It's A Slightly Bigger World, After All
Reader Dina alerted us to this story about Disney increasing the weight capacity of some of their rides, most notably Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s A Small World. Check out the mean-spirited tone of this article, though:
Disney just reeks of America. You know what else reeks of America? Fat people. Mix the two together and you’ve got one “only in America” smirk-worthy problem. The rides in Disneyland, “It’s A Small World” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” which take visitors from animatronic scene to animatronic scene via boat, are being reconstructed as the vessels are bottoming out, halting transport…Aware of the problem for some time, Disneyland employees have been keeping seats empty in boats carrying heftier folk. Reconstruction (which involves a deeper river and more buoyant vessels) will take 10 months starting in January, so if you’re planning on showing your chunky kids the magic of ethnic diversity a la Disney, you’re going to have to hold off a while.
Cute. Miceage gives more specific numbers: when the rides were designed, women were assumed to weigh an average of 135 and men 175 pounds. (The Miceage article is a very interesting insider take on the ride mechanics, but it does blame “churro-loving visitors” for slowing the ride down.)
Well, I’m sorry for having the audacity to weigh more than 135 pounds, to enjoy churros, and to love Disneyland. Maybe there should be a “you must be this thin to ride this ride” sign at the front of every queue! Perfect solution!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Fat Positive, Fatism, Old Timey
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to be vulnerable for a moment, there’s nothing more embarassing and heartbreaking than not being able to fit into a ride at an amusement park.
This reminds me of when I went to Cedar Point in Ohio, and was amazed to see they had “test seats” outside of many of the rides so that riders could test to see if they fit into them before standing in line for ages.
I actually was a little concerned about “fitting”, but I was not about to sit in the test chair in front of the whole world…it just seemed so humiliating.
I ended up being just fine on all the rides, but it got me wondering which would be worse; sitting in the “test chair” in front of everyone outside the rides, or having to leave the ride bc you can’t get your seatbelt buckled? This happened to a couple people I saw, and I really felt for them.
People are making this out to be a situation where Disney is revising rides to accommodate morbidly obese people, when in reality, the rides will now most likely accommodate the very people who are doing the fat-bashing.
The standards set in the 1960s are ridiculously low. C’mon… 175 pounds for a man? 135 for a woman? My husband is 6’1″ and weighs 180 and I think he’s a beanpole. Yet, he’s one the so-called “churro-loving” fatties that will now benefit from the revision of the ride.
People also don’t consider that collective heights have increased from the 1960s, which exponentially involve a rise in weight. But it’s so much easier to fat-bash than understand the real logic behind the move.
Oh man, c’mon. Those were original Disney rides created in a time where people were REALLY tiny! Not only in weight, but in height. I’m 5’5 and of the ‘average’ weight suggested in your article, and I find it difficult to fit those boats. I feel cramped and claustrophobic, and always get out with bruises on my knees. In addition, eve when they fill those boats with people of average weight, they bottom out, because it’s not the 50’s anymore! Ok, they probably updated the boats since then, but still. Anyway, I just don’t understand why this guy thinks that because people are larger they’re less entitled. The rides are supposed to be made to fit the people visiting them… what’s the point if most of the population can’t fit?
Man, us fatties really suck, don’t we? Not only are we “the enemy within”, but now we’re going to ruin Disneyland. If only there were a few brave souls out there who could speak up, show us the error of our ways and lead us to the path of thinness, which would of course equal happiness and joy and the end of all war.
*sorry for the incredibly poor quality sarcasm…I’m sick, and remembering my embarrassment at being banned from rides on a class trip in middle school. I was told, in front of a group of my classmates that I couldn’t ride a ski-lift type ride with my friend because I would drag the ride down (I was 14, 5’7″ and probably weighed 180 at the time), right after two boys who weighed at least as much as I did had been let on. The ride operator was a teenage guy who obviously took a lot of pleasure in saying this to me, and he smirked as I walked off crying.
