Have you ever noticed that it is per­fectly accept­able to make fun of and degrade peo­ple who are fat? Think about it for a sec­ond. When­ever a movie needs to show that some­one was pre­vi­ously unat­trac­tive there are flash­backs of him/her being fat (think Mon­ica (Court­ney Cox) on Friends).  I was watch­ing (some­what begrudg­ingly) The Seeker on the WB and the main char­ac­ter was forced to enter­tain a King’s unat­trac­tive sis­ter. Of course she was over­weight and to add insult to injury, she was sex­u­ally aggres­sive and des­per­ate because of course no man had every touched her before. Unfor­tu­nately, this priv­i­lege does not end with Hollywood.

I was read­ing an arti­cle about how Gaboure Sid­bie (of Pre­cious fame) slapped Chris Rock because he grabbed her butt when she stood to accept an award. Even worse than his dis­gust­ing misog­y­nis­tic behav­ior are the com­ments that peo­ple left on the arti­cle I won’t post them here, but please, check them out and see what I mean.

And even on a more per­sonal level, my hus­band and I had a con­sul­ta­tion with the doc­tor (Dr. J) who will be per­form­ing the endoscopy that out WLS Dr. D requested. Moments before meet­ing with him were seen by a nurse who sat us on a table to check out blood pres­sure. When she was done she ush­ered us into Dr. J’s office. He explained the pro­ce­dure to us and then explained that we may not be able to have anaes­the­sia for the scope due to our sizes. But he did not stop there. he went on to make a big deal about the beds not being able to hold us. In fact he went into the hall­way and asked a nurse to check the weight limit on the beds and as he showed us around the facil­ity he made one state­ment after another about how big we are. My hus­band was imme­di­ately both­ered. But me, in my “fat-girl shame” made excuses for this guy.

The funny thing is that this hap­pened last Tues­day and the more I think about it the more it both­ers me. What made him think it was OK to voice his dis­gust of our size? We obvi­ously know that we are fat– in fact we are try­ing to change that and he was aware of that fact.Why do peo­ple feel that it is their right to point out that an over­weight per­son is over­weight. He would never have ver­bal­ized is worry about per­form­ing this pro­ce­dure on a homo­sex­ual, or some­one of a dif­fer­ent race. If I had entered his office with HIV or some other dis­ease that could have been pre­ventable would he have treated me the same way?

Absolutely not!

A blog­ger who I at one time respected made sev­eral state­ments against Fat Accep­tance (I won’t link to it because you can Google it quite eas­ily). I wanted to com­ment on it when it was writ­ten but felt that it was a win-less bat­tle. After all, it has been made appar­ent to me that no mat­ter how intel­li­gent, pretty, tal­ented a per­son is, if he/she is fat no one notices accept to ridicule.

Hatred towards over­weight peo­ple is the last form of accept­able discrimination.

And this is not about the fact that being fat or obese is unhealthy. We know that and most of us have made numer­ous attempts to change our sit­u­a­tion. It’s not easy nor is it made any eas­ier by being made the butt of jokes or hav­ing peo­ple spew their hate and dis­gust with­out regard for ones feelings.