so FUCKING tired of fat jokes.

[kodalai]

It's anecdotal that once upon a time, Abraham Lincoln, before he became president, was walking down the street when he happened to encounter a woman who stared in open horror.

"My god!" she exclaimed. "You are the ugliest man I have ever seen!"

Lincoln was at a loss. "I don't know what you expect me to do about that, madam," he said.

"Well!" she said. "You could have stayed home!"

So everyone has their own trigger issues when it comes to intolerence or bigotry, particularly when it comes out of the mouths of the people who are supposedly, but tonight I'm feeling just pissy enough to focus on one little subsector of that kind of disgraceful behavior: fat jokes.

So, some people have a genetic metabolic condition. Some people have an acquired medical metabolic condition. Some people have had broken legs, or deformed feet, that keep them from exercising properly. Some people come from cultures in which fat is considered a positive thing. Some people come from a place, a job, or a lifestyle that simply doesn't allow them to keep up habits which will keep their weight down. You don't know. You don't know that person. You have no fucking idea what their life is like. You have no idea what the inside of their head is like.

But all of this is just a smokescreen for the real issue, which is blown away when someone says "Yeah, but this person doesn't have a medical condition, comes from a lily-white ethnic group with a comfortable easy working schedule, and access to all the healthy food they want, well, they have no excuse!" And that's the real issue, isn't it?

I'll say it once. I'll say it loud, and plenty clear.

NOBODY NEEDS AN 'EXCUSE' TO BE FAT. NOBODY.

Nobody has a legal, or moral, or societal obligation to be thin. It is none of your fucking business what someone else's dietary, eating, and exercise habits. None of your FUCKING business. IF there's a problem, it's between them and their doctors, them and their loved ones, or just their own. Not yours. And you have no fucking right to pass judgment on someone else's life because they don't happen to conform to your bodily ideal. You have NO right to decide, on your own, that that person has forfeited their right to basic human DIGNITY AND RESPECT. And you have no fucking right to treat them like subhumans because of it.

So I don't want to hear jokes about "double wide" doors at home, about greased doorframes, about lifting cranes, about specially modified seat chairs. I don't want to hear jokes about blubber, or whales, or dinosaurs, or long-burning oil lamps. I don't want to hear about doughnuts or ice cream or chips or tubs of lard. I don't ever want to hear you making sly jokes about someone's greediness, feeble-mindedness, laziness, or lack of social graces based entirely on the number of extra pounds somebody's carrying around. I don't ever want to hear it.

It might be a bit much to expect empathy and compassion, for the extra burdens they bear, for the ostracisation and humiliation overweight people already go through daily thanks to our society's obsession with thinness. It might be a bit much to expect from someone who's never been in that situation themselves, never imagined they could let themselves get to that place, never been stuck in a body they couldn't control, never been subject to that kind of systematic degradation. But I don't think it's too much to expect that YOU show the kind of fundamental discretion and respect towards other people that every single damn person on the planet is owed from you. Christ. It's not even a virtue. It should be taken for granted.



*The preceeding rant was in response entirely to encounters elsewhere on the net, and is not directed at anyone who has access to reading it.

Comments

[aging-parents.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! Accepting and respecting people as they are (in matters that are not harmful to other people) was for the culture in which I grew up one of the primary markers of coming into adulthood / maturity. It says a lot about the infantilization of modern Consumer-Mass-Market America that such things are no longer cultural norms (has a lot to do with an advertising industry that has conditioned us from early in life to be deathly afraid that we are unacceptable to other people).

[windsorblue.livejournal.com]

Bravo and amen. And thank you.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Well said.