What then, is your solution? That “fat” become a dirty word like black or nigger?
That fat people be given a pass and sympathised with for the “disease” they have that they “caught” from somewhere?
I just hope that I never get a blood transfusion from a fatty, I would hate to catch fatness…
DSeid, thanks for your eloquent post on this matter. It bothers me on the Straight Dope how we have to acknowledge the science only insofar as it doesn’t contradict our pet prejudices. I like seeing the research all laid out like that.
Actually, Sr. Olives and I were just discussing last night how there are three major issues that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy so far has failed to address:
All three of these in clinical settings have proven to be especially pernicious and resistant to treatment. The current rate of successful weight-loss maintenance over a 5-year period is something like 2%.
In this New York Times segment, some of our obesity experts discuss the problem. The general consensus is: emphasizing weight is ultimately counter-productive and unhelpful. We should instead focus on reinforcing healthy behaviors.
So this idea that telling people they’re fat is doing them a favor is pretty much bullshit.
As for the ‘‘bystander’’ thing, I’ve never been very good at keeping my mouth shut when others are being bullied. The reason people get away with that shit is because they fail to receive the social censure that normally would require them to regulate their behavior. If 50 people stood up and said, ‘‘hey, stop being a douchebag’’ people would probably knock it off.
So villa you think that is an error to call beating someone up “a crime” because it is different in degree than mass murder?
Once again, if you think that it is an overstatement to characterize “lazy assed fatty” as hate speech, that it is different in character than “Cheap Jew boy”, that’s fine, call it insulting speech for this discussion if you want. I obviously disagree as I believe both engage in hateful speech based on prejudicial stereotypes and to me that is the definition of hate speech.
bengangmo, is it so difficult to talk about a subject without intentionally using insulting words?
My solutions are pretty straightforward. Don’t use insulting speech. Recognize that someone who manages to lose any significant amount of weight has achieved something admirable, even they remain clinically obese, and that those who take on healthier habits are to be supported even if significant lasting weight loss does not result. Keep our mouths shut when we don’t know what the fuck we are talking about, especially regarding major health issues. And that we as a society, as parents, and for my part as part of the profession of pediatrics, do a better job of preventing adult obesity by changing the environment our children grow into adults in.
Assume that being fat is something bad that one way or another CAN be controlled by personal choices/behaviours (not saying its easy, just saying its doable).
So, you have a problem that a person can control. Seems to me you have three ways to look at it. Nobody has an excuse, its either do or die, put up or shut up, and no one is to blame but yourself (I doubt the fat people want that interpretation). At the other extreme you have any excuse is a valid excuse. Well, IMO thats just stupid. For one, it takes the whole concept of excuse and renders it meaningless. For another, it takes a problem and declares it unfixable (yeah THAT will help things).
So, ISTM that the only realistic stance is THAT there IS a fuzzy line somewhere between “just fix it” and “I honestly can’t help/control myself” where a person’s excuse is either good enough or not.
I know a person who is getting slowly fatter by the day and aint doing a damn thing about it besides telling everybody that it is happening. On the flip side a few months ago I saw a very large woman at the convience store first thing in the morning. She had just bought a big sub sandwhich. She shoved that thing in her mouth like an anaconda swallowing a water buffalo. It was gone and down in moments.
I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to see that my first example doesnt have much(if any) of an excuse while the other person probably DOES have some serious mental/addicitive/physical/behavioral problem going on.
My beef is that IMO plenty, if not an actual majority, of people are in the first group but like to think that they are in the second group and are therefore totally blameless.
I find that this gets on my nerves even more than most bullying. Go ahead and call me a fat lazy slob, but don’t pretend you’re doing it for my own good.
(Not that I personally ever get hassled over my weight, even though I’m “obese” by BMI standards. Being a dude means that a lot of the vitriol misses me and lands on my female friends instead. That might be getting a bit off topic though.)
The sad thing is that there’s rarely 50 people prepared to do that. Hell, there’s rarely even 5. The few times I’ve stood up against subtle bullying (overt bullying is a different thing, and doesn’t seem to happen in my social circles very often), the social censure was more likely to turn on me for being a humourless PC stick in the mud who was ruining the “fun”. :rolleyes:
I find my best defence is to stop associating with douchebags. I don’t tolerate crap in my house or among my friends. Now if only I could choose my family or coworkers…
Solution to what, exactly? To your prejudice? I suppose the answer would be some kind of change on your part.
What do they need to be given a pass for? For being fat? Why is this a problem? It’s possible to be fat and healthy. It’s possible to be fat and happy. It’s possible to be fat and live a good life. Fat people don’t have to submit themselves to the judgment of “bengangmo: the universal arbiter of acceptable body sizes”
Jeeze, take a step back please.
I never set myself up as the arbiter of healthy body size or good body attitude.
Forgive me please for having the temerity to suggest that calling somebody fat is not hate speech. That it does’t even come close.
Forgive me also for suggesting that fatness is not a disease, and that there is something that can be done other than just accept it as some sort of “condition” outside of one’s control.
Yes there’s a lot of evidence out there that its not easy, that someone people genuninly do have real problems losing weight, but “fat” as hate speech? Please:rolleyes: Take some responsibility.
You will also notice that I have said, in this very thread that bullying is never acceptable? Or did you miss that in your zealous rush to condemn me as the …uhmmm…eeerrr…what is the name for someone who is biased against unhealthy overeating and obesity anyway?
For choosing to make themselves unhealthy and driving up health care costs for all of us. Then having the nerve to whine about it and claim it’s “not their fault”
That pisses a lot of folks off.
Obesity is voluntary. That doesn’t mean that fat people should be maliciously bullied, but calling them fat is not hate speech.
