough sanity points in the day, IMHO. I’m loopy enough, lol.
I think breast reductions are seen as less potentially harmful, especially when compared to gastric banding/rerouting – it’s the difference between removing fatty tissue in the boobages vs altering internal organs and the ways in which they are designed to function.
But if you were to compare breast reduction to, say, liposurgery? Ultimately not that much difference, to the best of my knowledge (bearing in mind that i’ve never really researched or experienced either one, therefore i am of limited knowledge in this regard). Perhaps it’s more of a representation thing.
I’m in a similar position as you: i’m more in favor of body autonomy than i am of trying to tell people that it’s wrong to go one way or another.
I don’t get the feeling (strolling the fatosphere) that weight loss is NOT acceptable. Weight loss for the sake of weight loss I think is strongly argued. But weight loss for say helping strain on a joint I doubt would cause too much of a ripple, dependent on the method of WL. Now weight loss to “cure” diabeeeetussssss, would probably come up with some strong arguments.
Why is the breast reduction okay? The breast reduction is a LOT more likely to be a “cure” for back, shoulder, neck pain. I’ve not heard of a “fail” when it comes to breast reduction 3 years after the surgery. But many WLS patients will “fail” several years down the road.
Years and years later most breast reduction patients I’ve spoken to still say “it’s the best thing I ever did”. I dont think the same holds true for most WLS patients.
I’ve a friend that has even gained a large amount of weight after a breast reduction, with little to no change in her cup size.
I didn’t contribute to the discussion at SP about this, as I’m a woman with very large breasts who has thought about, but never seriously considered, a breast reduction.
I think you do raise an interesting point. I suppose part of the issue is that for the most part, women who have breast reductions don’t tend to have their breasts revert to their original size, the way that the weight tends to be regained from other procedures.
I think that it’s entirely the decision of the woman who wants the surgery — not something for me to comment on. But that’s how I feel about weight loss surgery, too.
For women who are planning to have children, both weight loss and breast reduction surgeries may have an impact on the health of children that come after the surgery, and I don’t think this is a reason not to have a surgery. To me, that was the main reason I never seriously considered breast reduction, I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed if I had children, and knew that breast reduction to reduce my ability to do so. Of course, plenty of healthy children are bottle-fed, but I knew that I wanted to nurse if I could.
Breast reduction surgery is a relatively low-risk surgery with a high success rate and few, well-documented side effects, such as numbness and trouble breast-feeding. Weight loss surgery is the exact opposite – it’s dangerous, widely promoted for people for whom other lifestyle changes such as exercise or better nutrition would be a better solution (and I don’t mean for weight loss!), has major side effects including malnutrition and chronic pain, and is promoted as a miracle.
If someone wanted weight loss surgery, it’s not my business to tell them they shouldn’t. It is their business (and their doctor’s) to make sure they are fully aware of the short-term and long-term risks, and I suspect that society’s fat-phobia is contributing strongly to people’s decisions to have this major surgery.
My girlfriend lost a great deal of weight (about 80 pounds) slowly and safely through healthy eating (not dieting) and moderate exercise. She went to the doctor and the doctor told her that her friend had lost 80 pounds through weight loss surgery, so my girlfriend should have that next! Disgusting.
While this will sound stupid the second I write it – Because ’smaller boobs!’ is not as socially popular as ‘thin!’, I have less tendency to think that someone might be being pressured into it against their better judgment, and more tendency to think that they will have done the research.
I troll Yahoo Answers trying to talk anorexic 12yos out of starving themselves. (Seriously, those girls are nuts.) Along those lines I see an awful lot of people considering WLS who are ill-informed about the risks and benefits, and expect the WLS to magically change their lives forever.
People seeking breast reductions, imex, just want smaller breasts. Not ‘my whole life will be better in unexpected ways’. They are more directly addressing the actual problem they have. And, as far as I know, breast reductions are safer and more successful. Of course, I’ve never really researched them, so I would just keep my mouth shut!
This comment was posted by Meowser, I accidently hit delete rather than approve so I have cut and pasted…
“I don’t necessarily think it’s a matter of “what’s okay and what is not.” I think it’s more a matter of, “What is throwing good energy, time, and money after bad, and what is not.” (Also to a certain degree a matter of, “What is being done to capitulate to patriarchal standards of female good looks, and what is the human cost of that.” Leg shaving has no death rate on it unless you have hemophilia; liposuction carries way more risk.)
