Moral Panic: Obesity

Most of us in the western world and other industrialized countries could stand to lose a few pounds for aesthetic reasons.  Those of us who’ve gone natural, a small but significant minority, have found that with our improved health comes a natural balancing of weight.  When one looks around though, it’s pretty easy to see that this issue has gone far beyond a debate about aesthetics and health.  It has become about whether or not some people have a moral right to harm others.

Recently, there was a big to-do in the blogosphere about Maura Kelly’s entry on Marie Claire, a semi popular blog-zine, Should Fatties Get a Room? (Even on TV?).  In it, she parrots a popular lie about obesity, “And obesity is costing our country far more in terms of all the related health problems we are paying for, by way of our insurance, than any other health problem, even cancer.” 

She then contradicts herself saying, “… because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair,” but then claiming, “I’m not some size-ist jerk.”

…

Okay, just keep telling yourself that.

In her apology, which seems contrived, she claims she didn’t mean to be cruel, and that she should basically be given a pass because she struggled with anorexia (another moral panic that didn’t quite take off since real anorexics are few, but socially induced, junkie “anorexics” are legion).  So she basically wants consideration for her issues, but doesn’t want to extend the same to others.

Say it with me class: overly entitled.

In other blogs, some support her original article, and believe that people should shame and ridicule fat people.  Some think she was overreacting, and that the obesity on television issue should be handled with more realism and less hysteria.

I am of the opinion that neither side understands what’s really at stake here because nobody is asking the right questions.  The first of them should be, “How did all this begin?”  The answer may surprise you.

Oppressed victorian breeder

Way back in the early 1900’s, feminists began promoting the idea that differences in height and bodyfat between men and women were socially imposed.  Since then, they’ve been in the business of shaping perceptions about the feminine ideal.

They had a few good times.  During the wars, women were needed in the workforce, so the strong, sturdy girl was ideal.  In the 1920’s, feminists had successfully flexed their voting muscles, and brought in both prohibition and the flapper ideal: a boyish, crass kind of woman with no regard for even the most primal womanly values.

Even so, up until the 1960’s, the feminine ideal was still pretty feminine.  The best efforts of the government and feminists, who were increasingly in bed together due to the “hand that rocks the cradle” reality of life, failed to make men stop liking big boobs, hefty butts, and dainty faces.

Liberated flapper

Obesity was pretty rare, especially in women back then.  It was an old people problem or a rich people problem, but seldom a problem since even old and rich people generally ate natural food.  The rich got to have more sugar than other people when they wanted it, but otherwise, they ate very well.  They also had to move more to live.  They had to walk to their mailbox, or go somewhere to get entertainment.  Some pastimes involved just walking and stopping from time to time for a drink or to talk to people.  “Promenade” was a normal thing to do.

People generally didn’t find obesity aesthetically pleasing, but it wasn’t such a big deal either.  You’d be hard pressed to find a dress above size 12 in a normal store, but nobody was going out of their way to make fat people feel bad about themselves.

So how did we get from Abbot and Costello having some friendly fattie and skinny fun to this?

This is fat girl rodeo.  In the past few years, copycatting some guys in Australia(?) who actually have testicles’ urban sport, big stranger rodeo, some very pathetic sheeple decided to pick the easy targets: women…actually overweight young women and girls.  Apparently, even skinny American guys can’t run anymore, so the “leg it” part was too much for them.  They have to pick women, so they’re less likely to get their asses kicked, and fat ones they think won’t be able to chase them down.

So one day you could be having a PMS bloat, and some drunk guy who is kinda fat himself, could decide that you’re fat enough to deserve to have your back or your knees wrecked so he can look like a good sheep who hates fatties.

How did we get here?

Well, I wish I could say that it was because of men, but it’s not.  In every society in all the world, men go where the pussy is.  If they thought that fat rodeo or talking trash to and about fat women would make them look less attractive, they wouldn’t do it.  They do these things because women have convinced them that it’s an okay thing to do.

Oppressed junk in the trunk

Back in the early 70’s, the former Marilyn Monroe ideal was replaced by the Twiggy ideal.  She and models like her ushered in the new look for the new wave of women’s “liberation”.  Funny how that “liberation” gave rise to a generation of chronic dieters who were afraid to be fat.  They had to have the new career girl image, and that image had to be low fat and high fiber.  If you were fat, you were unprofessional.  Forget that women working in an office would naturally be kinda sedentary.  That didn’t matter.  If you couldn’t stay thin on a normal 2000-2500 calories per day, you had to go below 1000 so you could talk or type all day and still look like an athlete…or at least be skinny like one.