And I have to admit…I don’t even know what a churro is o_O
I’m so god damned sick of people thinking it’s OK to fat bash because it’s “unhealthy” and there’s a PROBLEM in America. It’s that whole “We can’t keep trying to accommodate everyone” attitude that gets me. Why should some people have to miss out? I’m fat, and its really not my fault, but I have to miss out on tons of things- I can’t go on amusement park rides because I’m too fat and I haven’t been able to since I was 15 or 16. I’m afraid to fly because I’m just waiting for the day when they’re going to make me buy two seats. Is it so wrong that in addition to losing some weight I’d like some friggen sensitivity when it comes to my issue?
Oh, but it must be my fault. I’m a fat person, and we all know that fat people are fat because they have no willpower, right? And ALSO, fat people are ruining America (and the world), so we might as well just make them as uncomfortable as possible because the only way to FIX the problem is to make fat people feel unwelcome.
Yeah. I’m sarcastic, and bitter, and I just can’t believe some people. Whatever happened to catching more flies with honey?
What happened to the days when being “plump” meant you were the healthy ones? It used to be the skinny ones were the first to go….because they had the plague! LOL. Why is this even an issue in this country? Oh wait, it’s because we’re superficial….pardon me, I forgot. And the secret they don’t want you to figure out? They wanna keep you fat and unhappy. If everyone was happy about their weight, no matter the number, the diet and drug industry would collapse upon itself. Who could they sell their useless products and services to?? You need to stop caring what other people may think. Just remember, if anything happens to the world as we know it, the ones with the fat will survive.
that was mean spirited. i am a naturally heavy person and even at my healthiest weight and in the best shape of my life i weighed 209 lbs.
You’re damned right they should be making rides that accommodate people of all sizes. If they want the hard-earned money I’m spending on them, anyway. I’m starting to get more hardcore that way.
I bet the adult-to-child ratio at DisneyLandWorld is higher than it was originally projected to be, too. If they figured there would be a 50/50 split and there’s now a 70/30 split, well, that’s a lot of extra weight simply because there are more adults per boat than projected. I think the Disney parks have ended up being a lot more popular for adults than originally expected.
I was in a stuck boat on Small World a couple of years ago, but we somehow managed to grab onto a ledge outside the boat and push ourselves onwards.
About 8 years ago, I was flipping through press releases and found one from a university health sciences center. A faculty medical provider was extolling the virtues of anti-smoking campaigns, and was wishing aloud that there was a public awareness campaign about obesity. I remember thinking “Where the !@#$ has this guy been? I’ve never been heavier than 165, but as someone who stands at about 4’7” (I’m roughly 20lbs lighter than that at the moment) I sure have been publicly shamed about my disgusting obesity for much of my 35 years of life.
I agree with previous posters — this is mostly a commercial grab at $$ from people who probably won’t die from being fat. Even though we keep hearing “fat kills! Fat Kills!”
The hysteria is so very lucrative. I mean, yesterday, I found what kind of read like a South Beach Diet advert in the comments section on this very blog.
I’m confused by the talk of this somehow being a conspiracy of the diet industry. The article is about how Disney IS upgrading their rides to accommodate the greater size of contemporary park attendees. And if anything, Disney, which does sell food and does not sell diet products, only has a financial interest in making its customers fatter.
I came aboard to “weigh in” on this topic, but find my point made for me, and and made very well, by mhr.
I was once trapped for nearly twenty minutes in the graveyard section of the Haunted Mansion. I’ve since lost my love for that childhood favorite. The looping music and repetitive ghostly holographs did me in.
To weigh in on this article- I can’t believe things like this get published. I don’t care that the majority of “normal” society thinks fat is curable, and those afflicted can fix it. It’s just wrong to, you know, be MEAN. If your friend gets a bad haircut, is it okay to be cruel to her because she can “fix it”? Based on the “truth” of maintained weight loss that everyone’s barking, people seem to think it’s okay to berate. It will just hasten all the fatties to thin salvation. Ugh. Let’s not accomodate them. Let’s sneer and tell them to stay out of our theme parks.