If the death and postsurgical complication rates and on breast reduction were anywhere NEAR as high as they were on WLS, I would say DON’T DO IT. But WLS is in its own category as to what a clusterfuck it is for most people who have it. Only about 10% really have the outcome they envision, and a lot of people wind up much worse off than they were before.
Almost nobody has breast reduction surgery and then goes, “Well, my boobs are the same size as they were two years ago, what was the point of that?” And of course, nobody loses their ability to eat solid food forever as a result of having their breasts reduced. Or winds up with their boobs becoming EVEN BIGGER as a result of having their breasts surgically reduced, whereas, as we all know, dieters often wind up much fatter and in worse health than if they had never dieted.”
Hey all,
Thanks for the comments. I understand a bit more now where a lot of you are coming from in regards to this situation. I still have some points that I am considering and I will try and articulate them into a post in the near future!
Bri
My thing is, many women can and do live life without breasts. It is, however, somewhat more difficult to operate without a stomach.
The breast’s only function is reproductive as far as I know (correct me if I am wrong) whereas your stomach is part of what helps you survive. If your breasts are int he way, causing you pain, (giving you cancer0 then reducing them or removing them has little effect on your ability to remain alive. However you cannot simply remove your stomach because it is inconvenient, you need it.
That said, people who have WLS are not having surgery on their stomach to fix their stomach, they are having surgery on their stomach to hopefully fix their whole body. Not to mention a dangerous surgery, that might not actually fix them and might cause a whole host of problems.
Frankly, it just isn’t an apples to apples comparison. I would say that lipo and breast reduction are more similar than BR and WLS. Both BR and Lipo operate directly on the offending tissue. WLS is changing the way the body works, that’s a major thing to be messing with.
[...] On paralleling breast reduction and weight loss December 22, 2008 Bri recently wrote a very thought-provoking post on the different perceptions at Shapely Prose between breast reduction and weight loss, in general. [...]
Maybe it’s because any woman could have breast surgery but only a fat person would have surgery on his or her digestive system? So people have fewer issues with breast reduction as it’s not perceived as being as ‘bigoted’ a choice, if you see what I mean.
Maybe it’s because surgery on your breast is “less” risky than surgery on your digestion. Any surgery is risky, of course, but you can live without your breasts (God forbid), you can’t live without your digestion.
Personally I think that she should of course do what she likes with her own body, but her choice saddens me, as any elective surgery does.
wls, by design, mutilates an essential body system. breast reduction does not.
This. Several people have hit on the reasons why I (and I think I can speak for my co-bloggers here, too) believe the two surgeries are apples and oranges. Or, I don’t know, a cold virus and TB. The risks of WLS and extent of the body modification are much greater, the chance of your desired result lasting long-term is much lower, and the choice to do it seems significantly less free in our cultural context, where big boobs are valued and fat bodies are demonized.
As to Buffpuff’s comment, I just don’t think the distinction between “I’m starting to practice HAES, which might lead to incidental weight loss,” and “I’m trying to lose weight” is trivial. (Nor do I think HAES = pretending you don’t want to be thinner. ‘Cause if you’re pretending, then deep down, your goal is weight loss, and we’re back to square one.) In one case, your goal is to change your body in a manner that has a spectacular long-term failure rate, which can damage you physically and emotionally (or further damage you, as the case may be); in the other, your goal is to change your habits in a way that promotes overall health and is sustainable over the long haul. There’s a world of difference there.
I guess I can see how one could get the impression that we at SP are in denial about the real physical problems that come with being very fat, because we’re not that fat ourselves (or fat at all right now, in Sweet Machine’s case) and are very vocal about weight loss almost never being the answer. (Buffpuff, I don’t know if you were talking about us specifically with that line, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that criticism.) But I think that’s a pretty simplistic interpretation of our views. Over a year ago, I published a post by a woman who’d chosen to have WLS because sometimes, frankly, all you’ve got left are shitty options. What I want is not for women like her to have to live in constant misery while there’s a risky, long-shot option for improving their lives, but for women like her to have some actually decent options; WLS is still not an intrinsically good option just because in rare cases, it might be better than the alternative. Similarly, I have a sister whose weight makes her life a hell of a lot harder than mine, on a lot of levels, and I’ve said on numerous occasions that if I could wave a magic wand and make her thin, I would do it. I would do it for anyone who’s in so much physical and/or emotional pain that being less fat would measurably improve their lives. My point is not that fat people should never be allowed to lose weight.
My point is thatthere is no magic wand. Yet bariatric surgeons have a lot invested in claiming that WLS is a magic wand, when it’s actually a dangerous crapshoot. Commercial weight loss programs and even some well-intentioned doctors also claim they have the magic wand, but that it’s all on you to wield it properly — so if you have the exact same result as most people, you end up just as fat as before and feeling like a shameful failure, to boot.
