Tonight I am here to talk about fat.
Nowhere in the developed world is there a prejudice more cruel and yet more acceptable than fat-bashing. Nowhere in any part of the world is there a widespread, enlightened answer to the question of how obese people and obesity itself fit into a healthy, virtuous society.
If you are like the typical teenage male, then you are virulently bigoted against fat people, especially fat women. You find fat them to be physically repulsive—and again the women in particular—and may even want to inflict physical violence on them. This prejudice is particularly evident in a social setting, where, with your friends, it becomes popular to insult fat people and joke at their expense. You believe fatness is the result of a poor diet, poor self-discipline, and a lack of self-respect. In contrast, you, conversely, are either perfectly thin or are fat but brush off your own fatness with simple, self-deprecating humor.
I know that’s not true of everybody reading this, but I guarantee I’ve hit several people’s nails on the head already. We have a problem with fat in the United States, and in all the industrialized countries—and the problem is not what we think.
Being fat is something that can happen to anybody—and probably will. If the Compendium is representative of international statistics, then over one-third of the people who post here today are overweight already, and, of those of us who are not, more than half will become overweight in the years to come. Among those of us who are overweight now, a few are extremely obese.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that fatness can strike anybody, and despite the fact that a third of us—and many of our friends—are personally overweight, our individual willingness to empathize with those who are fat is seldom better than nil.
Why? Why is fatness so despised?
I think the answer is at least partially that fat-bashing has existed only as a “herd” behavior. Whatever underlying causes in our biology and psychology led us to single out fatness as trait by which people should be judged, this discrimination against fat has since taken root in our social fabric itself, where it became a cultural norm and proceeded to develop in all its nastiness as a full-fledged prejudice. As a cultural norm, the prejudice against fat is a value judgment that people are compelled to embrace—by the same peer pressure mechanism that dictates most of our social attitudes and perceptions. As a prejudice, this value judgment against fatness inspires fiercely passionate hatred in otherwise rational people.
As social animals whose power exists in numbers rather than speed or strength, it is in people’s evolved interest to have a likeminded culture in which we are accepted and normal. This is why we so often conform with such passion and wholeheartedness to whatever the prevailing opinion is. Any deviation from this script is not acceptable. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way human children interact together in groups. Children are capable of such absolute single-mindedness when in groups, unencumbered by the adult traits of judgment and prudence, that their behavior is little more than that of dressed-up zoo creatures.
Like the young of any highly-evolved animal species, human children spend their formative years overwhelmed by curiosity, imaginativeness, and playful energy. These are the inborn characteristics that lead to the development of traits which will increase the likelihood of survival. And the herd mind is simply one of those traits. That’s why children practice it so well—and why you probably cannot cure them of it. As far as the human genome is concerned—and therefore the human mind—today’s children are no different than those born before civilization even existed. They are, essentially, wild animals tamed into domestication by their parents and surrounding environment.
But let me speak of one of the objects of this immense power of herd thinking that children exhibit so well: Bigotry. Herd animals have every reason to root out and ostracize any members of the group who diverge from the norm. Any human being who did not fit in with the rest, was beaten into submission, expelled from the group, or even killed. Once again, we don’t need to look any further than human children to see the proof of that. Human children are capable of cruelty so extreme and that, when it occurs, almost any adult who saw it would feel sick.
This bigotry, this inborn proclivity to root out those who are different and punish them, is the ultimate source of every modern prejudice—other than the sexual prejudices—from racism, to xenophobia, to classism. And it is the source of fat-hatred too.
Yes, you’d forgotten that that’s what we’re talking about, hadn’t you? For some reason or another, human society identified fatness as an identifying characteristic of someone who does not belong in the herd. All at once, the individual opinions of entire generations of people becomes irrelevant—it is the cultural norm to hate fat people. The herd, where it has an opinion, is inclined to do your thinking for you. Today we call that “pop culture,” but it is many things besides.
It doesn’t actually matter if fatness does or does not put a herd at a disadvantage. Evolution is such that, prior to the inception of the sentient mind and the rules of civilization, whatever traits that developed in an animal species were not checked by any logical train of thought. They were simply tested in the arena of physical experiences, and, if they didn’t lead the population to a higher death rate, they tended to stay on! So, who knows why, fatness became the mark of an outsider.
