Well Said
Here’s another manifesto, and I think Meowser knocks it out of the park.
I will say that fat hate is one of the last forms of prejudice in which even most people who are subjected to it think they are getting exactly what they deserve. And I find that totally unacceptable. BMI is now being used to deny adoptions and emigration to other countries, and no, it’s not people who are “too skinny” who are the ones getting rejected. We do not get to appear in movies or television shows unless we are the butts of jokes or some kind of horrible “warning” to “normal” people not to eat what they want or they will wind up looking exactly like us.
And what’s our crime? Allegedly that we eat too much junk and don’t spend enough time at the gym, and of course, people cling fervently to the belief that can tell exactly what we eat and how much of it and how active we are just from our pants sizes; genetics, medication usage, chronic dieting, socioeconomic status and bioenvironmental factors have nothing to do with either our weight or the state of our health. Never mind that the I’d-hit-that “ideal body” for women, especially, is often arrived at through “lifestyle choices” far more destructive than anything I’ve ever done in my life, and that the same people who bash fatties for being unhealtheeeee generally think it’s perfectly fine for thin people to dissipate themselves and not sleep and come to work with killer hangovers multiple times a week, and even not exercise and avoid vegetables if they’d prefer to. Thin people are given a pass for their vices and peccadillos because they make the world a prettier place; fat people had better be perfect every moment of their lives in order to justify being such a blight on everyone’s sidewalks.
Bolding mine. So very true. And definitely thanks go out to Fat Fu for creating and maintaining the wonderful Fatosphere feed.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advocacy, Feel Good Friday, Meta, Tidbit
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Why thank you, Mo! Go kick M*M*’s ass for all of us tomorrow, K?
Incidentally, it was Fat Fu (who founded the Fat Fu site long before I joined on) who put together the Fatosphere feed and maintains it. She deserves all the credit for that.
Very excellent post, with so many great points! I do, however, take a bit of an issue with that last bolded part there:
“Thin people are given a pass for their vices and peccadillos because they make the world a prettier place; fat people had better be perfect every moment of their lives in order to justify being such a blight on everyone’s sidewalks.”
I realize that this might be a bit of intended hyperbole, but I’m not sure there’s very much truth to this statement. Yes, I’m willing to believe that a thin person can sit down and eat a big cheeseburger combo in public and not get nasty stares whereas a fat person may not be able to do the same reagrdless of their respective vital stats (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc), but…if you’re showing up to work with a hangover several times a week and not being productive then you’re going to get fired. Fat or thin, you’re going to get fired.
I just think this statement hints at the whole “my life would be so much better if I was just thin and attractive” sentiment that so many overweight people believe and which can be dangerous, especially once they lose the weight and find that merely changing the number on the scale does not make it so.
Well said, indeed.
Lots of people show up to work hung over and are still “productive,” Arlene. Those people don’t get fired, they get promoted, as long as they have the “right image.”
Well…yes, okay, it’s probably true that if two people–one fat and one thin–continually showed up to work hungover, and everybody in the office knew, but they both still managed to do their jobs well, then yes, it is more likely that the thin person would be promoted over the fat person everything else being equal. And no, that’s not fair, and yes, it is infuriating.
But I still don’t think it’s accurate to say that “thin people are given a pass for their vices and peccadillos because they make the world a prettier place.” There are plenty of thin people with drug vices, alcohol vices, gambling vices, sexual vices, etc. who have to face the consequences for their actions. There are plenty of thin people who get fired for showing up to work on drugs or drunk, who get their houses foreclosed because they overspent themselves into backruptcy, who get disowned by their families and friends and shunned by society for their sexual tastes and preferences. And to imply that they get a free pass simply because they are not overweight is ridiculous, frankly. And to imply that the world will go any easier on someone who’s facing serious debt, or being fired for drug or alcohol abuse, etc. if they just lost 50 or 75 or 100 pounds is plain wrong, in my experience.