Not only is there no magic wand, but the fake magic wands that are out there can cause serious damage. That’s why SP’s policy is to come out frequently and adamantly against those things.
Breast reduction, on the other hand, while not a magic wand (I have heard of people gaining weight and seeing their breasts get larger again, actually), is a whole lot closer to one. There’s at least a better than even chance you’ll achieve the objectives of reduced pain and increased mobility long-term, without rearranging your guts and possibly ending up permanently malnourished, chronically ill, and/or deeply ashamed of your own “failure” — to say nothing of dead. That’s a pretty huge distinction, to my mind.
the medical issues distinguishing breast reduction from WLS (and i don’t like the term WLS because to me, gastric bypass is extraordinarily different from lap banding) are these: breast reduction is plastic surgery. it is essentially cutting off excess tissue. Both bypass and lap band invade the peritoneum – the body’s “guts” cavity. in the case of bypass, as we all know, the intestines are literally rerouted *TO CREATE* malabsorption. to me, that’s morally indefensible – that is saying that fat people are so intolerable and pathetic and valueless that is is ethically defensible to create an inevitably unhealthy body at any cost, because that will make them acceptable when they lose weight.
that’s just the tip of the iceberg, but i also wanted to say that the surgical equivalent of breast reduction would be lipectomy – just cutting the fat off. i have had a panniculectomy where they did that – another plastic surgery procedure – for a belly that hung almost to my knees, and intolerable, excruciating lumbar pain 24/7. i don’t have that any more, and i did gain the weight back (about 19#), but somewhere else.
i don’t want to go into the morality of it. . . other than to say that bypass (and, to a lesser degree, lap banding) are much harder for the body than breast reduction (which i’ve also had – - bye-bye neck pain).
thanks for listening,
kcd
Just to put your mind at rest, Kate, I wasn’t specifically referring to SP but the ’sphere in general. It was actually the furore that erupted around Heidi’s WLS and Hanne Blank’s alleged betrayal of the FA movement, that revealed elements of what I perceive to be hypocrisy. Even you got it in the neck from some quarters for allowing Heidi a platform to voice her views – despite the fact Heidi made it clear she herself hated the idea of WLS and felt compromised by having to take such drastic measures to improve a life that had become intolerable to and debilitating for her. Some of the highly critical responses to your choosing to run Heidi’s piece and to Heidi’s piece itself, made it clear to me that some FA advocates do have a problem owning the fact that sometimes fat does have an impact on some people’s physical health. It also brought in a genuine example of one very fat person plainly struggling with their life in much the same way that trolls bring in similarly extreme examples in order to pick holes in our ideology – and it was brought to everyone’s attention by someone from within the fold. No wonder it caused such a shit storm and no wonder some people were angry about it. I wasn’t one of them; I was pretty angry with some of your critics though. As to there being no magic wand to make fat people lastingly thinner and WLS being a barbaric practice with frequently appalling physical consequences? I am with you all the way, but you knew that.
If I can just get back to Hanne Blank again though – she decided to adopt a more healthy lifestyle, (I can’t believe I just wrote down those words without wincing or using parentheses), in the active hope she could lose some weight in order to ease some joint pain she was experiencing – and she got pilloried for it left, right and centre. Had she said “I could do with feeling fitter than I do and want to make exercise and eating more healthily, (whatever that may mean to her), my goal from now on so I’m going to start practicing HAES”, no one would have given her the lambasting she got. Again, a lot of the criticism she got was for daring to attribute her joint pain to her fat. Sure they might be unrelated but I think we should give someone the benefit of the doubt when they’re talking about their own body. In the mean time, regardless of what you call it, eating differently and incorporating exercise into your life, if you weren’t doing either before and with the intent to keep it up, is likely to result in some degree of weight loss. No, it probably won’t make you thin or even appreciably thinner (unless you’re excessively restricting your calories and/or pursuing an excessively punitive exercise regime, in which case that really would be back to square one), but it could benefit your joints, as might what you’re eating or the kind of exercise you’re doing.