I find particular affirmation for this hypothesis in the observation that fatness is at its most violent when exhibited by young, sexually mature men against young women of reproductive age. Most of this is certainly the sad effect of a much older and far more deeply entrenched prejudice—misogynistic sexism—but some of it is very likely an indication of why herd-based bigotry originally evolved. From the perspective of the herd mind, there is no greater outsider than a woman who can bear outsider children. These fertile human beings are uniquely the source of all human beings. In a very curious way, they are therefore the proverbial kings on the chessboard. Verification of this idea would come by examining other prejudices, and looking for them to peak in the case of younger men assailing younger women. Factoring out for sexism once again, I think there are some corroboratory signs of this.
Whatever started fat-hatred in the beginning, has lost its importance. Today it is all about the hatred for its own, gleeful sake. As The Simpsons pointed out for us, the word for that is schadenfreude. (Leave it to the Germans to invent that particular word.) Under the architecture of rational minds capable of elaborate forms of behavior and communication, herd bigotry tends to spiral out of control into an organized, institutionalized system of prejudice, and, on the wind of popular culture, becomes a self-feeding fire that soon loses sight of any trace of rational biological or psychological relevance. What is good for the herd becomes self-reinforcing, and reason be damned.
But the reasonable fact of the matter is that there is nothing whatsoever about fat people that warrants the sheer magnitude of hatred which is directed at them.
So, now I have laid out my take on why fat-bashing came to exist. It evolved because, as human beings, we create enemies and divisions wherever we perceive them—not where they actually exist—and therefore we are often mistaken in labeling something an outsider. So it is in the case of the overweight.
Now I ask a slightly different question. The old justification for fat-bashing nullified, what about fatness itself, and the hatred thereof? Is being fat somehow wrong or bad? Is the prejudice against fatness justified in some other way?
Well, the correct answer from a logical perspective is that, no, with the old justification gone, the charges should be dropped. But prejudice doesn’t work that way; if an old justification withers, people look for a new one to take its place. And that is the only reason why this essay now continues.
Let us put off the subject of the morality of being fat for the time being, and first discuss the physical, social, and psychological implications of it.
Only one thing seems immediately certain: Profound obesity is not healthy. It strains the heart and lungs, the filtering organs, the skin, and the bones and joints, to the point where any of these organs or structures may reasonably fail or become debilitated. However—and I say this solely on scientific grounds—any other statement is less certain and subject to empirical validation. For instance, what is the impact on human health in the case of moderate obesity? What about simple overweight? What about the different kinds of fat people can accumulate, in different concentrations and on different parts of the body? What about the causes by which that fat was accumulated—for instance, high-fructose corn syrup versus sugar, or butter versus canola oil? What about the correlative characteristics that typically occur in fat people, such as stress, lack of self-confidence, or a sedentary lifestyle; how do we factor those out? What is the extent of these other traits’ impact on health without regard to the actual fatness itself? How does muscle mass compare in relevance to fat mass when determining health?
These questions go on and on, until all but the dimmest bulbs start to realize that science knows much less about the health effects of fatness on the human body than Joe Schmoe on the street thinks he knows. The end result is that we must be open to the very real possibility that being fat itself is not necessarily a health risk, but rather it may be the type of fatness, or the degree of fatness, or completely different lifestyle traits, that actually determine whether or not we are unhealthy, and to what degree.
Not being a doctor, or in any way knowledgeable of this sort of research to a professional degree, I can only offer these few, simple kernels of skepticism. It seems perfectly natural that, duh, being fat is not healthy. But so much of that certainty is the result of unfounded cultural prejudice, and so little is based upon solid medical information. Intuition may feel right, but it has no inherent guarantee by the forces of reality. It will be a while yet—perhaps a long while—before science has established a consensus on the inherent health impacts of excess weight on the human body.
In the meantime, where physical health is concerned, I can only say two things: The first is that it is our ability to gain weight rapidly, not our ability to be fat continuously, that served us in our animal past. Being significantly overweight for a prolonged period is not something for which natural selection provided and, as such, its advantages and disadvantages to our health are a wildcard. In the meantime, heart disease continues to be the number-one killer in America. This is probably related partially, but not wholly or even mostly, to obesity and excess fat. (Other causes of heart disease are so numerous I won’t even get into it. The heart is easily our weakest link on the road to longevity.)
