This week has seen several news items that I can't resist commenting on. Apparently not only are fat people not more apt to be jolly than thinner counterparts, but by golly may have higher depression. Well, who'd've thunk it? But, by gum, fat people are perfectly capable of reading food nutrition labels. They also ignore food lables as much as anyone else. Someone got paid to tell us this??
In other news, people don't want to label children and teens as overweight or obese because it might be stigmatizing. Well, no kidding. Ask children if they'd rather be fat or deformed, and a significant percentage will pick "deformed".
Jeez. What's next? Fat people don't have souls?
Notice how one set of news items focuses on stereotyping the overweight/obese. Jolly. Stupid. Who'd have thought that fat people were actually reading and aware of what they were eating? In a society that villainizes fat as much as ours, how is it surprising that the overweight have significant depression?
The other set of news items talks about how awful it is to even be called fat. Gosh, even telling our kids that they may be overweight could lead to an out of control escalation of eating disorders. Hmmm, how about reminding them that who they are is not what they look like?
The truth is that our society feels the need to stigmatize the overweight, and can get away with it. Overweight and obese people tend to earn less than leaner people. They are actively avoided and even ridiculed in the dating scene. It's extraordinarily difficult for overweight people to find attractive and fashionable clothes, even though overweight is the most common set of body sizes in this country.
Guess that fat people aren't that different than thin people. They don't want to be picked on, excluded, discriminated against, or ridiculed any more than thin people. It'd be stupid to be inanely jolly when faced with the reality of what it is to be fat in our culture.
By the way, fat people aren't uniformly stupid, lazy, ugly, jolly, greedy, gluttonous, or any of a dozen other human states. Well, no more and no less than thin people.
The next guy I see wearing a "no fat chicks" t-shirt is going to get a piece of my mind.