Worth, Not Girth
TTWS faithful reader and YouTube blogger Kristin is ON FIRE here. Regarding the issue of fat discrimination, she writes:
Thank you Liz! I knew I liked you for a reason…now I have even more reason to like you. Size discrimination and fat phobia are so rampant in our society and we have very few allies (skinny friends) who are willing to stick up for us when the proverbial 13-year-old-acting nitwit stands up in the room and starts making fat jokes.
The truth of the matter is, dieting doesn’t work and people are taught to feel nothing but shame about their living, breathing, life-sustaining bodies. We are all taught that we can never be thin enough and for those of us in the plus size and big men’s categories this means that life can be especially difficult. Not only are fat people discriminated against in employment, personal relationships and virtually every social situation imaginable, but we are forced to shut up and smile and laugh like a jolly fatso while the entire society punches us in the stomach.
Whatever physical pain that results from being overweight cannot compare to the psychological torture that society and individual people put fat people through. Some thin people think they have a right to make fun of fat people, because they believe we are lazy, shiftless, stupid, unmotivated blobs who can’t do any better and need to be told how to lose weight. What if they knew the secret that we are actually real flesh and blood human beings with emotions and feelings and experiences and a shame so deep that it is hard to break thru? What if they ever saw us bent over a toilet throwing up again and again? What if they saw us starving ourselves? What if they saw us cry or feel hurt? And what if they knew how fucking amazing we all are to survive such hatred and still manage a smile at the end of the day?
Turn on the television and imagine that all of those diet and weight-loss ads are instead ads to become another race or gender. How would that make you feel if you had to see that 24 hours a day knowing that you couldn’t be who everyone else seemed to want you to be? Michael Moore is an amazing and groundbreaking filmmaker. He obviously works hard and is intelligent and thoughtful. I agree with you that that stupid PETA person is being an idiot. If they care for social justice and the equality of PEOPLE at all, they should shut the fuck up and go learn something about oppression and size discrimination instead of yapping their mouth off and acting like a moronic hater.
Anyway, I thank you Liz for sticking up for Michael Moore who should not be judged by his girth, but by his worth. If we had more thin allies perhaps this kind of stupid hatred could be eradicated.
liz | 5:57 PM | Uncategorized
The issue of weight is analagous to the issue of mental health. How fat is too fat, how thin is too thin? This is similar to the questions regarding mental health. How long do you get to be unhappy after a loss before you are considered depressed? Who gets to decide what losses are sufficient justify which length of unhappiness? How long do you get to be cheerful if things are going your way before you are labeled hypomanic?
If there is a high rate of suicide among the people working in a chicken processing plant, does that mean an epidmic of mental illness or a really sh*tty, slavelike job?
Have you ever seen a “person of size” in a Zyprexa or Seroquel commercial?
Like physical size, humans should have the choice to decied when and what they want to try to change about their emotional state. Of course also, people come in different physical and emotional sizes, all of which have value. If you are model slim, you are not normal, in fact so many models have public battles with drugs, eating disorders, and other “mental health” problems, and yet society tells us it is wrong not to strive for this appearance.
That being said, the stridency of PETA folks often comes across as mean spirited and it takes credibility away from their mostly just cause.
I once had a friend who was in PETA who stopped speaking to me when I informed her that I had bought a Siamese kitten from a pet shop. It was a dusty, dark little pet shop and my Sofia was locked in a cage on a shelf crying. There’s no way I was leaving that kitten there. I don’t think the fact that there are other cats in shelters would have justified me leaving her there when I had the money to spring her. Though I still of course support the pet rescue movement.
Right on! It’s to the point where I no longer watch TV because I’m bombarded with drug ads, food ads and weight loss ads.
It doesn’t matter what we do — if you’re fat, or even larger than what society has deemed normal, you’re told through overt and not so overt messages that you’re worthless.
“If you are model slim, you are not normal, in fact so many models have public battles with drugs, eating disorders, and other “mental health” problems, and yet society tells us it is wrong not to strive for this appearance.”
I know the context of your article, and I (almost) completely aggree with your point of view, but as I have quoted the above paragraph I think it is ’stepping off on the wrong foot’ to go on a rampage against skinny people.
Skinny people should be happy for what they have just now because of the way society perceives them – at this moment in time. It won’t stay like this.
It’s like when smoking a cigarrette was seen as normal and now it’s the worst thing in the world to do. Or when global warming wasn’t even an issue on the political agenda – and now people are slowly coming to terms with the situation of the planet.
Social ideals DO change.
But to go on the aggresive against the slim saying they’re not “normal”(what is normal?) will not win you any points when it comes to changing peoples ideals and I am emphatic that perhaps that was not the point of your article but that you might have
phrased it wrong.
But I hope that your views were not entirely prejudiced againt the slim and that we don’t create a social barrier between fat people and slim people…..
……Why can’t we all just get along?
Andrew
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