This is a comment by Mike L on the post “I Don’t Have to Explain My Fat to You“.
I’ve heard these things before, and I personally take issue with “fat acceptance” for two reasons.
First, for reasons I do not understand, many members of the fat acceptance movement seem to hate me. I was a student at City College of San Francisco before transferring to a 4-year school, and during my time there I attended a couple of events where Linda Bacon would speak about Fat Acceptance. At every single event someone (and in fairness it was usually an audience comment rather than an academic) would attempt to demonize “thin men” as the source of all of society’s problems.
Even if you wanted to demonize thin people, why were men singled out every time?
Furthermore, my family has a long history of heart disease, so I have little choice but to be proactive about prevention or else face heart disease myself. This means I exercise vigorously six days a week and I’m very careful about what I eat. As a result, I am a thin man. How am I supposed to feel when I hear myself being demonized because of steps that I am reasonably taking to prevent the plight I watched my grandmother suffer through?
If the FA movement wanted an ally, they screwed up.
Second, even if the FA movement wasn’t problematic, the comparison to the LGBT community is preposterous. Homosexuality does not drive up my medicare costs.
Now, are there “healthy” fat people? Sure. Are fat people in America on average “healthy”? No, not by a long shot.
When the author writes:
“There are so many people who can be on board with FA or other fat-positive principles, provided the fat person in question is healthy….F*** That.”
It’s pretty clear that the author is not actually concerned with an ongoing public health crisis in America which affects all of us through insurance premiums, medicare, and medicaid. It’s one thing to argue that we should not stigmatize fat. It’s another to argue that being unhealthy has no societal costs at all.
Photo credit: Flickr / tobyotter
“Homosexuality does not drive up my medicare costs.”
Actually, I heard that sentiment thrown out by homophobics during the rise of AIDS–that gay men were driving up medical costs. Seems pretty ignorant now, doesn’t it?
Shame tactics leveled at fat people are more likely to cause fat people to avoid going to the doctor or for the doctor to ignore their health issues (for examples see fathealth.wordpress.com). Less preemptive care = higher costs. If you are really concerned about medical costs, change your bigoted attitude.
The idea that fat *people* are driving up your medicare cost, and not the system which makes unhealthy food much much cheaper than healthy food is ridiculous. I have the privilege to be able to afford healthy food, and I exercise. However, I’m still fat- and I’m not driving up anyone’s costs. What is driving them up is gentrification, which pushes poor people into certain neighborhoods with limited food choices, and limited education by doctors on what healthy means. Most people go to the doctors with health issues and are given pills- yes, if they’re fat, that means it’s being… Read more »
This is a silly argument. It is entirely possible to subsist on rice and beans. It is not pleasant, but it is possible. You can do this regardless of what income level you have because few things are cheaper than bulk rice and beans. People who claim that ONLY unhealthy food is cheap have probably no explored actual healthy eating options. Milk, oatmeal, frozen fruits and vegetables, rice, beans, frozen chicken breast, uncooked pasta, canned vegetables etc. are all healthy foods that are available at very low costs. I’m sorry, but reality begs to differ with the argument that corporate… Read more »
Why do you care whether I’m healthy or not? I don’t hear you calling to ban skydiving, motocross, football, or a thousand other choices people make that result in more injury/death and thus higher costs to society? Pop quiz – which of my activities today is more likely to result in injury/death/healthcare costs going up: a)eating pizza for dinner, b) sustained exposure to high-energy X-rays, or c) catching and restraining sub-adult alligators. All 3 are things is choose to do because they add enjoyment to my life, but if you think option a is the worst, you have an even… Read more »
Death does not actually result in higher costs to society, nor do most injuries. Chronic health problems are another matter.
This is covered in the links posted in comments above.
“Even if you wanted to demonize thin people, why were men singled out every time?” For the exact same reason we single out white men when discussing race, rich men when discussing poverty, and middle-aged men when discussing age. To grasp the mantle of victimhood and bask in its moral authority and political power, one must draw as stark a comparison as possible between the experiences of your group and another more privileged group. You’re free to define your group and there group as needed to accomplish this goal. Now, if we could only find the white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied,… Read more »
I’m working on it! Give me 12 years and I’ll be the right age =)
Two things: one, issues of gender equality between cismen and ciswomen are very different than class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, equality issues. In those other issues there is a pretty clear divide between privileged group and non-privileged group, whereas with gender it’s more contextual. Second thing, you’re last, long sentence demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of privilege. Straight people aren’t to blame; a system which gives straight people privilege is to blame. Able-bodied people aren’t to blame; a system which gives straight people privilege is to blame, etc. Not everyone is able to distinguish between how a… Read more »
Respectfully, I think you misunderstood his last sentence, which (in my understanding) was to be read sarcastically.