Yeah, yeah. Old hat. But I still get the angries.
Yeah. I can’t go to amusement parks anymore. I don’t fit on the rides. Makes me more sad than angry.
La Wade, I doubt the majority of Disney funds comes from food sales. And WE sound paranoid? But I didn’t really expect you to say anything positive.
I have plenty of memories of going to Cedar Point, and fearing that I would not fit on the rides. To my great (and fortunate) relief, I had no problem.
But you know, us fatties are just making the world a “bigger” place – even though we work for a living and contribute our money to the economy just like the rest of America. But yet, us fatties need to be shunned for daring to ask for accommodation. Only the thin and fit are allowed to have fun? But, if us fatties are put on the same level as them, WHO would they look down upon? That is the biggest fear.
I’m confused by the talk of this somehow being a conspiracy of the diet industry.
LaWade – I don’t see where anyone is saying this. Can you be more specific and point out particular posts?
I do see where people are talking about diet companies in the larger context of weight-based discrimination, but nowhere do I see anyone claiming Disney’s modification of the ride to be a conspiracy of the diet industry.
I have to correct you Sarah, it’s ONLY the thin that are allowed to have fun; you don’t to be thin and fit at all, thin is the only allowing criteria. Heaven forbid that one could be fit and fat, like I and many others that I know are!
I agree with the person who said that Disney probably didn’t forecast the child-adult ratio accurately, and are making the changes to their seats in light of reviewing their sales data and going “Hang on a minute… it seems like we make more money off the adults”. Since DUH, they actually HAVE money to spend.
The comments I was referring to were ones such as Cindy’s remark that “this is mostly a commercial grab at $$ from people who probably won’t die from being fat” and Brainsitter’s remark that “the secret they don’t want you to figure out? They wanna keep you fat and unhappy.” I don’t think they’re specifically referring to Disney as the “they” here. The implication, I think, is that the authors of these articles represent “them,” but given that the articles appeared in, respectively, a clothing company’s blog and a Disney fan site, I think that’s a little far-fetched. I mean, are the people who wrote these articles bigots? Of course! Are they part of a diet industry conspiracy? I doubt it.
And my point about Disney being in food sales is to point out that the financial pressures go both ways. In fact, a lot more money is made making people fat than it is making people thin. The weight loss industry is widely quoted to be worth $40 billion a year in the U.S. But food sales is a $1 trillion per year industry. The food industry has a vested interest in encouraging people to eat more and in downplaying any negative consequences of obesity. They even sponsor pro-FA websites like obesitymyths.com. But that doesn’t mean that every person who is in favor of fat acceptance is part of a great McDonald’s conspiracy.
Why does any of this matter? Well, I think if you want to get rid of anti-fat prejudice, you have to understand why it’s there in the first place. And I really don’t think that the answer is a diet industry conspiracy, although I can understand how many aligned social forces might make it seem that way.
I have to admit that when I’m in line for a really cool roller coaster, I find myself obsessing about whether or not I will fit. Thankfully I always do!
And I have actually used the test seats. I never felt embarrassed by it. Perhaps it’s because all of the kids in before me and after me sat in them too….just to see how “cool” it was.
La Wade – I didn’t mean to confuse anyone. I sort of read the article/post as a criticism of bigger bodies (Disney and fat reeking of America). You know, as in: “Disney world is having to spend money to accomodate fat people. The horror!” If they were spending the same amount to, I dunno, increase the volume/capacity for a ride to get more patrons on a ride, it might not have been as conversation-starting.
I then got steamed at the whole complain-about-fat-people-costing-us-money and saw it as a way to get Disney’s brand out there. I admit I could have been reading while knee-jerking & conspiracy hunting. I’ll try not to do that so much.
