This board is about fighting ignorance, and that’s an exceedingly ignorant statement. Fat people get insulted by total strangers over their weight. In the media, fat people are practically invisible, and when they appear, it’s usually as an object of pity and ridicule.
Even in this thread, comments like “So if you get heavier still, will you be more proud?” and “Do you fit into an airplane seat without your fat spilling onto other people?” and “[to] be too lazy to walk 20 minutes a few times a week” rather strongly imply that fat persons should feel bad about themselves.
I’m lazy and I procrastinate a lot, and sometimes spend far too much worktime on a particular message board. I don’t know whether that’s morally better or worse than being fat. Fortunately, I get to deal with my particular problems without their being visible to the entire world. Fat people don’t have that luxury.
I’m old enough to remember, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” and despite being one of the fair-skinned majority, I was able to parse that: it wasn’t that being black was, in and of itself, something to be proud of, any more than I could take credit for being white. But given that blacks were still regarded by many as being dumb and lazy simply by virtue of their pigmentation, they naturally responded by saying, yes, they were just as good as the rest of us. “I’m black and I’m proud” was a shorthand for that.
Same thing with being fat - even if being overweight is a negative, rather than a neutral factor, like race. When you look at someone who’s fat, you don’t see how well they do their jobs, whether they’re good parents, or whatever. They’re saying, “I’m going to be proud of myself as a whole person, and look at my weight as just one aspect of that, rather than dumping on myself over the one battle I’m losing that everyone can see.” As you can see, that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker quite as well as “I’m fat and I’m proud.”
You know, it really shouldn’t be rocket science to sort one’s way through that.
