_ A friend told me a story. An anecdote? Two women are talking, and one is upset because someone else called her fat. Her husband closes his manly newspaper, finishes his manly toast and says in his manly tones, “you’re not angry because she called you fat, you’re angry because you know you’re fat”. This is supposed to teach us something, apparently? The value of thinness? The truth than nobody wants to be fat? Yes. Nobody wants to be fat. Am I supposed to believe that the solution is to try to make everyone thin? _ Women are taught that fat is the very worst thing they can be. It’s worse than being cruel – you’re too fat to be mean, you must be jolly, only skinny bitches are allowed to be mean – it’s worse than being talentless or unskilled – as long as you’re thin, you’ll make it – it’s worse than being uneducated, and it’s even worse than being sick – when a thin person gets diabetes it’s a tragedy, but when a fat person gets diabetes, it was inevitable, and people worry that obesity is contagious.
You could win the Nobel Peace Prize, and if you were fat, people would still call you lazy. You may think you’re upset about your fat. You might think you feel fat. No. You don’t. Fat is not a feeling – fat is emotionally neutral. Fat doesn’t make you feel a thing, stigma on the other hand, stigma does. The way to end hatred is not to make everyone look the same. That only increases hatred. Every now and then I’m talking with someone about body acceptance, and they’re all like – that’s good for thin people, but y’know... what about the real fatties? If I thought everyone should look the same, this would be a whole different blog. That should be apparent. You might feel shameful, unappreciated, or a failure – you might feel the weight of prejudice upon your shoulders, and you might be made to feel that it’s your fault. You might feel that your life is not under your control, because you might buy into the lie that fat is a choice, just as one might buy into the lie that homosexuality is a choice. They’re not the same lie, but neither are they truth. That which exploits one’s fears and insecurities must never be mistaken for truth. It carries weight not because it’s true, but because it’s exploitative. It’s designed to carry weight, and it’s designed to fool us with mystical truth-like-feeling. We are not very good at distinguishing between one thing that carries weight and another thing that carries weight. One must constantly remind oneself – that which exploits your fears and doubts is not truth. If we don’t remind ourselves of this, the lies wear us down and we succumb to that which masquerades as truth, but in reality amounts to nothing more than hate and fear mongering. Who profits from exploiting your fears? And who profits from speaking the truth? People exploit each other for sex and affection by making each other work for approval. But anyway. Or, of course, there’s that other option. Maybe she doesn’t know fat, but she knows hatred; she was hurt because someone was being hurtful. Read Feeling Fat.
2 Comments
Michellers
5/27/2012 03:06:42 am
That anecdote makes me really sad. IF, somehow, all the people of the world suddenly became "normal" weight, I bet that the people at the upper end of the spectrum would still be vilified as fat because of the way human beings seem to need to separate and define the world by physical characteristics (see the blue eye/brown eye study).
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Chris Serong
5/28/2012 12:52:24 pm
I agree with the point - if we all loved and accepted ourselves more, a lot of our problems would go away.
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