‘Fat Sex Therapist’ compares fitness to Nazism, dieting to rape

Fatness is health, dieting is sexual assault, and fitness is a white supremacist Nazi science – so stated a self-described ‘Fat Sex Therapist” at a college talk. Commenters were shocked, but the anti-fitness backlash is growing.

Sonalee Rashatwar, the therapist in question, delivered her polemic in a two-hour lecture at St. Olaf College, Minnesota last week. Puzzlingly, the lecture was hosted by the university’s Wellness Center, in conjunction with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.

“I truly believe that a child cannot consent to being on a diet the same way a child cannot consent to having sex,” she declared, adding: “I experience diet culture as a form of assault because it impacts the way that I experience my body.”

While the overwhelming medical consensus recognizes obesity as a cause of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, and premature death, Rashatwar joins a growing number of ‘fat acceptance’ and ‘health at every size’ activists who argue otherwise. Science, she told the crowd, is a white supremacist tool designed to oppress the obese.

“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?” Rashatwar, who uses the gender-neutral ‘they/them’ pronouns, asked.

“Fatphobic” science is “often actually eugenic science… eugenic science is Nazi science,” she continued.

After denying the link between obesity and high blood pressure, Rashatwar attempted to link Christchurch mosque slayer Brenton Tarrant’s murder spree with his love for physical fitness.

“I do not think it’s surprising that the man who shot up Christchurch, New Zealand was also a fitness instructor,” the self-described “Donut Queen” said. She argued 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.”

Rashatwar’s woke speech generated some attention on Twitter, mostly negative. “This is what the death of a civilization sounds like,” one commenter wrote.

Rashatwar’s intersectional rambling was not a once-off event at a stereotypically liberal university. Rather, it came as part of a 12-date nationwide speaking tour, during which she dissects issues like “How Fat Queers the Body,” and “Health is a Social Construct.” She is also a licensed therapist.

‘Fat acceptance’ is a movement becoming more prevalent in academia. Last year, nutritionist Linda Bacon, author of ‘Health at Every Size’, was a featured speaker at Baltimore’s prestigious John Hopkins University. Bacon spoke out against diet culture and ‘fatphobia,’ at the same university that hosts the Global Obesity Prevention Center.

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