I recently read Gina Kolata’s book “Rethinking Thin,” and that, coupled with my own life experience, has led me to the following conclusion. I understand it may be controversial, but I’m having difficulty seeing why the logic doesn’t hold up.
Being fat is very similar to, if not pretty much the same as, being gay. However, our society has evolved, over the last 20 years in particular, towards an understanding that discriminating against gay people is wrong. However, we are moving in the opposite direction with fat people.
Why being fat and being gay are similar:
There are spectrums of weight and sexual orientation, but at some level (we know it when we see it) someone is either gay or they’re not, and someone is either fat or they’re not. I’m not talking about people who need to lose 15 pounds, or the people who were LUGs or BUGs. I am talking about the people who have lived their adult lives as obese people or as openly gay people.
Correlations between weight/sexual orientation and health risk factors: Not all fat people are unhealthy or will encounter obesity-related health problems. Not all gay people engage in unhealthy behaviors or will encounter health problems attributable to their sexual behavior. Not all skinny/straight people are healthy or avoid risky behaviors. Yet health reasons are used as a proxy to treat fat people/gay people as less worthy members of our society.
It (weight/sexual orientation) may be genetically determined. It may be environmental. We don’t really know, but it’s almost certainly some complex combination of both. We’ve set up a dichotomy in this society where that if you can argue “I’m born that way,” your deviations from the norm are more accepted. Why is that? We respect religious diversity, yet for adults, religion is a choice. We may be born into a religious family and surrounded by cultural norms that guide our religious beliefs, but ultimately, we all choose whether or not to embrace religion.
About that “choice” thing: we’ve pretty much decided that people don’t choose to be gay. Why? Straight people don’t choose to be straight. Why would someone choose to deviate from the norm in a way that subjects them to societal abuse, discrimination, and in some cases, physical harm? Yet we’re convinced that fat people choose to be fat.
However, with gay people, we do acknowledge that while gay people don’t choose to be gay, they can choose whether or not to act upon their true feelings. They can remain closeted and celibate, miserable and lonely, or they can come out, pursue same-sex relationships and try to be as happy as anyone else in the world. Fat people can’t exactly remain in the closet — their weight is as visible as their race or gender (if not more so, given the levels of ambiguity that can arise between one’s self-identification and external presentation.) But they can either pursue the path of self-loathing, withdrawing from society, constantly dieting, and remaining constantly aware of — and miserable about — their weight. Or they can accept it for what it is — one facet of who they are — and ask the same from the people around them.
Some claim there can be “ex-gays.” After a dose of intensive therapy, religion, denial, whatever it takes, you can pronounce yourself cured of your so-called deviance, ready to engage in “normal” heterosexual relationships. Some claim the very notion that people are able to cure themselves (or should need to cure themselves) is particularly offensive and should be attacked at every opportunity. Some claim that if you’re fat, you can choose to lose weight, and then you won’t be fat any more. If you haven’t done that, it’s evidence that you’re lazy or morally deficient.
So now we have all of these ex-gays and formerly obese people running around, waiting for their bodies to betray them at every opportunity. Science shows that at a cellular level, that once fat cells have been created, they don’t go away. They’re just waiting for the next opportunity to burst into corpulence. What Kolata’s book describes is all the ways that we’re finding out that fat people who lose weight don’t become thin people — they just become fat people in thin bodies. The level of constant vigilance required to stay thin and to overcome long-established (and not well understood) metabolic processes goes far beyond what we all understand to be the willpower or self-discipline our society expects of functional adults.
As a society, we’ve moved in the direction of no longer expecting that superhuman discipline of gay people to remain celibate (unless they’re Catholic priests, but that’s a whole different matter) because we recognize that it condemns gay people to a miserable, unhappy life in denial of what we recognize is their true nature.
Yet we demand the same thing of fat people: deny yourself the ability to fully satisfy a basic human need shared by everyone (hunger) to meet someone else’s expectation of how you should live your life. And if you don’t, you don’t deserve to have a job, because employers should have the right to select people who look good. You don’t deserve to have adequate health care, because you’re a strain on the system for the rest of us who are morally superior to you. You don’t deserve to have kids, because you’re probably going to pass along your fatness to them and condemn them to an unhealthy, unhappy life too. You don’t deserve to be loved, because you’re probably going to leave your partner spouseless someday.
Liberal/progressive people find this logic reprehensible when it’s applied to gay people (and call those who employ it homophobic, rightly so) but personally engage in it on a daily basis when it’s applied to fat people. If you really believe that all fat people are going to die sooner, isn’t that punishment enough? Why make their presumably shorter time on earth miserable too? Is it just because you’re insecure about being judged on your looks, and need someone to feel morally superior to?
Gay people have successfully applied many of the lessons of the civil rights movement, and have fought until sexual orientation has been included in anti-discrimination laws. They are continuing to try to get rid of societal prejudice, and with every measure of public opinion, there is progress. They have been criticized for hijacking the civil rights movement, and for glossing over the differences between sexual orientation and race and gender.
It is time for fat people to toss aside their self-loathing and demand an end to some of this absolutely ridiculous prejudice. The next time someone tosses out this crap about “you choose to be this way,” or “society is justified in discriminating against fat people because…[you pick the reason],” it’s time to find out whether the person making the statement is a homophobe, and whether they would ever make a similar remark within earshot of a gay person. If the answer is no, then it’s time for some education. If we can pick off all the skinny pro-gay people, then that just leaves the homophobes, and believe you me, quite a few of them are fat.
