What do they WANT us to do?
Sometimes I just don’t get fat haters. Not the hating part– I understand the world is full of biggots and people who just need to feel superior by knocking other people down. I get that part. It’s that I just don’t get what it is they think we ought to do about ourselves. Let me explain.
In 2005, I gave up my car. I figured it would save me enough money to get through grad school without loans, it would force me to exercise more, and it would just feel really good to thumb my nose at Bush’s blood-for-oil foreign policy. All three things proved to be true. Because of a particular flaw in the public transportation situation where I was working at the time, I could get directly TO work by bus, but to get home I had to walk two miles from the office to the nearest functioning bus stop. So I was walking two miles a day, five days a week.
This is what the skinny people want, right? Aren’t we all supposed to be out there exercising all the fat off?
Apparently not. On a frequent and regular basis, carloads of young, skinny assholes would roll their windows down and shout abuse at me as I walked from my office to the bus stop. So…. let me understand. You don’t want people to be fat, but when you see a fat person out exercising, you will discourage them from doing so by shouting abuse at them? I just don’t get the logic. Unless… oh wait, I think I get it now– they want us to shut ourselves up in our homes and jog in place where nobody has to see us, until we have burned off enough fat to be acceptable to them. Then, and only then, can we be seen again in public. Got it.
I am still carfree, and I still take public transportation, and I am still fat. (Oddly enough, all of that walking did no lead to the loss of a single pound.) So in the past few years, I have developed an interest in the attitudes of people about fat people taking public transportation. One of these days I will finish my epic post on fat people who ride the subway and the people who love to hate them. But for now, let it suffice to say that a simple web search shows there are a lot of people who just hate, hate, HATE it that there are fat people on subways and buses. They don’t want us to sit next to them. They don’t want us to stand near them. In short, they don’t want us there at all.
So once again, I must ask–what is it that they DO want us to do? Run through the tunnel behind the subway train until we have burned enough calories to be acceptable as fellow passengers? Quit our jobs and stay home, locked in our houses and apartments starving ourselves until we are deemed thin enough to be seen out in public again? What?
So now comes the latest “I just don’t get the logic” occurrence. I am a long-time subscriber to Newsweek, but I’m almost always at least a week or two behind. So this week I’m working on an issue from the beginning of May, and I came across this quote on the Perspectives page, which you can find on their website here.
“We’re on the Titanic and, rather than forcing our children into the lifeboat, we’re telling them to join the band.” –MeMe Roth, president of National Action Against Obesity, on new clothing lines aimed at plus-size teenage girls from retailers Target and Forever 21
Once again, I just don’t get it. Roth objects to CLOTHING? Or is it just that she objects to attractive, fashionable clothing for fat girls? Is that it? She doesn’t want them stuck at home with no clothes to wear– she just doesn’t think they should be allowed to dress fashionably, because that might cause them to… what? Feel good about themselves? Not feel disgusting? Have good self-esteem? Heaven forfend! We can’t have fat chicks feeling good about themselves– that would undermine Roth’s plan to make them hate themselves so much that they will do whatever it takes– healthy or not– to conform and become thin. No, fat girls should wear burlap bags with a big scarlet “F” stenciled on the front.
So it really is just all about hate after all. Nice.
Daily pug count: Three, plus a brace of puggles in front of the laundromat.