My initial point is not so much that practicing HAES means you’re pretending you don’t want to be thinner. More that, in a culture such as ours, where many of us have been brainwashed since childhood to welcome weight loss for any reason and where being fat in a fat-phobic climate has resulted in most of us wishing we weren’t fat; it’s pretty damned hard to acknowledge there will probably be a weight loss component to eating more mindfully and/or taking up a regular exercise without being happy about it or, in Hanne Blank’s case, hoping for it. It’s simply human. Lastly, FA means so many things to so many of us. I’m pretty sure the one thing we all agree on is that fat people shouldn’t be treated as lesser human beings on the grounds of our physical appearance and that encouragement of that needs to be stomped on by whatever means possible. Everything else is up for grabs and open to individual interpretation. Learning to develop a fat aesthetic and finding it in our own bodies is a pretty big deal for a lot of us, so I can see why Bri raised the question.
Bri, sorry for the novel!
Had she said “I could do with feeling fitter than I do and want to make exercise and eating more healthily, (whatever that may mean to her), my goal from now on so I’m going to start practicing HAES”, no one would have given her the lambasting she got.
She also wouldn’t have gotten the lambasting she got if she was talking only about herself, without putting other fat people down for not following her lead. Unfortunately, almost nobody, except maybe Debra Sapp-Yarwood, seems to be able to go on a diet without getting all righteous and smug about it.
The contrast between Blank and Sapp-Yarwood is pretty illuminating, too. Sapp-Yarwood has been on Big Fat Blog for years, but managed to respect the “no diet talk” rule even as she was dieting herself, and acknowledges that having successfully lost weight she is an outlier, not a role model. That’s the thing. I don’t give a flying poop what someone eats or doesn’t eat, other than not wanting anyone to starve him/herself to death. But making a big deal about weight loss (as opposed to going about it quietly) and expecting other people to continue to follow you as a movement leader (as opposed to a movement participant) doesn’t sit well on me. If Blank had gone on the low-carb regime she felt her body required and showed up one day 50 pounds thinner, who would even have known other than the people she was close to?
…
People really need to do their research before they open their mouths. A breast reduction is not an easy surgery. It is major surgery. Major, painful, potentially dangerous surgery. It is not an instant magic wand. It is nothing close to a magic wand.
Breast reductions are not like “simple” liposuction procedures. They leave large, visible scars, far more than any weight loss surgery. They involve, in most cases, the anchor technique. Where your nipples and aureoles are cut off, sometimes completely detaching them from nerves and blood supply, a vertical incision is made from where the new breast apex will be to the base of the breast. There it meets up with a horizontal incision running along the curve of the underside of the breast. Through these incisions, breast tissue and fat is scooped out. Excess skin is cut and removed, the nipples and aureoles are sewn in their new place, the skin flaps are pulled around the new breast shape and sewn together. Hopefully into a breast that is the size desired and looks something like an average breast. Eventually. It takes an average of a year for reduced breasts to settle into their new size and shape, if nothing goes wrong. Like, say, your nipples not taking and rotting off and requiring further complicated, expensive reconstructive surgery. Or abscesses or large craters forming or anything else that can go wrong in major surgery. GA complications, the body rejecting the procedure, etc. Overnight hospital stay, surgical drains, pain medications, potential infections, probable loss of sensation in one or both nipples…
I’m not denying the seriousness of gastric bypass surgery or its hazards, but blowing off major surgery as something that isn’t? And not only that, blowing it off AFTER you have flat-out said you don’t know what it involves?
Wow. Them’s some ignorant ovaries, babes. What part of “hello, we’re going to slice ‘n dice, carve, scoop, reshape, stitch and glue your body and hope for the best” doesn’t come across? I’ve had internal organs removed with less pain, hassle, or potential complications than a breast reduction has.
I can’t comment on the breast reduction vs. wls aspect of your post, because I’ve never considered either option and it’s going to take something on the scale of the Apocalypse to change my mind about that. I really don’t like the idea of having surgery for anything other than potential life-saving measures (that’s just me, of course, what other people choose to do with their bodies is none of my business unless they explicitly as me for advice). But there was one sentence in your posted I wanted to comment on…
“By general FA standards, trying to lose weight is not an acceptable exercise (no pun intended). Not for any reason.”
Yes, I agree, and thank you a thousand times over for mentioning this. I’m fat. I’m still struggling with a desire to lose weight vs. a desire to love and accept myself as I am. I’m also losing weight because of eating and exercise changes I had to make to correct other health problems (I have an aversion to pills too, and if something like high cholesterol can be fixed or managed with diet and exercise I would rather try that first than go straight to the pills). And I often feel that there’s no place for me in the FA movement, which I find sad. According to society, I’m too fat to belong there (oh well, their loss if they want to toss me out). And though this may not really be the case, I often feel that according to the FA movement I don’t really belong there either because I haven’t fully accepted my fat body and lost all desire to lose weight. I mean, I’m pretty sure nobody in the FA movement would actually say that to me, but sometimes I wonder if people are fully aware that people like me exist and might be a bit sensitive about how things seem, and that in a medium like the internet — with no voices or body language or anything of the sort to help make a message clearer — it’s easy to come away from something with the wrong message or impression.