The second thing I can say is that, excepting the more profound degrees of obesity—in which the body is physically overwhelmed rather than slowly poisoned with adipose—being fat does not by itself seem to cut life spans all that short. You are likely to live quite a long time, fat or not. And, with the power of modern medicine, the predispositions of the body’s reaction to excess weight are only as significant as the gap between affordable, effective medical care and prescription drugs, and good health. This gap grows smaller all the time, as new drugs and new medical expertise comes into being that neutralizes many longstanding conditions associated with, and thought to be aggravated by, extra body fat.
In short, speaking purely in terms of health, our perception of fatness conjures up a villain far more powerful and malevolent than the fatness of real life.
Moving on, then, from the physical aspects of fatness to the social aspects of it. All else being equal, most human beings are physically able to life their preferred lifestyle from within a wide range of body fat percentage and distribution. Ranging all the way from excessive thinness to considerable fatness, most people would suffer only minimal physical obstacles to living as they like. You can swim in the lake whether you’re 90 pounds or 400. You can walk for long distances, play with your friends or kids, perform everyday chores, do your job, prepare and eat dinner, sit and watch movies or read books, and indeed do a great many other things all within an impressive range of weight. All else being equal, additional layers of fat progressively impede your physical mobility, strength, and stamina. These layers, however, can add up for a long time before your loss of function starts to get in the way of your preferred lifestyle. Indeed, two-thirds of the adult population in the United States is overweight, and yet these people do not suffer relative to the other third from a particular lack of identity or character, and so obviously a great many of these people are able to perform a great majority of the things they wish to do, with only minimal or moderate interference from their extra fat.
And the fact also stands that, when fatness begins to sap our strength or stamina, even a modest amount of exercise can easily replace both, with no net fat loss whatsoever. This greatly increases people’s ability to store fat without facing obstacles in living their preferred lifestyle—to the extent they are willing to do a little extra exercise on a regular basis, which is surprisingly uncommon.
Then, as fatness encroaches without a corresponding boost in muscular power and cardiovascular capacity, it slowly starts to pick at people’s way of life. Not only does it slowly sap overall energy levels, but at some point it starts physically getting in the way. Tying your shoes can get harder. Walking up the stairs and be more exhausting. Athletic pastimes may become more difficult and therefore less appealing. But how many people, and to what degree, suffer from a hardship in living their preferred lifestyle because of their weight? I think most of us would be able to say that we can generally live as we like with little or no physical interference from our fat.
But there is another side to the social aspect of fatness. Even if somebody is physically able to swim happily in the water despite wearing an extra hundred pounds of fat, he or she may utterly dread putting on a bathing suit and exhibiting their flesh for all to see. Therefore it is that not only is fatness itself relevant to our lifestyle, but the very concept of fatness as well. This psychological component is actually the major portion of this whole obsession we as a society have with fat.
Fat—and I do hate to sound cliché, but it must be done—fat is an enemy that exists chiefly in the mind. The concept of fat is instilled in our minds from a very young age. The strong social stigma associated with being fat, especially in the case of younger women, is vastly more deleterious to one’s preferred lifestyle and personal happiness than any physical ramifications of carrying extra weight.
In this way, the bigotry against fat is self-sustaining. People are prejudiced against fatness, and so therefore being fat is bad for them because it attacks their self-confidence and popularity, and, thus, they are inclined to hate fatness all the more. This vicious little circle is like a runaway nuclear reaction, so powerful that at this point people will drive themselves to clearly abnormal behaviors simply to appease their concept of a desirable body image. This includes everything from self-confinement in fear of being seen by other people in a public setting, to full-fledged eating disorders—said to affect a frightening portion of the adolescent female population. It is ghastly stuff.
Because the prejudice against fatness is so strong, and because it is continually reinforced in peer groups, and by popular authorities such as mainstream entertainment, the concept of fatness has become utterly disconnected from its true nature as a physical condition, and has morphed into a veritable phantom menace of Godzilla proportions.