Liberated of all oppressive trunk junk

Anyway, back to men going where the pussy is, much like the flapper in the 20’s, the Twiggy of the 70’s promised free casual sex.  Marilyn was a sexpot, but she was loving and clingy, not free and easy.  She wanted to be your wife, and would settle for being your mistress.  Twiggy didn’t need no stinking commitment.  She was the girl you could meet at a party, bang, and not even have to sleep with after.

Men, having their masculinity whittled down to nothing by women who cooked with credit cards and believed in the new addage, “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine,” didn’t stand a chance.  They bought the skim body and drank the skim milk.

Oh yes, let’s not forget the low fat craze.  Fat, even in food, became something bad.  Papers were published, and the people in white coats, heavily influenced by their co-opting of eastern religions, which aren’t bad if you know what you’re doing, decided that meat is murder.  No attention was given to the fact that people in Asia who were vegetarian for religious/ethical reasons, did a lot of lactofermentation, and seldom eschewed dairy.  Vegan is the new ideal, and even today, despite most of their studies being debunked many times over, they are still pushing it.

Stopping bullets with liberated bones of steel!

What I find incredibly ironic is that all the while people were being told that fat was a great evil, especially for women, Americans were being stealthily set up to become fat.  Grains became the base of the food pyramid, and though white sugar isn’t the best thing for you, it’s a whole lot better than the high fructose corn syrup replacing it.

Corn oil and canola oil were and still are promoted as healthier than animal fats.  Salt isn’t salt anymore.  You have to go buy special gray salt in order to get all the minerals you’re supposed to get from it.  Eggs are villainized for their cholesterol even though they are one of the few food sources of vitamin D available to most Americans.  People are being overdosed with omega-6 and deprived of omega-3.

If you’re not eating paleo, primal, or according to your ancestry, and you’re not overweight, you’re lucky, but only for a time.  Cancer rates are going up right along with obesity, and likely due to the same causes.

Now, faced with the reality that westerners are fat, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, feminists have suddenly realized that they’re alienating a significant proportion of women with their superslim ideal.  Over the past decade, they’ve been working hard to blame men for pushing the unrealistic ideal, when they were the ones at the helm of programming men to be unrealistic.

While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50’s.

I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever. — Maureen Dowd

In the 70’s, as a reaction to the promotion of the feminist physical ideal, the fat acceptance movement arose to counter it.  Now that their plans to elimate the size differential between men and women didn’t result in a new generation of goose stepping uberwenches, they’re moving to co-opt fat acceptance.

I don’t want to see that happen, but it will.  Feminism has government and financial backing, and fat acceptance, not so much.  So those of us who just wanted a little sanity in the past, are now going to get crowded out by women who want exemption from the realities of life.  They had no sympathy for us from the 70’s until just the past couple of years.  They promoted the idea that we were ignorant and oppressed, and now we’re diseased.

But wait…just when you think it’s simple, it’s not.  Remember, feminists aren’t the opposition anymore.  They are in bed with the government and making Rosemary’s babies already.

You can look liberated like me for $50,000 taxpayer dollars!

If obamacare turns out to be like other national healthcare systems, since obesity is a disease now, and not a social and economic inevitability of misnourishing the masses, it should be treated.  It will become the right of every American, just like it’s the right of people in other national healthcare systems, to get free or near free weight loss drugs and surgery.

Now say this with me, class: cha-CHING!$!$!$!

So fat, the great evil of our time, is going to be big business.  The government and feminists want you to believe that it is a disease and a defect that has no cause but the weakness or genetic unfitness of the individual.  They need you to believe that because if everybody knew the real reason more people are fat today, they would demand to end subsidies of grain, and pay more attention to how their meat was being raised, and their dairy collected.  People would demand things that would either be expensive for them, or just wouldn’t profit them as much as making people fat and then charging them to fix it.

A shady mechanic breaks something in your car so that you have to go back to get it fixed.

Now, I understand that nobody who’s currently picking on fat people or people who aren’t really fat for being non ideal, is going to stop because of what I just wrote.  If they had that level of awareness, they wouldn’t be cretins.

I wrote this for everybody who observes the cretins, and understands what hopeless tools they are.  This should help you to articulate your disdain for them with more clarity.

Just remember that they can’t help themselves.  The overly socially dependent can’t see the big picture, and it’s kinda pointless to try to get them to.  Believe me, I’ve tried.  Just save yourselves, and try to keep your kids from ending up the same kind of badly programmed tools.