Fat is the new Gay

Recently I’ve been involved in or witnessed a number of debates regarding obesity. In one situation a person found a note on another person’s car. The car was legally parked in a handicapped space, the note said, “Being fat is not a handicap”. The person removed the note from the car so that the owner would not find it and face the humiliation of anonymous denigration. And so, the debate began, and within that debate the fat hate rolled fast and furious.
To start, I’m appalled, absolutely appalled, that someone with the most minimal of information would decide that the only reason the person had for receiving the handicapped designation was that they were fat. There could be any number of reasons for the person’s handicapped designation, many of them completely unrelated to their weight. But that’s not the point, really, it isn’t. Whatever the reason might be, it’s none of your business. How cheap is your mind that you can waste its efforts on policing handicapped designations? What an asinine conceit to believe that you are the one who gets to decide based solely on a few moments observation who does or does not deserve to park in such a spot. That you, above even the various state guidelines, should decide and these people must justify to you.
Fat bashing is an easy sport these days. While there are certainly a number of medical reasons for why a person has the extra poundage, it’s readily agreed that most people are overweight because they eat too much and exercise too little.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a total fatty. I’m fat because I eat more calories than I expend. I have no excuses to offer up.
Picking a group to hate on is relatively easy. One only has to find people who are different in some way and then expound on those differences. Used to be we could attack natural differences like gender or race or sexual orientation, but not so much anymore. We’ve learned (some people slower than others) that ostracizing people for differences they did not choose is pointless. But fat people are different, they made choices! Choices that the skinny people would not make.
When a fat person goes out, every pint of ice cream, every cheeseburger, every slice of pie, every milkshake, every tub of popcorn, every bad choice they’ve made is on display to the world. People can look at the fat person and see a clear history of ‘bad’ choices. And so, safe in the anonymity of their own choices, they attack. The attacks are cheap and easy, they don’t require much effort at all. They can snort in derision if the person is there or later they can play Internet Tough Guy, logging on and vomiting out everything that is wrong with all the fat people they see. And the fat people, how do they defend themselves from such attacks? Sure, a few can rightfully proclaim medical conditions, but even those protestations are often met with, “yeah? well I have a medical condition that is entirely different but decidedly worse and I’m not fat!”
For the rest of us, there is no defense. We know we’re fat, we know why we’re fat, denying it rings as hollow as the arguments for intelligent design. So we take it. We take it because there is no other choice. If we didn’t want to be mocked we shouldn’t make bad, mockable choices, right?
Right?
But that’s the thing, our choices are highly visible, you can see them. What if every one of your bad choices were laid bare to the public? What if your credit score was on the back of your shirt for everyone to see? How about the details of every one of your failed relationships? Your sexual urges? Your poor performance reviews from every job you ever had? Would you be so quick to judge and mock someone if they could see that one time in college you intentionally gave a chick too much to drink so you could fuck her with little resistance? Would you be keen to remark, “You just have to eat fewer calories than you use! I don’t see what’s so hard about that!” if someone else could say, “you just have to spend less money than you make, I don’t see what’s so hard about that!” every time you left your house?
Fat bashing is cheap and easy, it doesn’t require much thought and you know the majority of the population will back you. But what I want to know is who the fuck are you to climb on such a high horse? Sure, you can spout off all the statistics about obesity and health issues, but really, who the fuck are you? Are your bad choices any better? Or are your bad choices just less evident?
Don’t worry, if history tells us anything it’s that soon enough, your bad choices will become evident and the majority will turn on you as well.