And make no mistake, this disease of the mind takes two to tango. People’s dread about fat is matched by active harassment of those who are fat. Those who participate in the harassment usually justify their actions by dehumanizing the victim (e.g., “he’s an ugly cow”), or by feigning emotional concern (e.g., “I worry for your health!”), or even by failing to make the connection that attacking someone who is fat is an act of harassment (“She needs a good kick in her butt to motivate her to get up and exercise!”). Almost without exception, people who try and rationalize their harassment of the overweight and obese are really just looking for a way to give voice to their physical disgust at somebody’s weight—a disgust created by the herd mind!
But because fat people are already—by virtue of this pervasive social bigotry—vulnerable in the self-confidence arena to attacks based on their weight, it is extra hard for them to deal with the attacks. They start to think, “What if I am an ugly cow?” or “What I’m a heart attack waiting to happen?” or “What if I being slapped around is what it will take to finally get me to do something?” So, for this reason, the disingenuousness of people’s remarks stings particularly badly.
How many people do you know, who not only are you respectful and truthful about their weight, but are not ashamed of it and in fact are either neutral or actually happy to be fat? I know people who are happy to be fat. And I know people—many more people—who literally cannot accept, cannot wrap their minds around the idea, that a fat person can be happy with their weight, suffer from no lack of self-confidence or self-respect, and may even be enthusiastic about gaining even more weight? Many people simply cannot assimilate the premise that fatness is not synonymous with a failure of character. And yet, fatness and the failure of character have no inherent connection whatsoever. It is only the strength and cruelty of the anti-fat bigotry that makes it so rare to find somebody who is very fat, but can deal with anything that comes their way with regards to that bigotry, without overreacting, and indeed be happy to explain themselves rather than see it as a chore or a strain? It is so rare to find somebody who is fat and happy and simply does not mind the endless insults! And, likewise, for all the same reasons, it is so rare to find people who believe that said fat and happy people can exist at all.
To sum it up, we come back to my earlier point: Being fat is the mark of an outsider…an enemy…something worthy of punishment, ostracizing, scorn, ridicule, and abuse. This has little or nothing to do with the adipose tissue itself. It is, simply, the physical symbol of a very powerful cultural neurosis in which we all share.
If there were any immediate and conclusive argument that being fat is wrong, it would be this psychological aspect of fatness. But hopefully you, dear reader, are of good conscience enough that you would find such a rendition to the ugly powers of prejudice to be an appalling prospect.
And therefore, we begin to get into the character of the issue. Is any bigotry self-justifying? Is it right for people to dread being fat themselves and attack fatness in others, simply because they are inspired to do so from an earlier, logically-hollow herd instinct?
I spoke earlier of the morality of being fat. In all truthfulness, I don’t believe in morality. Morals are arbitrary rules based on artificial values systems, themselves founded in either religious superstition or personal expediency. But, morals aside, there are more legitimate principles to be taken into consideration. To put aside the semantics and just get straight to the point: Is fatness something that can be grafted onto a scale of virtue?
I have seen such prejudice come out of people’s mouths and fingertips when they discuss why they dislike fatness. I mentioned some of these earlier: They say it ruins your health, demonstrates a lack of self-confidence, or self-discipline, and makes you ugly. Are any of these actually true? The first one is too complex for a yes-or-no answer. The second and third are true only because the bigotry sees to it that fatness continues to be a source of suffering for most everybody who experiences it. And the fourth one…well…is fat ugly?
The correct answer is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I’ll bet you’re thinking to yourself…that’s something only a fatty would say! Well, look at it this way: What is different between a fat person and a thin person? Fat people are softer, larger, tend to be sweatier and have a stronger scent, and, all else being equal, will have to exert themselves more to perform a physical task. In women, fatness usually emphasizes the body’s primary sexual characteristics—the hips, bust, and belly. In men, it comes in the form of a large protruding belly and therefore produces the appearance of additional size and, therefore, strength and power. We can safely conclude that fat has evolved to accumulate on the parts of the body where it, in the past, has done the most good in boosting the species’ survival.