Anyway, this is getting rambly, I just wanted to mention how glad I was to see someone else mention an issue that’s been bouncing around in my brain ever since I first discovered the fatosphere a few months ago.
Absolutely well done for this Bri,
I know you say you aren’t stating an opinion but gist of your question, as I understand it, is that reducing breasts is no different to reducing the stomach, therefore to support one and not the other is hypocrisy.
The fact that you get points for the fact that (western) society prioritizes big breasts suggests to me the hypocrisy is based as usual, on a kind of underlying classism, big boobs are vulgar and lower class somehow-incidentally that is exactly the same stream that goes against fatness itself. But it also has a feminist tinge, in that feminism prioritizes the boyish and the androgynous in women especially (although in men too) and that is the same genus as feminist fat hatred also, which is why it is verboten to discuss it on Shapely Prose.
The relative difference in risk or mortality rates or these ops is what you call a straw man, it’s utterly irrelevant to the underlying principle, surgically altering yourself to fit your mindset, rather than altering your thinking to fit you body. Even I don’t think the purpose of weight loss is mutilation, it’s the same as breast reduction, to reduce.
I’m not attacking the women (and men) who have breast reduction, merely the notion that body hatred is an essential of life that must be left intact, worshiped even and the body must be cut or drugged to submit to your imagination.
Breasts are subject to the same changes of mindset as fatness( I’ve personally experienced this first hand, in fact, I can’t remember which came first, breasts or body!)-or not- if you believe that changing the way you think about being fat, is healthier, ditto your breasts. If thinking of yourself as a fat person and that’s OK, I choose not to be ‘humilated’ by that makes a difference, so does saying I’ve got huge breasts and that’s OK, I’m not going to be humiliated by that and so forth.
If you remove from your thinking, as much negativity about being fat and you do the same with your breasts, you are as likely to heal some or all of your ‘physical’ hurts (or not) as you would with fatness itself, (or not).
As for Buffpuff’s point, I don’t doubt that someof FA has an issue with the potential differences between the fat and those who are fatter, (It annoys me that we are expected to agree on everything; the haters think we are all one fat person too) there is a difference between weight loss from dieting and weight loss as a side effect of change, positive or negative. That has a biological basis- the body tends to behaves and respond differently to one than the other, the fact that people are hoping for weight loss from HAES (whatever it is) is irrelevant to that.
My basic thought is that they are pretty much the same idea, surgery to change your body. I honestly don’t think one is better or worse than the other. I also feel as though it is not up to me to say what is right for someone else, I mean if I am asking people to be accepting of me and to treat me with respect and to respect my decisions in regards to my body even if they don’t agree with them then I have no right to pass judgment on someone else. As Nudemuse says in this excellent post http://nudemuse.org/2008/12/fat-musings-take-four-million.html I feel no need to “shame” anyone for their decisions. I think alot more can be accomplished if you talk to them with respect as a friend and make sure they have truly their decision and to encourage them to look inside themselves and see if they really need this and what their motivation is. If they decide it is what they want to do, how I feel about them will not change. How I treat them will not change. Even if someone wants to lose weight, honestly that is their decision and they are fully welcome to do that, As long as they treat me with the same respect and don’t push their decision on me I am fine. I don’t mind if they talk to me about it because I believe friendship is about sharing, but we just need to figure out a comfortable medium so that neither of us have to feel uneasy or hurt. That is doable if you are willing to.
I guess people do whatever makes them happy. I don’t think gastric banding makes people happy, but it might make them happier if they think that the alternative (being fat) is a horrible horrible thing. Gastric banding has a lot more nasty consequences (and often backfires anyway in its intentions), than surface surgery to take away fat cells, which in itself is no walk in the park. So you’d have to be pretty desperate.
I guess the more people are willing to suffer in order to avoid being fat, the worse they must think being fat is. So thin obsession causes much suffering in people. If people do think being fat is horrible, then it’s likely that suffering to not be fat will make them feel in some way better. But it would be so much better to eliminate the pressures that make them think being fat is horrible, so that they don’t have to suffer in other ways.
(I’m just thinking about surgery motives for appearance rather than pain. I got nothin’ explicitly about how breast reduction is seen vs other forms of modification, but I do see a bit about how large breasts = sexual harassment = sex = slut = bad, therefore it’s noble to want to reduce them.)