Tuesday, July 11, 2006
The Obese and the Rest of Us
Few weeks back a woman friend said I had a hang up about fat people and was unfair in my comments about them. Both of us are thin. Thinking about her comments I had to admit to myself that she was right. I have stopped being critical or, rather, I stop myself from being critical about those who are obese. I no longer contemptuously think that they are responsible for their condition.
Rachel Cooke's article "Is weight the new race" in The Observer (Guardian) is well-written and tries to present a balanced view. "Truly terrible, is the answer. You may think that you know this already, but in order to come even close to grasping a fat person's misery, you should probably take that imagined desperation, and triple it. Then consider your attitude to this unhappy person. Do you pity them? Or do you despise them? If the latter, do you feel able to say so out loud, in public? I bet that you do. These are critical times in the great obesity debate. In the West, all we talk about is our increasing weight, and what we can do to keep it at bay. Emotive words like 'epidemic' and 'time-bomb' are thrown about like so many hand grenades. Open a newspaper, and a story will certainly be there (most recently, it was reported from the British Dietetic Association conference that the risk of fatal disease increases by one per cent for every pound a person is overweight). The seemingly well-established connection between fat and disease has meant - so far - that it has been somehow acceptable to criticise the fat; it's for their own good, after all. But now there are rumblings. The fat and their supporters have had enough of what they regard as discrimination. They are angry, and they are going to fight. They regard their cause as just. They believe that fat is the new race."
Excerpts:
- So is fat the new race? I don't believe that it is, though it could become so in the future. But that's not to say that thinking about it in these terms isn't a useful corrective. If we're allowed to want fat people to lose weight, then they're allowed to want thin people to be kind - or, better still, blind. Best not to forget, then, where we started - with a woman walking down a street, feeling as though she might as well be stark naked.
- 'I know ... that when a thin person looks at a fat person, the thin person considers the fat person less virtuous than he,' writes Judith Moore in her memoir, Fat Girl. 'The fat person lacks willpower, pride, this wretched attitude, "self-esteem", and does not care about friends and family because if he or she did care about friends and family, he or she would not wander the earth looking like a repulsive sow, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, general wide-mawed flesh-flopping flabby monster.'
- Imagine feeling like that. Think before you click your tongue against the roof of your mouth.
