darkemeralds. (Reply)

Posted by

Oh god, where do I start?

Obviously giving earth-friendly, health-friendly transport systems equal emphasis with regular ones is a good idea. But Jackattak is living up to his educationally-challenged username by his weak, fatphobic arguments. As panisdead said, his assumption that it's that simple is so indicative of his personal privilege.

I've complained before that as a fat woman, I'm berated if I don't exercise, and yet verbally and often physically assaulted when I do exercise. Assuming no one's going to run over and punch one for daring to walk past while committing the crime of being fat, as happens often, is any fat person going to be happy to cycle or walk to work if the workplace doesn't have showers? Obviously that applies to people who aren't fat too. It's not pleasant to have to work while being sweaty. But it's an infrastructural issue that just opening more cycle paths or whatever is not going to fully address.

What part does the climate have in this (i.e. rain puts people off, too much sun makes exercising incredibly draining, cold is difficult to deal with, ice is dangerous, and so on)?

If one has a bunch of kids or elders to drop off at day care or a relative's house or whatever, how exactly is one supposed to fit them on one's skateboard?

What about security concerns? That's a huge one. Plenty of people live in places where it's too bloody dangerous to go outside the door after dark, and sometimes during the day. That goes double if one is a certain race or a different 'class' or is female or any of a thousand other personal situations. I live in one of the richest areas of my entire country and I get in the neck on a regular basis. If I were living in a disadvantaged area, it would be much worse.

What if one is a wheelchair user or has some kind of physical challenge and physically can't make the effort to go x miles to his or her workplace? Even if one is able-bodied, there are limits. If one lives fifty miles from work, good luck cycling that twice per day, year round. What if one lives quite near work but has more than one job? There's only so many hours in the day. Finance plays a huge part in this, as only significantly rich people can really freely choose where to live.

So if one is able-bodied, lives in a temperate climate, doesn't have small kids or anyone else to look after, has a black belt in martial arts, a kevlar vest and/or a gun, is only working one job, and is rich, he or she can then get on his or her bike. Otherwise, it might be a little more difficult than Jackattak thinks.

Even the terms he uses cause my eyebrow to raise. I mean, 'morbid obesity' is not a term accepted by most body acceptance activists. They say that one's overall health has many ways to be measured and one can't say that over a certain weight, boom! one is automatically going to die. It's not that simple. A person can be fat and still be healthy. A person can be thin and still be unhealthy.

It annoys people because they want to believe that their obsessive calorie counting and their inherited genes and their ability to have enough time and money to attend a gym make them morally better people and safer from dying, but it's not actually true, unfortunately. In life, there are no guarantees. I wish I had an euro for every time someone condescendingly told me how unhealthy I was for being fat, while they smoked their twentieth cigarette of the day. Smoking is an appetite suppressant, as are most illegal drugs. All my family except me and my dad are thin. All my family except me and my dad smoke. Would I be healthier smoking? I personally don't think so.

My sister is thin mostly because she's nearly a foot taller than I and also when she was drinking and using drugs, she would sometimes not eat for days, because she'd rather spend the money on drink or drugs. Would I be healthier if I were thin because I'd spend most of my twenties and thirties shooting up? That's what my sister thinks. I personally disagree, which won't surprise you. :) Fat is a matter of appearances and I think it's unwise to judge by them.

IMHO, by saying 'morbid obesity', Jackattak is using an apparently PC, or at least commonly-used-by-the-medical-industry, expression as a figleaf to cover his hatred and revulsion for bodies he personally finds unacceptable. He should just say 'OMG disgusting!' and get it out of his system. Even 'obesity' is a questionable word. Fat is a characteristic, a simple descriptor, but obesity is presented as a disease, which is not wise as the science is unclear and scientists are as subject to fatphobia as the next bigot, e.g. fat has been proved to have protective effect on some people. It's better IMHO to just say 'fat' and not use a term with judgement loaded on it, just as one would describe a tall person or a short person as 'tall' or 'short' and not as 'over-vertebrae'd' or 'stunted.'

As your own experience shows, one can take regular exercise and it can improve one's health but have zero effect on one's actual appearance. (I have had the same experience too. I started walking daily back in November when I went on career break and while I feel better in myself, my size is the same. And I'm okay with that.)

What does 'overeating' even mean? Over what? It's like he means 'meeting more calories than one expends' but that's a outdated idea too, for anyone who knows anything about set points or even about individuality.

Since he asked, I don't think overeating (i.e. eating a lot, however one measures that) is as dangerous as alcoholism. I think having an eating disorder is, and his little story about someone eating a pint of ice-cream in under a minute (is that even physically possible?) sounds like maybe compulsive eating or something like that. If his mother does have an eating disorder, that's unfortunate but it's also the last thing that is going to be helped by having hatred unleashed on one or by getting one's 'fat ass' onto a skateboard or whatever the hell he was babbling on about.

The fact that he's sick of his mother being fat and he's sick of seeing fat people around? Wow, way to be a crap, intolerant son and a narrow-minded, 'the whole world must revolve around me and my aesthetic preferences' person. Should all the African-American people bleach themselves if he doesn't like looking at 'em? His viewpoint is totally ridiculous.

And is it even logical of him to say on one hand, 'If you exercise, that's FANTASTIC no matter what you look like. What you look like has no bearing on the situation as long as three things are present: 1) You're happy with the way you look.', then, practically in the same breath, 'I'm sick of [fat] and I'm sick of seeing [fat people] around'? Which is it? What is he suggesting here? Do all fat humans have to wear a doctor's certificate around their neck showing their reason for being 'legitimately' fat due to a medical condition and/or a personal trainer's note stating their verified daily exercise and calorie intake before he'll treat them as human beings? Maybe that certificate or note could be pinned on in the shape of a yellow star or coded in a tattoo on one's inner arm? Because that's shading towards the kind of illogical prejudice he is displaying, to be frank. He doesn't like a certain set of other people, so he is free to abuse them? I really can't get behind that.

Here's a link or two which you might find interesting: But don't you realise fat is unhealthy?!, and Fat versus fiction.

The awesome Twisty Faster puts it better than I can: "See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue — how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because 'health,' in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of 'unhealthies' who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos — but I'm too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let's just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn't be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can 'prevent' cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap."

I admired your responses to the schmuck. They were much more measured and dignified than I would have been. I hope he doesn't irritate you for long. ♥