“But I still don’t think it’s accurate to say that “thin people are given a pass for their vices and peccadillos because they make the world a prettier place.”
HA!
Clearly you’ve never worked in the entertainment industry.
I do believe — having lived it — that you’re correct in your assessment that “just because you lose weight, your world won’t change”; however, that does NOT mean that conventionally pretty people are not privileged in their conduct FAR beyond what’s “permissible” for those visibly outside that norm.
(Britney Spears, anyone? Amy Winehouse?)
And the further outside that norm you are, the more severely you’re punished in this society, particularly for “deviant behavior” that people who cleave more closely to the norm can do and get away with.
And if you don’t believe that people can show up to work hungover — or high, for that matter — and not get fired, you should take a tour of some big city law and accounting firms, those bastions of conservatism and maintenance of the status quo.
Because the status quo in America IS that the more you cleave to the white patriarchal approved norm, the more you can get away with.
If you remain unconvinced, Google “white privilege”, “male privilege”, and Paul Campos’ central thesis — then get back to me.
Another awesome manifesto – that’s so 100% true. People absolutely feel that it’s okay to judge people for being fat, no matter how healhty our lifestyle choices are, and the thin unhealthy people are never given any crap about what they do. I sit here and eat my orange and my salad and my low-fat cereal and watch the skinny people snarf up brownies and know that there’s no fucking justice in this world….
Fat people and smokers, the two groups it’s still okay to discriminate against.
Yup. People CAN show up for work hungover and not get fired… or phone in sick repeatedly on a Monday, not make much of a secret of it that it’s because they’re hungover, and not get fired.
A colleague of mine used to do it and may do it still (I don’t work there any more). It used to drive me slightly crazy. I did rather wonder at the time if there’d have been more of a reaction to a woman doing this, rather than a young man, but I was never tempted to test the hypothesis…
On the whole, though, I think it’s down to workplace culture. I’ve never worked anywhere else where that happened.
I was thinking the case was overstated as well but I think you’re definitely right, littlem that there are degrees of deviation from a norm that make some bodies public property while others have the privilege of invisible bodies. It would be hard to not see, for example, that women’s bodies are scrutinized more than men’s. Or that pregnant women get all manner of uninvited scrutiny. Or I have an autoimmune disorder which many of my coworkers have suggested (in spite of pretty good evidence it’s a genetic disorder) is caused by either 1) my veganism 2) my fat or 3) some diabolical combination.
Meowser is definitely dead-on in saying that fat people are judged by their physical bodies and assumed to be doing something wrong and their fat is assumed to be a burden on others.
Kate Moss couldn’t snort enough coke in the 80s, and she still got “promoted.” And paid lots of money to strut around glowing.
I think snorting coke is pretty well documented to be bad for you.
Maybe time is the great equalizer. Maybe, when Kate Moss has an age related illness people will cluck at her “well, dearie, you should have put down the cocaine! Pushed yourself away from the dusty coffee table!”
I somehow doubt it. I’d bet both hand Kate Moss’ obituary will be dram-rama-SUPERMODEL-GORGEOUS!!!!
both hands, I meant.
I’ve actually experienced this first hand. Years ago I had a part-time job driving around the beverage cart at a golf course. There was a girl who I worked with who would show up late and so hungover that she couldn’t handle driving a golf cart for a few hours a day. (By the way, we were about 19 at the time… and imagine how messed up you’d have to be to not be able to operate a golf cart). So I would pick up her shift on top of mine when she did this.
I wound up getting fired because someone had complained about me. While this may be true (spending 8 hours on a bumpy golf cart around grabby, drunk, white, rich old guys is bound to make you cranky) I also know that that Lady Hangover still had her job after I left. And I also know that she was about 50 pounds smaller than I was and pretty and she lived on the golf course with her rich parents.
This was a shitty job and I wasn’t too sad, but I certainly taught me that the wealthy and pretty had a free pass in a lot of situations.
And that right there is pretty much the entirety of what bugs me about thin vs. fat thinking.