Hi to NYT and Chi Trib Readers and Other Noobs

posted by meowser

If you’ve just gotten here via the New York Times or Chicago Tribune — or you’ve discovered FatFu for the first time for any other reason — hello and welcome.

There are two of us who post here: the blog’s namesake, FatFu, and me, Meowser, who Fu invited to join on with her after she’d already set up this joint. At first we did not use avatars to distinguish our posts from each other’s, but after much confusion ensued amongst the readership, now we do. (My avatar, in case you want to know, is my cat, Binkley, who thoroughly approves this message.)

You should know (and I’m sure Fu is going to blush when she reads this, but I don’t care) that Fu is one of the unsung heroines of the fat-blog movement. She is the one who set up the “Notes from the Fatosphere” feed on the sidebar and keeps it updated, and she is the one who wrote the takedown of the “fat is contagious” story mentioned in the NYT/Trib article, as well as much other trenchant, fabulous stuff which I hope you’ll all take the time to read.

Neither Fu nor I blogs very frequently (a couple of posts a month each, on average), which is why the Fatosphere feed is such a goddess-send to someone like me. My posts tend to be epics, which is why there are not very many of them (if I had more time I’d write shorter posts, yuk yuk yuk), and in fact I’ve one coming up in the next few days about that recent Bitch magazine story about how all size-acceptance people allegedly hate all fat binge-eaters who seek treatment for their disorders because then they might get skinny and embarrass the rest of us. (Here’s a brief, two word preview: NOT TRUE.) The Fatosphere feed (see the sidebar immediately to the right for the feed) lists posts from its participants almost immediately after they pop up, and hence is a real boon for someone like me who doesn’t have fresh material daily the way many other bloggers do; when I’ve got something new, there it is, and people who care about such things will find out about it that way. Quite stylish, and we have Fu to thank!

Now, since I’ve already had a concerntroll post from someone who complains that thin people get “eat a sandwich” insults too (yeah, but has anyone ever denied you health insurance or sent you away from the doctor’s office for refusing to?), let me say that neither I nor Fu has much truck with skinny-bashing, and any comments insulting someone’s body size no matter what it is get handled with, well, a pretty heavy hand. We might delete them entirely or we might deliver some kind of clever-ass rebuttal, but they don’t go unanswered. Trust me. If anyone told my skinny boyfriend to “eat a sandwich” within my earshot, they’d be told by me, “Not until it’s been shoved up your ass first.” (Look, I’m a Brooklyn girl first, even though I live in Portland.) Besides, he eats plenty, believe me.

That said, do I really believe what many people say, that fat hate is the last socially acceptable form of prejudice? I’m not prepared to say that, no. Social norms differ greatly by region and subregion; what’s “okay” in a big coastal city may well get someone beaten to a pulp in a rural part of the Bible belt, and that’s restricting analysis to the United States only. I’m also not big on “our curse is worse” (how you like that one, Cubs fans?). I only know what my own “curse” is; I’ve never had to live other people’s.

However, I will say that fat hate is one of the last forms of prejudice in which even most people who are subjected to it think they are getting exactly what they deserve. And I find that totally unacceptable. BMI is now being used to deny adoptions and emigration to other countries, and no, it’s not people who are “too skinny” who are the ones getting rejected. We do not get to appear in movies or television shows unless we are the butts of jokes or some kind of horrible “warning” to “normal” people not to eat what they want or they will wind up looking exactly like us.

And what’s our crime? Allegedly that we eat too much junk and don’t spend enough time at the gym, and of course, people cling fervently to the belief that can tell exactly what we eat and how much of it and how active we are just from our pants sizes; genetics, medication usage, chronic dieting, socioeconomic status and bioenvironmental factors have nothing to do with either our weight or the state of our health. Never mind that the I’d-hit-that “ideal body” for women, especially, is often arrived at through “lifestyle choices” far more destructive than anything I’ve ever done in my life, and that the same people who bash fatties for being unhealtheeeee generally think it’s perfectly fine for thin people to dissipate themselves and not sleep and come to work with killer hangovers multiple times a week, and even not exercise and avoid vegetables if they’d prefer to. Thin people are given a pass for their vices and peccadillos because they make the world a prettier place; fat people had better be perfect every moment of their lives in order to justify being such a blight on everyone’s sidewalks.

There’s no reason for it. There’s no logic for it. There’s no justification for it. And frankly, if I hadn’t gained 70 pounds on antidepressants that wouldn’t budge at all even with the widely prescribed less-food-more-veggies-more-exercise “solution” until I went off the drugs completely, I might be just as clueless as some of the concerntrolls. That’s what it took for me to get a clue. Do I want that to happen to everyone? The fat, not necessarily. The clue, yes.

That’s why we’re here.