I don’t have a problem with getting on the case of someone who is being a jerk and hiding behind “truth.”
Of course beating someone up is a crime. But if a friend of mine takes a punch outside a bar, and then later compares himself to the victims of murder, I am going to tell him to get some damned perspective on the situation.
You see, this is where you acknowledge the difference, even though you choose to be blind to it in other ways. Stopping being gay, black, Jewish etc is (a) not possible and (b) not admitable. You yourself say that losing weight is admirable. If a gay person told you they had become straighter, would you say they had achieved something admirable?
I agree people should be politer. I just don’t think the problems faced by fat people come close to the problems caused by homophobia, racism, and anti-semitism. I also think a lot of it is simply thinly veiled misogyny.
Of course “fat” isn’t hate speech. Did someone say it was? I thought we were talking about remarks like “lazy fatties.”
My point is that there is nothing to take responsibility for. Being fat is not a crime.
Ok. Look. These two quotes are exemplars of the confusion that pisses me off. Unhealthy does not equal fat.
Unhealthy overeating and being sedentary are unhealthy behaviors. Here we agree. I am also biased against unhealthy behavior.
Where we disagree is that you can be fat and healthy. You can be fat and unhealthy. You can be slim and unhealthy. You can be slim and healthy. Most people in the US seem to confuse these two concepts.
Just because someone is fat does not mean:
-they are currently overeating
-they don’t exercise
-they have heart disease
-they have diabetes
-they have high blood pressure
-they need to be shamed
While unhealthy behaviors like overeating and not exercising may cause someone to gain weight, they are still not the same thing. Fatness and unhealthiness are still two distinct concepts. Why is this so hard? I mean “correlation implies causation” is at least a logical fallacy I understand. But why, in this case, do people engage in “correlation implies equality”?
I still feel bad about the time I was on an emergency department rotation in med school, and participated in the workup of a morbidly obese young woman who came in with what turned out to be a minor complaint. After relaying his diagnosis and recommendations, the attending ER doc looked at her and commented “You need to eat less” and walked out.
I really should have apologized in some way for his jerkitude.
Which is what is was, not “hate speech” in my book.
There is no threat of violence or denial of basic human rights to a person if you walk up to them and chant “Fat, Fat, the Water Rat!” or make cutting remarks about the obese on a message board. It’s just low class.
Neither are a plethora of other things people get judged on/by.
Doesnt mean the judging is totally without merit though.
And, obviously there are levels of judging that range from “kill the worthless, subhuman bastards” to 'honestly, they could do a bit better than that".
Fine, there’s also nothing at all wrong with being fat. Did you read the rest of my post? The point was that while being unhealthy is bad, being fat is not.
I’m sorry for the multipost, but I think I realized what the logical flaw is in the prevailing opinion and why it’s so temping.
Popular opinion:
-Unhealthy behavior often causes fatness
-Fatness often causes health problems.
-A implies B implies C
-Conclusion: Losing weight is the correct course of action.
A bit more reasonable point of view:
-Unhealthy behavior often causes fatness
-Unhealthy behavior often causes health problems.
-(A implies B) and (A implies C)
-Conclusion: Ignore weight, and instead focus on healthy behavior.
Of course, this means that fatness and health problems will be correlated, but only beacuse they have a common cause. But things are complicated by the fact that fat people who change their behavior don’t usually lose enough weight to be “not fat”. Things are also complicated by the fact that the “weight loss” crowd actually endorse lots of healthy behavior, so it’s not as if they are wrong, but just misguided. Things are also complicated by the fact that our society thinks “Ew, gross fatty! Why can’t you lose weight you dumb ugly slob?”
Thats great. Except for the part that (IME) most fat people are NEITHER eating healthy or exercising significantly. They just use the small fraction of fat people that ARE doing it to allow themselves to fly under the “being fat isnt inherently unheathy” radar.
Talking on your cellphone while driving increases accident rates–raising insurance rates for all of us–by a factor even greater than obesity drives up health care costs. So how come you aren’t obsessed by that behavior and level insults in GQ at those who do it?
Face it, you know there’s more to it than just “fat people drive up costs for the rest of us.” It was shown in more than one study that second-hand smoke caused health problems for others, but if one here had the temerity to suggest that perhaps under such circumstances it might be a bad idea for anyone to smoke you’d get a raft of people hollering about “right to make personal choices” and not a whole lot of those same people convinced that increased damage to others trumped that right.
Honestly, if you came right out and said “I think fat people are gross and disgusting” you’d at least be scoring some points for honesty. Tiptoeing around the real issue doesn’t do you any favors.
Meh. I think Dseid and Duke and others are misunderstanding many of the situations on this board where they see people bashing fat folks.
I’ve never seen someone say “I’m fat” and then just have other posters come out swinging at them. Hasn’t happened, in my experience. What DOES happen is someone says “I’m fat and it’s not my fault, I’m just a poor victim of circumstances I can’t control, woe is me, here are some studies that prove it.” And then the people you are calling fat-bashers get on the fat person’s ass–but not for being fat, for being a whiny person with no sense of responsibility.
Also, re: the studies cited aboive–looking at fatness from a top-down societal perspective has nothing to do with looking at it fron a personal perspective. So, even though there are studies showing that some people are pre-disposed to weight gain and many people have trouble losing weight, that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility fir your own life.
So if people get on your ass for being a whiner, don’t try to paint them as the bad guy for making fun of you for being fat, because that is not what they are doing.
Are you this incensed when someone tells a blonde joke? In many ways blondes are more genetically predisposed to their hair color than an obese person is to their proclivity to gain weight.
But they could both do something about their condition…the fat person could eat fewer calories than they burn each day and the blonde could dye her hair.