Fatgirl wrote I’m fat, and its really not my fault…
On November 5 she wrote on her blog I ate till I was stuffed, and there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.
Sure it’s “really not your fault” sweetheart, sure it’s not…
Cat….because she ate til she was stuffed once? Have you ever eaten a lot? Come on.
Well sure I have Kandice, but as Fatgirl got up to over 400 pounds something tells me that she ate til she was stuffed more than once.
Cat, the topic is Disney re-engineering their seats to allow larger folks to ride — right now, their assumption of a 135 pound woman (when the average height for women is about 5’4”, this doesn’t even cover all the 5’4” women who fall within the “Normal” BMI range). The topic isn’t “who deserves to ride the rides at Disney” or “why eating until you are stuffed on one occasion means you deserve to be excluded from X or Y activity.”
Disney markets itself as a place where people have fun, connect with their families, and appreciate that society is made up of all kinds of different people, as “it’s a small world after all.” If riding the rides is a merit-based activity, maybe they should have screeners at the gate, excluding mean-spirited killjoys from participating in the fun.
Okay lay off the personal attacks, please. This is not the place for an indictment of Fat Girl or an analysis of why she or anyone else is fat. Or, while I’m at it, the place to take backhanded swipes at La Wade. Come on now.
Furthermore, all this obsessing with whose “fault” it is that any given person is fat smacks of unkindness and elitism. Some of us are born with raging metabolisms and long, lean builds. Some of us are not. No matter how much I diet and exercise, I am never, ever going to look like marathon champions Catherine Ndereba, Zhou Chunxiu or Uta Pippig, or gymnast Svetlana Khorkina, or even the lowest ranked female bodybuilder. I’m not built that way.
So to say, “well, *I* look a certain way, and I only eat X amount of food, so everyone else can, too,” is crap. Genetics, one’s background and upbringing (because kids who become obese can actually increase the number of fat cells in their bodies, whereas adults who gain weight often just add fat to existing cells), economics, and a plethora of other factors play into the equation.
It’s like saying, “Poor people should stop complaining. I studied hard and went to college and law school and now make a lot of money. They could have, too.” It ignores all sorts of contributing factors, it’s overly simplistic, and it’s just insulting.
Sorry. I saw your post after I posted, Mo. I’ll be quiet now.
Um, La Wade? You seem to have forgotten that food isn’t just “the thing that makes you fat.” Spending money on the diet industry is a luxury; spending money on the food industry is a necessity. Of course people spend more money on food than they do on dieting. You could talk about how the food industry loads their foods up with high fructose corn syrup because it’s cheap, or about how many food companies sacrifice health for the sake of appealing to our lizard-brain desire for fatty and sugary foods, or any of the many other ways the food industry is fucked up, but saying “people spend more money on food than dieting” is like saying “people spend more time working than they do exercising”. Again: one is a necessity, the other is a luxury.
Food is both a necessity AND a luxury, I’d say. There are not too many people out there who eat only as much as they need to survive. I’m certainly not in that group. And I’d say it’s pretty indisputable that the food industry has decided that convincing people to buy and eat more food that they don’t need is a good way for them to increase their profits. A great book that talks about this in some detail is Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, in which she talks about the influence of food industry groups in shaping governmental dietary recommendations. Anyway, I just think it’s important to keep in mind that there are massive financial interests on both sides of the diet issue.
I know some fat adults who specifically take vacations to Disney because they find it to be more fat-friendly than other vacation destinations. So I’m wondering if they have this problem *more* than other amusement parks. For example, I would never go to Six Flags again because it’s basically pointless (about 60% of the coasters are too small), but the vast majority of rides at Disney are fine for me. Does that make any sense?
