BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Facing fat hatred
"‘Body diversity is a natural occurrence in human beings, that everyone is not supposed to be thin. And the notion that everyone is supposed to be thin is rooted in fatphobia itself. And the second thing that I would say is people use the argument of health to divert from the fact that they actually are just uncomfortable with fat bodies. We're not policing other people's health behaviors in the same sort of visceral and violent ways that we police fatness. It's because we hate fatness, and we hate fat people. And we have used the science to validate our hatred, it is not the other way around. What I would rather see society worried about are what are the structural conditions that we are creating that lead to unhealthiness. Because the truth of the matter is, when people talk to me about high blood pressure, right, and like, oh, hypertension, and I'm like, I am a black person in America, where the police are regularly murdering us. And you're asking me if I'm gonna diet, to worry about hypertension? How about we create a society that has conditions that don't elevate people's stress levels and cortisol? How about we create that world?’...
‘Esther Rothblum… [is] a professor of Women's Studies at San Diego State University in California, and says arguments about health and weight are used to legitimize fat phobia. She thinks when we look at research showing a link between fatness and poor health, we need to consider that there's a very strong relationship between weight and income’
‘To the point that in most western countries, fatter, people are poorer and richer people are thinner. And when I asked my students, why are fat people poor and rich people thin, they always say, always, I've never heard an exception to this, something along the lines of well, you know, poor people can't afford organic vegetables. So they buy things like you know, macaroni and cheese which are high in calories. What they are saying is that first you are poor and because you are poor, you become fat. In fact, the opposite is true. First, you are fat. And because of that, thanks to discrimination, you drift into a lower income group. So if I had a fatter sister and a thinner sister, my thinner sister, research shows would be more likely to get accepted by elite universities, would be more likely to get a higher paying job, more likely to get health benefits at work. If she's heterosexual would be more likely to marry a wealthier husband. As a result, poorer people have far less access to health care, especially in the US. Fatness and poverty are so linked.’...
‘There is a multi billion dollar industry, focusing on dieting companies, diet foods, diet sodas, diet cookbooks. And there are many reasons why people join fitness clubs, but I think many people join them to lose weight. And so if you think about that, you know, there is a huge motivation to keep people unhappy with their bodies feeling too fat, trying to lose weight, you know, trying to improve their appearance and so on.’
‘How much power do you think that industry has?’
‘I would say that is the main contributor to the problem, that in a very capitalist society as the US is, everything boils down to, you know, corporate dollars and advertising. And so they have a lot of motivation to push back and say fat is unhealthy, you know, people should be fit, whatever that means, etc.’…
‘Fatphobia is still pervasive in many institutions, even universities. And Esther tells me, it's been much harder to find acceptance for her work, in fact studies than in her other specialist area, LGBTQ studies’
‘And so they will say things like, you know, I'm not racist, I just don't like fat people. Or when the author mentioned homosexuality, I can see her point or his point, but I certainly don't think that applies to fat people. I even once had a journal editor. This editor actually said, if I were you, I wouldn't continue with this line of work. And luckily for her, I have a thick skin and I did continue’...
'There's a very clear relationship between fat phobia and anti blackness that was obscured for decades, maybe even more than a century.'…
‘How does your thesis play out when we look at coronavirus and the many studies around the world that have found that people who have obesity are more likely to have serious complications from it and more likely to die?’
‘You have to keep in mind that there is often a relationship between weight and poverty. Therefore, when we see that it's heavier people who are having worse health outcomes in COVID, it could be a number of factors that are the result of living in poverty or the stress that is associated with being a person of color. What we need to think about is okay, well what are all of the social, environmental and economic factors that are contributing to poor health outcomes for these people? There's too much variability of health outcomes to blame the weight alone’
‘Some of those studies into coronavirus and obesity, they did adjust for age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic deprivation, household density’
‘Well, keep in mind that it's not as if the studies that we are seeing are capable of assessing all of the many factors that are impacting people's lives. Sure, maybe they've looked at age, sex and race. That's great. But did they look at proximity to environmental toxins? Did they look at the walkability of neighborhoods? Did they look at the stress that's associated with being a person of color in the sort of very white supremist context. Something tells me that all of those things didn't make it into the models. And so large scale quantitative studies are valuable, but we have to understand that they do not explain the sum total of the social universe.’...
‘The words obese and overweight... [are] nowhere to be found this week. That's because our guests say these labels treat fatness as a disease. Sabrina tells me that if we were to remove the idea that we need to regulate body size, we wouldn't need to use these terms at all. Like our other guests, she prefers the term fat. I asked Sabrina how she describes herself as she isn't fat. And she told me she likes the term straight sized ally’...
‘What would you do if you suddenly put on a lot of weight? A huge amount of weight? Would you try to lose it? Or would you embrace it?’
‘I don't know. But I think that's a very, I think that's a very important thing to reflect on. Maybe about 15 years ago, I was put on a medication that did cause me to gain weight. And I definitely felt conflicted about it. It was like in the beginning, I felt like yes, I look so sexy. Look at all my curves. I had all this attention from black men’...
‘Women have naturally a higher percentage of body fat than men, so they need more body fat to function properly. And so fat has been attributed to feminine factors. And by association then weakness and and some sort of moral failing that's historically been attributed to women and them being sort of lesser than men’...
'I think that we are at a point in history. where we were, for example, with feminism in the sort of early days of the feminist struggle. The normative view, is to regard fatness as something that's bad, ugly... We are at a point where there is increasing awareness that that's not really correct. And definitely not socially just'"
Smokers would be glad to know that their health behaviors are not being policed.
Apparently the police kill more black people than heart disease
Financial interests means that we can't trust the research on how obesity is bad for health. But presumably if you question financial interests with regard to covid, you're a conspiracy theorist and science denier
Apparently all fields are worthy of study, and if you claim one is not, you're just X-phobic
Presumably it's not essentialist to claim "fat phobia" is "anti-blackness"
The depths one goes to to deny inconvenient facts. Of course, to raise the spectre of confounding factors when it comes to race and covid would be 'racist'
What a reach, to claim that disapproving of fat is misogyny
Social justice is denying science and spreading comforting myths
Related:
Leading Causes of Death-Non-Hispanic black Males - United States, 2017 | Health Equity | CDC - "1) Heart disease 23.7%
2) Cancer 20.2%
3) Unintentional injuries 7.9%
4) Homicide 5.0%
5) Stroke 4.9%
6) Diabetes 4.3%
7) Chronic lower respiratory diseases 3.2%
8) Kidney disease 2.6%
9) Septicemia 1.7%
10) Hypertension 1.6%"
Apparently the police are giving black men in the US heart disease. What power they have!
Social interactions of obese and nonobese women - "The stigma associated with obesity is likely to limit the opportunities obese women have to develop social skills. This hypothesis was tested by having obese (n = 15) and nonobese (n = 22) women converse on the telephone with college students who were unaware of the women's weights. Ratings made by judges who listened to the women's contributions to the conversations but who were unaware of their weights showed that obesity was negatively related to judgments about the women's likability, social skills, and physical attractiveness. The telephone partners of obese women rated the women and themselves more negatively than did the partners of nonobese women. Obese and nonobese women generally did not differ in their evaluations of their own and their telephone partners' behavior, and they also did not differ on a measure of social self-esteem. These findings suggest that there are real differences in the social behavior of obese and nonobese women and that these differences affect the impressions formed by those with whom they interact."
From Rothblum's long CV. Which suggests that discrimination is not the only reason fat people have worse outcomes. Though of course grievance mongers will claim discrimination has an indirect effect here (despite obese women having no difference in self-evaluation and self-esteem)
