January 11th, 2005
Praise Jesus for Houston
According to Yahoo! Buzz today, Houston is “America’s fattest city.” And I just have to say, I’m grateful that it’s not somewhere I live. Knowing that I’m a proud fat activist, that statement may puzzle you–but I’m just so sick and tired of feeling personally responsible for tipping the scales for my city and/or state. I’m sick and tired of being subjected to guilt-mongering harangues and browbeating about fat–the evils of fat, the “epidemic of obesity” and all the horrible things that fat supposedly causes, not the least of which is death. Even though I don’t live in Houston, it’s pretty bad in Maine where I used to live, what with the state government being whipped into a frenzy by fat-hater-extraordinaire Sean Faircloth on the topic of “obesity”–with the end result that you can barely turn on the TV in Maine without being subjected to a “public service announcement” (i.e., free advertising for fat hatred) which portrays fat people as lazy, gluttonous, and too dumb to know the solution to their problems is a good long walk. Let me say right now that that stereotype doesn’t fit any of the fat, strong, hardworking Maine people I know. And I can’t even count on my feminist sisters to get it right, since they’re posting calorie counters and workout schedules on feminist bulletin boards, and Women’s Enews is coming up with stories like this one, on women and diabetes. This article is so typical of the way the media talks to women about illness that I almost want to give up writing this right now. But no such luck for y’all. Instead I’m going to refer you to this great article by Sue Scharff:
Women’s special claim on disease doesn’t stop there: it also extends to heart disease. A giant billboard on Seattle’s Rainier Avenue trumpets in 5-foot high letters, “Heart disease: #1 killer of women,” and gives a website address. Don’t men die of heart disease too? Why has no one put up a billboard on Rainier Avenue reminding them of that? Why are we constantly force-fed images of women on the verge of death, while men are shown driving around in pick-ups, drinking beer, playing football, and making masses of money by trading stock over their cell phones? If it’s already common knowledge that men die younger than women do, why the idea of women as the sicker sex? Why do the media focus exclusively on how sick women are, or soon will be?
As Scharff goes on to point out, there’s very little money to be made from men’s health care, since they notoriously suck at taking care of themselves. Women, on the other hand, will go out and buy whatever supplement, medication, service or procedure we’re supposed to, in order to care for our health–and we’ll buy it for our loved ones as well. So let’s go back to the fat thing and follow the money.
First of all, we didn’t get where we are all by ourselves. Let’s interrogate the hideous opening of the Women’s Enews article a little further:
Nancy Gleeson never said “no.” When she saw sugar, she ate it, gorging on cookies, chocolate and banana splits every day for decades.
Leaving aside the blatant fat-hating language and assumptions in that sentence–let’s ask ourselves, who made sure that the sugar was out there for Nancy to see? Who creates sugary products, and who benefits from their being on the counter of every single corner store, gas station, and supermarket in this country? Who engineered the shift from an agrarian to an industrial to a service economy in this country, thereby requiring more and more of us to work at sedentary jobs to support ourselves? Whose bright idea was it to use chemicals for everything and then dump them into rivers and lakes, where they’re on tap to poison us? Whose factories emit toxins that pollute the air and rainwater? Who invented and promoted television as a pastime, replacing engaging community-based forms of entertainment and socialization? Who purposely trashed functioning public transportation systems in order to make people dependent on cars? I don’t know the answer to these questions (though the last one has the initials “GM”), but I DO know it isn’t the women and the working-class men of this country–at whom the majority of the anti-fat finger-pointing and healthist sneering is now directed. Now that the capitalists have gleaned every last bit of market share out of candy bars and Fritos, and profited from the repetitive strain injury of those of us sitting on our fat asses in the electronic sweatshop or standing on our fat feet in the electronic assembly line, they’ve turned their attention to sucking us dry by freaking us out about our collective size. If they can’t make us pay up on the grounds of vanity–and unfortunately they often can–they won’t hesitate to guilt us about what all that fat is doing to our health. And who benefits? They do–SlimFast, Dexatrim, NutraSystem, Weight Watchers, surgeons of all types make billions of dollars every year off of women who think that being fat is a death sentence. (And don’t forget the psychiatrists who make a bundle when your weight obsession turns into an eating disorder.) These guys are chuckling all the way to the bank OVER AND OVER, since DIETS MAKE YOU FATTER. Hello out there, sisters! Quit listening to the media. Quit buying this crap. Quit believing that you’re too fat. Do a little research and you’ll find out that all this stuff about the “epidemic of obesity” is a crock. You’ll find out that an average-height woman who weighs more than 146 pounds is considered medically overweight. You’ll find out that the standards for who is “overweight” were arbitrarily determined and keep changing as it benefits those who profit from people’s fears. You’ll find out that the medical data linking fat to illness are correlations at best, and those most often haven’t held up to repeated study. You’ll find out that thin people get heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and cancer too. You’ll find out that lots of people manage diabetes without medication and often without losing an ounce–so diabetes can hardly be a result of fat itself.
And after all, nobody gets out of this world alive. What’s healthy for fat people is healthy for thin people too. If you don’t know anything about healthy nutrition, make it your business to find out–from a source that doesn’t have a financial interest in promoting body anxiety. And find a way to move that makes you feel good about your body, instead of punishing yourself on some treadmill in some boring beige cinderblock mirror-lined room with CNN blaring on the TV. (I dunno about you, but watching CNN makes me wish my fat WOULD kill me on the spot.) Contrary to what the capitalists would have you believe, good health in a clean world is free, or at least very, very cheap. People can be healthy at all sizes, but not when corporate profits depend on poisonous technology and industry, a labor market that works our hands but not our bodies, and overproduction of nonnutritious processed junk that passes for food. Somehow we all need to fight our way out of this stupid paper bag of blaming individuals for body size and health problems and holding individuals solely responsible for the solutions, when body size varies naturally and systemic conditions in this country foster ill health. There’s something fundamentally wrong with this system that no diet is going to fix, and we can’t even begin to address the real problems when the media colludes with those who profit from this insanity, writing as if the only problem is what folks are eating in Houston.
