Too Good To Miss
June 15th, 2007
From Red No. 3 comes today’s genius idea: Fat Hate Bingo and Fat Hate Bingo 2! Featuring all your favorite fat-hating slogans like “You must be delusional if you think it’s okay to be fat” and “You’d be so cute if you just lost weight” and “But you’re going to die!”
I have to say that some of them, you’ll have to explain to me. Like “We should accept whatever size someone wants to be.” Is that somehow an anti-fat statement? And “losing weight is hard work.” Well… isn’t it? Maybe I’m thinking about this too much. But feel free to explain the rationale behind those being anti-fat.
Or you could just ignore me and order a Fat Hate Bingo T-shirt. That would work too.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Humor
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And “losing weight is hard work.”
I’ll take this one.
People whip that statement out to refute the notion that dieting doesn’t work for the vast majority of people, because our bodies readjust to the lack of caloric intake.
“Well, I never said losing weight was easy!”
Yeah, and I never said I was afraid of hard work. I said I was afraid of my body going into starvation mode.
Oh I see. So it’s more like “if you’re not losing weight, you’re just not trying hard enough.” Got it.
I think “We should accept whatever size someone wants to be” is on there as a response from someone trying to rein in the fatties when they start to criticize dieting (e.g., “If a fat person WANTS to lose weight [and is willing to keep trying even though they will pretty much never succeed barring anorexia], we should support their decision.”). This one always annoys me, because for most of us, it’s not a matter of questioning whether someone should BE a size 4, but whether they should saddle themselves with a lifelong obsession, never be a size 4 anyway and constantly loathe their bodies. If someone ‘wants to be’ a size 4 and just naturally IS a size 4, I say bully for them.
Kate’s right with the “hard work” line. It’s invariably trotted out to imply that fat acceptance is about avoiding the work and the continued implication that anyone can be thin if they just try hard enough. It’s often used by people who think fat acceptance is a buzz-kill.
“We should accept whatever size someone wants to be” is the rallying cry of “Diet Acceptance” which tries to ape Fat Acceptance language to tell Fat Acceptance to shut up. The unspoken follow-up would be, “by which we mean thin.” It fosters the illusion that no one should be critical of dieting because this would endanger the rights of dieters (another square). Basically, its saying that weight loss promoters get to promote their beliefs but fat acceptance promoters don’t.
“We should accept whatever size someone wants to be” is a very slick saying, definitely.
You can see how it is twisted by using instead the phrase, “We should accept whatever size someone is.” Now that’s affirming.
“We should accept whatever size someone wants to be” implies that fat is a choice, and if a fat girl [i]really[/i] wanted to be thin, she could, since, y’know, fat is a CHOICE.
The minute I saw “losing weight is hard work” I heard it in my head in this pseudo-comforting, patronising tone of voice implying either “I know it’s hard, but you wouldn’t be so fat if you weren’t so lazy!”, or “poor stupid fat girl, don’t you know you have to sacrifice everything to fit cultural standards?” Either way, grrrr.
And don’t forget the mechanism of bingo–one statement on its own may not be suspicious. But five in a row–bingo!