In the early hours of Wednesday, April 20th 2011, an attack took place on the Herbal Magic Weight Loss Clinic on Wellington Avenue in Guelph, Ontario. All of the storefront’s windows were smashed, and paint was applied to the inside.
Capitalism attempts to hold control over all of our instincts for freedom, including our attempts to love our bodies. Herbal Magic, and other enterprises which sell us “health” and “wellness” at the expense of our self-esteem, hijack our relationships to our bodies. In a culture where “health” is synonymous with beauty, and beauty is equated with thinness, the weightloss industry turns our self-hate into billions of dollars every year. This has to stop.
Like most people in this culture, the perpetrators of the attack on Herbal Magic experience the effects of the system’s ongoing attack on our self-conception and self-esteem. Although we struggle daily with the social construction of beauty and with weightloss industry’s role in perpetuating it, we have chosen to turn our frustration into action.
“Beauty must be defined as what we are, otherwise the concept itself is our enemy.”
