Normalization of Obesity
During the 19th and 20th centuries United States went through quite the adolescence. We had a civil war over what the playground rules really were. We got peer pressured into the first Great War, and bullied into the second. The course of these two wars, along with poorly closed canned of worms following Reconstruction, led us to desegregation and feminism.
These two movements were powered by individuals getting angry, and by those individuals choosing to live their lives in the face of opposition. These movements – their presence seminated by war – are the two most powerful influences on liberal thought, and the cultural aggression and resistance of both are what is behind the tug-of-war that has ended with people introducing themselves as red 0r blue staters.
The politics and protests over accepting obese people as “normal” pales by comparison, but even so, it’s worth pointing out that this recent wave of “anti-normalization” press has similar historical footing. We’re in the middle of an unpopular war. Our cultures are deeply divided. The media, the main source of homogeneity and thus some form of cultural complacency (rather than the active process of peace) is facing a terrifying new world where the standards they’ve set – thin is in, it’s important to look like the people on television, you have to prove it’s unhealthy to be overweight instead of taking a doctor’s say so – are not only questioned vocally, frequently, and by people in a lower economic class, but those who question the status quo – bloggers are especially the focal point – are gaining power and regard over previously accepted sources of authority. It’s no coincidence that the groups most heavily targeted for “public concern” at this time are African Americans and women. It seems, in many ways, that the so-called obesity epidemic is the best of both the activist worlds of race acceptance and female freedom.
Those vocally “concerned” about the “normalization of obesity” have some sort of self-interest in this. You generally don’t see people campaigning against companies that pollute neighborhood water and give all the kids in that block cancer unless they live there, and you don’t see thin blonde pundits carrying on about how unhealthy obesity is unless there’s money to be lost for her personally if people choose to be fat, or choose simply to stop paying into quick fixes that the diet industry provides when their weight varies 10-15 pounds.
It’s especially true lately. Television advertising has gotten increasingly heavy-handed. The messages in diet ads were pernicious enough five years ago: you will have a sex life and friends if you just get skinny. Now, the messages are outright vicious. “I was embarassed to go out,” is the line in one particularly nasty ad – and it’s being supported by studies suggesting that obesity is “contagious” with a news spin recommending that the thin ostracize the plus size. Apparently, the obese are a bad influence – if people talk to plussies, the plussies will just be “normal” people, and more and more individuals will skip the diet if they range upwards of a size 10 (which lately seems to be the acceptable maximum size). There is an overt and aggressive effort to force the fat to hide away indoors until they get skinny — we are no longer invisible, and this makes us a threat.
Minorities are attacked most when the majority sees them as a threat. So what makes the obese a threat? I seriously doubt it’s a strain on health resources – chemical addictions are still the biggest strain, and I’m hardly the only fatty who strives to eat and exercise in a way that minimizes need for doctor’s visits.
The two areas hardest hit would be the fashion industry, and above all, the pharmaceutical industry. I’m coming to the conclusion that pharmaceuticals are equal in evil to oil companies – move over Exxon, here comes a whole new kind of oil spill, thanks to the provision of Alli. This stimulated panic over the American diet is a way of both distracting the country from much more serious and resource-draining problems – like war – and as a way of scaring people into continuing to drop billions of dollars on a bloated industry.
So, being fat scares the skinnies — too much person brings on a cognitive overload, that causes them to belittle, deride, harass, and to try to make us plussies hide. Is it just me, or is there some serious power in knowing that?
I agree with you that fat folks accepting who they are at the size they are at is a threat to the skinny nation. They need a diversion from real problems so they target fat folks and as a fat black man I get it with both barrels.
The fashion industry is like Exxon, in that they are making billions and will make billions more of perpetuating an illusion of what you should look like