blame fat/anthropology
May. 19th, 2006 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxSo, apparently I took my high horse on vacation.
Whenever I try to tell someone that weight per se isn't an illness (which seems to be a conversation I have often lately), they invariably come back to the "but there's this one guy who weighs n pounds [where n is any number the person considers high, usually something between 200 and 1000] and can't leave his house!" argument. They really really want me to concede that at least that dude's fat is killing him. Which of course opens up the idea that anyone who weighs less than Official Tragic Fat Guy should be endeavoring to not weigh what he does. It validates the obesity panic, and just makes it a preventative measure.
This is a problematic argument, though. The Obesity Crisis! Egads! is not about preventing people from becoming so fat they can't move. It's about convincing people who weigh quite a bit less than that they're de facto sick, symptoms or not. The Official Tragic Fat Guy is a red herring - he's a stand-in for our fear that fat could indeed be all-consuming, isolating, dangerous. Just as the Official Fat Chick Tummy is. The anonymous headless torso, the story we heard about someone who OMG can't get off the sofa, and the object of Fat Chick Porn - they're all the same sexy, grotesque, can't-tear-your-eyes-away specter of non-conforming, uncontrolled humanity. When you fix your argument on one of those archetypes, you have to recognize that you're talking about an idea and not a person; the stories (true and imagined) of such people are so distant from and disinterested in the actual facts and meaning of their lives.
I still suspect that even weighing 648 lbs (this is the fat rapper Big Pun referenced in Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, in one of its more offensive "oh my god, the fat fat fat!" moments) does not, in and of itself, make you immobile and sick. The things you do or the illnesses you experience that push you to weigh so much probably do result in immobility. And yeah, that might be preventable, but I don't see that as a public health crisis - or maybe it might be a crisis, but only because a cultural obsession with food could push some folk in either direction - intentionally getting fatter is one thing, but deciding to be immobile (rare as it is) is more analogous to anorexia or bulimia than to apathetic couch potatoism. I don't think people get that. And I'm not sure whether ceasing to demand people pursue the obligatory body project of dieting, health-consciousness, appearance-focus, etc. would eliminate the desire to be at the end of a weight spectrum - it's like the question of whether a perfect feminist utopia would still have BDSM. You just can't imagine it.
Whenever I try to tell someone that weight per se isn't an illness (which seems to be a conversation I have often lately), they invariably come back to the "but there's this one guy who weighs n pounds [where n is any number the person considers high, usually something between 200 and 1000] and can't leave his house!" argument. They really really want me to concede that at least that dude's fat is killing him. Which of course opens up the idea that anyone who weighs less than Official Tragic Fat Guy should be endeavoring to not weigh what he does. It validates the obesity panic, and just makes it a preventative measure.
This is a problematic argument, though. The Obesity Crisis! Egads! is not about preventing people from becoming so fat they can't move. It's about convincing people who weigh quite a bit less than that they're de facto sick, symptoms or not. The Official Tragic Fat Guy is a red herring - he's a stand-in for our fear that fat could indeed be all-consuming, isolating, dangerous. Just as the Official Fat Chick Tummy is. The anonymous headless torso, the story we heard about someone who OMG can't get off the sofa, and the object of Fat Chick Porn - they're all the same sexy, grotesque, can't-tear-your-eyes-away specter of non-conforming, uncontrolled humanity. When you fix your argument on one of those archetypes, you have to recognize that you're talking about an idea and not a person; the stories (true and imagined) of such people are so distant from and disinterested in the actual facts and meaning of their lives.
I still suspect that even weighing 648 lbs (this is the fat rapper Big Pun referenced in Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, in one of its more offensive "oh my god, the fat fat fat!" moments) does not, in and of itself, make you immobile and sick. The things you do or the illnesses you experience that push you to weigh so much probably do result in immobility. And yeah, that might be preventable, but I don't see that as a public health crisis - or maybe it might be a crisis, but only because a cultural obsession with food could push some folk in either direction - intentionally getting fatter is one thing, but deciding to be immobile (rare as it is) is more analogous to anorexia or bulimia than to apathetic couch potatoism. I don't think people get that. And I'm not sure whether ceasing to demand people pursue the obligatory body project of dieting, health-consciousness, appearance-focus, etc. would eliminate the desire to be at the end of a weight spectrum - it's like the question of whether a perfect feminist utopia would still have BDSM. You just can't imagine it.
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Date: 2006-05-20 01:14 am (UTC)