The problem with privilege arguments is that they never examine the actual strategies executed by the players in the system. Instead, they focus entirely on the “starting points” of the players and then make pretend that this is the whole game. Many of us disagree with this type of analysis, and the sentence was an indication of this sort of disagreement.
Interestingly ties back into that “Easiest Difficulty Setting” article that did the rounds.
Homosexuality does not drive up my medicare costs. According to a recent Forbes article, neither does obesity: Alcohol, Obesity and Smoking Do Not Cost Health Care Systems Money “Now there is no doubt at all that these unhealthy behaviours do have costs, that’s not at issue. The major cost is of course to the imbiber, smoker or lardbucket in the form of a shorter lifespan.” “But what about these costs to the health care systems? Well, the clue is in that shortened lifespan. Yes, certainly, there are costs to treating the diseases brought on by too much booze, tobacco or… Read more »
“Another myth down the toilet…”
Not quite.
That paper looked at Europe, but I live in the US.
Looking at US costs, the obese do indeed cost more.
“Making the cost impact all the more troubling is the fact that, unlike smokers, obese people tend to live almost as long as those who keep their weight under control. ”Smokers die early enough that they save Social Security, private pensions, and Medicare” trillions of dollars”, said Duke’s Eric Finkelstein. “But mortality isn’t that much higher among the obese.””
From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/04/30/obesity-now-costs-americans-more-in-healthcare-costs-than-smoking/
First off, I don’t see anything in that article that says the obese do, indeed, cost more. Certainly the passage that you quoted does not say that. Perhaps there is something on page 2 of the article that says that, but no article text loads for me on that page so I don’t know. But that’s okay. Let’s use your logic on smoking which your article does explicitly say saves Social Security, private pensions, and Medicare trillions of dollars. Are you a smoker, Mike L? No? If not, you are driving up smokers’ costs in Social Security, private pensions, and… Read more »
That’s an interesting paper, though note in the summary the authors set out several critical conditions related to its validity. Also, it takes a rather dubious approach towards links between risk factors and disease i.e. it assumes independence. The test country used in the model should also be reviewed and compared to other regions where direct patient moneys contribution is different. Another issue brought up in the commentary is the use of average costs in the formulation. The point made by the critique needs consideration as it will influence outcomes. It is well understood that 50% of lifetime aggregated health… Read more »
Your example just goes to show that both men and women can be demonized for their bodies, no matter what they look like. “Skinny bitches” are the body police and gender police, all rolled into one evil, unhuman package. I read on PostSecret last Sunday a secret from a woman with an eating disorder, who although recovered feels a smug satisfaction with having achieved a lower “low weight” than other sufferers of her disease. At first I felt sad for her, and then later, upon reflection, while still feeling compassion for her, I thought she was a bitch, and yeah,… Read more »
Justin you’ve repeatedly tried to tie capitalism to the way we look at bodies, but I just don’t accept that.
The fact remains that “beauty ideals” exist in virtually all cultures, regardless of whether or not they are capitalist. The ideals change from culture to culture, but less capitalist cultures do not magically begin accepting all body types.
Justin didn’t say that capitalism creates beauty ideals. He suggests that capitalism influences the beauty ideals of western cultures. Other cultures have beauty ideals, certainly, but they are not tied to capitalism…because they are not capitalist.
But that claim doesn’t demonstrate that our beauty ideals ARE capitalist. Furthermore, different countries have starkly different beauty ideals despite strong commitments to capitalism. It’s difficult to claim that a country like Japan is not deeply capitalist, yet they clearly have a very different beauty ideal than the US does. Likewise, it’s difficult to claim that a country like Finland, the epitome of Scandinavian Welfare, is as capitalist as the US is, and yet Finland has beauty ideals that are remarkably similar to the US (look up Finnish models and see if you can tell the difference). It just seems… Read more »
Firstly, that’s not the way society and culture works. A similar system (say capitalism) won’t have exactly the same result with the way it interacts with other systems (like say valuing the body) across every culture. In part that’s because capitalism is different in different cultures (as are other social systems), and they all interact with each other.
Secondly, as Justin pointed out, he wasn’t talking about ‘beauty ideals’ (it was wrong of me to use that term in my own comment). He was talking about how society places value on the body. Those are two very different things.
I don’t say that beauty ideals are capitalist. I say that capitalism has its own qualifications for what it values in our bodies. Beauty is one, but only in as much as it can be commodified: if your kid is model-cute enough to be photographed for catalogs, or if you have the kind of body that people pay to see, or even if you just fit the Hooters uniform, then it’s worth something in dollars. Otherwise, you just give your loved ones pleasure with your beauty and capitalism doesn’t care. The system wants you to be a valuable worker, whether… Read more »