-Caveat Lector-
http://www.nypress.com/frame.cfm?author_id=7&site_id=1
Petra Dickenson
Feature
Fat Lies
The fat are on the march, demanding their slice of civil rights.
Well, okay, they are making a pit stop at McDonalds first. But as
soon as theyve finished grazing theyll tell you how horribly unfair
it is that the world has not been supersized to accommodate their
swelling numbers. Their XXL bums dont fit in size 16 seats and
they have higher rates of cancer, diabetes and heart diseaseor,
as they say in the civil rights biz, these victims are systematically
denied access to public facilities and suffer discrimination in the
area of healthcare.
Incidentally, the "victims," borrowing from the queer playbook, do
want to be called "fat," although the word "overweight" grosses
them out. As for the medical term "morbidly obese," the quacks
can drop dead.
To advance the idea that the fat should be added to the growing list
of groups entitled to not just freedom from discrimination but, this
being America, to preferential treatment as well, it is necessary to
convince everybody that weight isnt a matter of personal choice.
According to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance,
the heavyweight "human rights organization working to eliminate
discrimination based on body size," weight is indeed an immutable
personality trait, much like skin color or sex. And since it is wrong
to discriminate against people for characteristics they cannot
control, it is wrong to discriminate against those who are fat.
NAAFA wants to see height and weight included as a protected
category in the civil rights statutes. One state, Michigan, and two
municipalities, Santa Cruz and San Francisco, prohibit
discrimination based on weight, while Washington, DC, outlaws it
on the basis of personal appearance. The world-class San
Francisco Ballet School has already been accused of
discriminating against a fat applicant.
The party line among the fat activists is that their people cannot or
do not want to lose weight. The pharmaceutical companies and the
medical establishment are simply exploiting and harming a
vulnerable population that is, or would be were it not for external
pressures, happy the way it is. Drawing on old-school Marxism,
the size-acceptance movement even considers fatism, like racism
and homophobia, part of complex power relationships where some
have all the power while others are marginalized and discredited.
In the U.S., more men than women are fat, but to the feminists,
"Fat is a Feminist Issue." Preferring their own reality, they consider
being fat an act of an antipatriarchal rebellion, a deliberate rejection
of the male-imposed ideal of female beauty.
While this explanation remains hugely popular among campus
feminists, it goes against the NAAFAs dogma, which holds that
people cannot control their size, and is also contrary to the
associations experience with Fat Admirers, an officially recognized
cadre of male loyalists who attend the organizations
conventions in the hope of making everyones dreams come true. A
subgroup of these romantics, known affectionately as "feeders" or
"encouragers," get their jollies by watching their partners expand to
even more humongous proportions by continuously spoon-feeding
them like, as one observer noted, "foie gras farmers."
Weighing in against the mass of propaganda that the solution to
being fat is not to lose the extra pounds but to revel in them are the
neo-Puritans who maintain that citizens have a moral duty to
preserve their health, and that anything pleasurable, such as
drinking and smoking, should be proscribed or, in the case of
eating, severely limited. All religions involve self-discipline and
periodic purgationnote the correlation between the decline of
traditional religions and the increase in obesitybut where the old
faithful invoked only the moral authority of God, the modern-day
zealots call on the power of the state to punish the wicked.
One would think that the fat would be libertarians, but apparently to
live and let live is even for them too hard to swallow. They want to
be free, and more power to them, to engage in behavior our
masters have demonized as "risky," and yet at the same time they
insist that the sensitivity police be on full alert whenever their
feelings get hurt.
Which way do they want it? Either we limit the scope of
government and agree that the target of civil rights grievances
should be state, not private, conduct, no matter how odious the
latter may be, or stop acting surprised when government
watchdogs come sniffing into every corner of our lives.
Being obese is probably no picnic, but personal discomfort or
insults are not something that a reasonably free society should or
could legislate away. Besides, if the fat are entitled to special
protection, what about the stupid, the kleptomaniacs, the
pedophiles? Are they not equally deserving, are they not also
victims of ostracism, do they not suffer f