In this regard, fat actually has positive aesthetic appeal! It isn’t ugly, but attractive! At least, a modest amount of fat. Layer after later eventually begins to distort the basic human figure, and, by the time formless obesity sets in, fatness can only be attractive in and of itself to the extent that somebody has a fetish for it. But, speaking in terms of modest fatness—or even considerable fatness, short of the more profound degrees of obesity—fatness is like a giant zoom button that gives us more of the things we like to see. Therefore, in a visual sexual-sense, it is innately attractive.
Of course, there are other aesthetic theaters to be concerned with than simply the visual-sexual. But, when you take sex out of the equation, that whole “eye of the beholder” idea comes into play again. Can we get around it?
For instance, where fatness interferes with one’s ability to perform relative to others or relative to one’s past self, it can be seen as pitiable, undesirable, or even off-putting. However, is there more beauty in the martial artist whose limbs become like the tips of swords in their selectiveness upon touching the ground, or in the overweight person who plods upon the ground with heavy footfalls and listless poise? It depends on how you interpret what you see! Certainly, it is reasonable to assume that we all would aspire more naturally to the nimbleness and agility of the trained master, than to the entirely unremarkable profile of the fat person.
Therefore, in taking into consideration our own physical powers, fatness is an aesthetic negative. To the extent you associate power with a good sexual mate, it may even have a sexual connotation.
Indeed, when thinking of the many pastimes which humans must be highly skilled and fit to enjoy, versus the many pastimes which are similarly exclusive only to those who are fat, the former category is astounding, whereas the latter category is limited mostly to the capacity for eating and the more sensual aspects of the body. But backpacking, hang-gliding, bicycling…all of these require a minimum level of fitness and improve as our fitness improves.
To invoke an old derogatory slur, “When they come, they’ll eat the fat ones first,” there is also the thought that fatness reduces one’s effective power of fight or flight. All else being equal, this is true. Fat does not result in much extra muscular power, and constitutes a pure drain, without any benefit at all, on anybody’s aerobic stamina for running. When viewed in this context, fatness is a definite negative.
Then again, there is so much about lifestyle that has no relevance to fatness. Speaking from a personal perspective, much of what I do in the course of a regular day requires no more physical fitness than the strength to hoist myself out of bed in the mornings. To write, or read, or play video games, or cook, or people-watch, or converse…none of these things requires fitness. In this regard fatness is a neutral quantity.
Putting it all together, my jury is out. Fat can be sexually attractive, or unattractive. Fat can be aesthetically appealing, or repulsive. Or it can be plain old neutral!
Let us look at it one last way. In this day and age, everybody on Earth understands the desire to lose weight. Very few understand the desire to gain it. If you are not one of those people, then your mind has been muddled by a deep and malevolent cultural prejudice.
Incidentally, I come before you tonight with a BMI of 24.4. I stand 5’10” and weigh 170 pounds. That’s right on the edge of normal weight and overweight. It is also the most I have ever weighed. In the long run I will almost certainly end up as one of those people who becomes overweight in the course of adulthood, perhaps even obese. And, in all honesty, I look forward to it. For one thing, I like to eat. For another, I am one of those people who sees a lot of attractiveness in fat. So, before I join the ranks of society’s most-despised, I would like to take the opportunity to speak on the behalf of all people who exist on the receiving end of fat-bashing prejudice. Hence, one of my motivations for this article. At this point, there isn’t much to be done in terms of supporting the positive side of fatness, but I feel I have made a good start at tearing down the façade of fatness as an enemy of the people. Whatever its real detriments are, fatness as a concept in our minds is vastly more noxious. We need to realize what is fake and what is not. And, good grief, we need to put an end to such a pointless prejudice, that spoils the lives and self-images of so many people.
I could go on. There is so much more that can be said. There is an entire fat acceptance movement out there, consisting of people who are fat and take pride in it, who work to make it more acceptable for people to live happily a few sizes larger than Hollywood would say is appropriate. to dispel the negativity of our concept of fatness. Likewise, there are political ramifications to the obesity epidemic that I did not even begin to touch, ranging all the way from healthcare expenditures to a fast food tax. And I did not discuss the obesity epidemic itself, or the lifestyles and food products that have led up to it. Etc., etc. There is plenty yet to discuss here.
Incidentally, with regard to the poll, the average weight of a female American standing 5' 8" in height, adjusted to an age of roughly 20, is around 180 pounds.
Poll