Body Equality

Let’s talk again about fat hate and quite possibly fat discrimination. Recently Marie Claire had one Maura Kelly post a blog about a new American sitcom about a fat couple. In her post as far as I could stomach to read, she basically says fat people are disgusting, ugly, and they make her want to lose her lunch. I’ve also read several articles in response to her blog post and while the articles themselves are very balanced and often…well not exactly pro-fat but very fat and skinny and average are equal. The comments however leave something to be desired.

Many of the comments are full of fat hate or the whole ‘health concern’, and comments about how having to sit beside a fat person on a plane or on public transport is just so traumatizing. But what I really want to address is the idea that because of free speech people are allowed to go out and spout any kind of acidic comments they want to about fat people.

Ladies and Gentlemen, freedom of speech does not protect your right to harm others. I cannot stand up in a packed theater and shout fire. I am not allowed to call a black person the ‘N’ word. So why should freedom of speech protect someone’s right to fat bash? It is causing harm, psychological harm sure, but psychological trauma as we’ve all seen can easily lead to physical harm of one’s self. And don’t you dare tell me that racist comments are different from fat hate, they are both the same! You are judging someone and discriminating against them based on how they look!

On top of the whole freedom of speech thing, fat bashing is no different than what the news has been going on about for weeks about bullying! Bully’s bully because they want to make themselves feel better, or they think if they make that person feel bad enough about themselves they’ll change. Well fat haters (hell all bullies/haters/bashers/whatever) life doesn’t work out like that, you hurt people and they tend to lash out, either at you or in many people’s cases at themselves. Even if they bottle it up for now eventually it’ll come out.

Now onto the issue of another comment: why should a complete stranger’s opinion matter? Well it really shouldn’t, however, most fat people have been attacked and ridiculed so much throughout their lives that they have virtually no self-esteem left to combat the hate this complete stranger spews at them. And when I say they’ve been ridiculed I mean they’ve had family members telling them to lose weight, they’ve had diet coaches, they’ve had gym memberships, and they have the whole of the media telling them how horrible and worthless they are because they’re fat! Even the First Lady has gotten in on this! On top of it some people receive unwanted and unwarranted attention while in public: people making snide comments in pseudo low voices, people taking pictures to make fun of the fat person, people reposting photos from facebook or any other photo sharing sites to fat hating sites or groups. So now tell a fat person that a stranger’s opinion shouldn’t matter. To most of them that’s the only attention they’ve ever gotten so they start to think that that’s the only attention they deserve. So don’t tell me that we fat people should have the self-esteem to just ignore it.

Now my dear fatties, I feel we are justified in our attempt to speak out about the issues surrounding our fatness. Because if we don’t say a word it’ll just continue in the way it has, and that to me is unacceptable. We deserve to be happy and to be able to go to a restaurant or on a plane, bus, or train without having to worry about if someone is going to be cruel, or if we’re going to be kicked off. Our plight is no different than Civil Rights back in the 60’s, we want body equality.