Face it, folks: we’re the very last minority group (albeit one with a lot of weight to throw around) that political correctness permits to be constantly reviled. Try this on for size:” Gays are diseased – let’s cure them of their gayness!” or, “Black people can be helped to whiteness, let’s start a campaign to lighten them up!” If you did THAT, you’d have the wrath of the gods raining down upon you.
The solution? If you like what you see in the mirror, if you feel good & you’re healthy, then ***k ’em! Since the Disney people are so kindly enlarging their accomodations, just go along for the ride & have the time of your life.
And just maybe they’ll give that wretched song a rewrite: it’s a BIG world after all!
To be honest, it’s not just a “fat” thing. Americans have gotten taller and more muscular in the intervening 60+ years as childhood nutrition has improved, and even if weights were only increasing proportionally, it would start to cause problems.
In any case, it’s good that the parks are being proactive about this, as opposed to say, airlines who just say “screw the customer”.
I thought about one other thing… people have fewer kids now than they did in the 50s. So, if the average family then had 2-4 kids, now the average family might only have one or two. So the ratio of parents to kids is lower (two parents with one kid vs three, for example, thus more adults on each boat, thus the boats need to accommodate more weight. Of course, this isn’t always the case, but you see what I mean, in terms of the size of the “average” American family.
And, in support of the point thatgirljj and others have made… my husband is 6’5″ tall… at 175 lbs. he’d look like he just got out of prison camp, you know?
People HAVE got taller, and not just in America (the tallest nation on earth, on average, is the Netherlands).
I’m about 20 pounds heavier than my mother (I think), but two dress sizes smaller. Why? Because I’m four inches taller than she is. Height really does make a big difference.
According to that second article, these boats were designed in 1963. And according to the CDC, American men and women are about an inch taller today than they were then, but they’re about 25 pounds heavier on average. So clearly, Americans are gaining girth faster than they’re gaining height. But I don’t particularly think it matters in terms of the issue being addressed here. Is a 250-pound person who also happens to be a 6’7″ bodybuilder and follows an exacting diet and exercise regimen more deserving of public accommodation than a 250-pound person who is a binge-eating couch potato? I think not. All people of all sizes for whatever reason deserve reasonable public accommodation.
I worked at cedar point last year and quite simply, most of the faster and steeper coasters simply have to have seats in a given size range because the rider needs to be able to be locked in very tightly. On a few of the coasters people who really aren’t even very large cannot fit, this is for the same reason that small children and little people cannot ride. Either you’re going to fall out of you cannot be locked it. This has little to do with size acceptance on the most extreme of thrill rides because they make sacrifices in who can ride to have the biggest, fastest, etc. There is no reason to be ashamed to try to test seat – if could save you 2 hours in line and the employees HATE having to break your heart when you’ve already waited in line. If you’re at risk for not fitting the employee at the line gate will often ask you very nicely to try the test seat, if they’re doing what they’re supposed to.
With more generic rides and even many coasters, the seats can be much larger. If you’re in an amusement park and are afraid of not fitting on rides, find an employee of a size similiar to yours and ask! Most of them would love to help you because they know what it’s like.
ps. if you’re going to cedar point, ride the magnum and stay away from the dragster (big difference in who will fit)… magnum is one of the best and most underrated coasters there anyway, and the line is much shorter. the best seat is 3rd from the front, you get the most air time.
Yeah, I guess you could compare being fat with being gay. Except that being gay doesn’t come with built-in health risks. If someone has a disease, you try and cure it.
You people are pathetic, trying to make yourselves feel better while shoving pie down your face. That’s sick. You don’t have to be anorexic to exercise some SELF CONTROL and only eat one slice instead of two.
Face it, the world likes skinny people right now. Maybe one day we’ll go back to the 18th century, and your fat ass can be on the cover of magazines. But please, stop trying to justify your obesity by comparing yourself to Oprah. If you give millions of dollars to orphans, then OK. But if all you do is write on the internet to make yourself not feel so nasty, piss off.