In keeping with our debate about free will (or the lack thereof), I was recently reading a thread somewhere on the Internet (maybe reddit?) about why it's socially acceptable to make fun of fat people. One person basically said "well, you don't make fun of gay people, why is it not OK to make fun of gay people, but it is OK to make fun of fat people?" The reply: "Fat is a choice, gay is not." Discuss.
Fat can be choice, but it isn't always. Just ask lust4life. Or anyone who has ever taken a medication that caused weight gain. Or children, who exist subject to the caloric whims of their parents. Or folks with mental disorders or emotional issues who don't have the capacity to choose. In my case it's a choice - I am fat, or at least I have gut, solely due to my own self-indulgence. I've mocked fat people, and I'm sure I've done it on this board. Mostly because I am an asshole. But me being an asshole doesn't make it right. So maybe I'll stop. Maybe.
Trust me, most of the time it's a choice. When you see fat fucks at the grocery store with a cart full of fatty processed food and a bunch of high-calorie sodas, and no vegetables, don't even TRY to tell me it's all their hormones fault. I didn't even know it was socially acceptable to make fun of them; whenever I do that, people call me an asshole.
I don't make fun of fat people. I make fun of people I don't like. If I don't like you and you're fat, it becomes a target.
It's really hard when the people around you look a certain way. The obesity rates just keep going up and up. Obese mothers and fathers are having children that they raise eating the same things that made the parents obese in the first place, and you get children growing up who see 1: junk as food, and 2: that being overweight is normal. On the other hand, the media glamorizes the thin and often underweight. So you've got overweight people surrounded by other overweight people, but being told by the media that they are disgusting. That results in a lot of self hate, comments like you saw on reddit, and denial, denial, denial. It's hard to be told that you are gross or unattractive, so I think a lot of people in that position swing in the other direction: they embrace it as beauty, they embrace it as part of their "culture" (see: The South). While this may alleviate some of their self hate feelings, it aggravates the problem because their condition will not change and the children raised in that culture end up the same way their parents did. Being overweight is not healthy, but moreso, the eating habits that lead most overweight people to that point are not healthy. I think that is the bigger issue. I don't know how to unwrap cultural ideas that are plain wrong, especially with something as sensitive as your weight or as intangible as "healthy", but it needs to happen. How can you reasonably expect a 400lb 30 year old who grew up eating McDonald's and cracklins to switch over to vegetables and meat after DECADES of eating habits? I dunno, I'm kind of ranting now, but it is really hard for people locked in any cultural cycle to get out. This goes for crime, or obesity, or smoking, or poverty. If everyone around you is doing it, why would you even think about doing something else? And by the time you think about doing something else, it is almost impossible.
So if Person A has a psychological or biological imperative to eat cheeseburgers and avoid broccoli, and Person B has a psychological or biological imperative to hook up with people of the same sex and avoid hooking up with people of the opposite sex, why is it OK to expect person A to "get over" their imperatives and change their behavior, but not person B?
There are medical treatments (pills, etc.) for appetite reduction and weight loss. I don't think there are any for homosexuality.
Article here. Now if that isn't a good enough reason to make fun of fat people (or British men) I don't know what is.
Fat people look funny and generally not like someone worth sleeping with. There's the additional assumption that someone fat is also smelly. Fat can be a choice but is not always. And acting as if it's easy to get your body to suddenly eat a few thousand calories below its basal metabolic rate is hard as shit, no matter what kind of condescending tone you take. And lets not forget the fucking food pyramid has grains right at the bottom, which trigger an insulin response and make you MORE FUCKING HUNGRY. In other news I switched to a diet consisting mainly of fatty meats (bacon and steak), cheese, spinach, and green beans and lost 40 lbs so what the fuck do I know*. * yes I take suppliments for potassium, calcium, vitamin c, and magnesium
The moment your start saying staying gay isn't a choice, you stop giving people the possibility to change. I think the approach should be ''don't hate yourself, but keep striving for straighter''. Isn't that right? No?
One action is objectively a detriment to lifespan, as far as I know the only health risk associated with homosexuality that doesn't exist in heterosexuality is colorectal damage - and even then a lot of hetero people have fun with that anyway.
I'm sure there are other factors. You're probably statistically more likely to get AIDS and rectal cancer. Also, consider the social stigma that still exists. That's gotta raise cortisol levels something awful, which screws with your health horribly. So by your reasoning, if it were more unhealthy to be gay than it currently is, it would be OK for us to start trying to turn people straight?
I'm not entirely sure homosexuality is a fair comparison. That's like saying that you are tall or have blue eyes. I think a habit that you can say yes or no to would be a fairer comparison. And yes, I know you can say no to a homosexual act, but that doesn't mean that at your core you are heterosexual. Just like chopping off a tall man's legs, or giving color contacts to someone doesn't change reality, only an outsider's perception of it.
But people change their sexual behavior all the time. Sally Ride was married to a dude and then became a practicing lesbian. A RMMB member we all know and love went from dating a guy to dating girls. Tom Cruise...exists. With fat people, do you want to change how their brains react to the concepts of food and exercise, or just their behavior? If the former, how is that different from reprogramming gay people? If the latter, how is that different from just encouraging gay people to act straighter?
My reasoning was simply to point out a fault in your statement, not to infer any implications beyond that. (lets be serious here I'm the last person who's going to condone fat-shaming)
A lot of the time, overweight people don't know the proper way to eat right. You find people in every walk of life that are dieting ineffectually and failing to lose weight. You can eat several thousand calories a day and still have a body that thinks it's starving due to a lack of nutrients. I don't think you can make the same argument for homosexual people.
Did you spend the past few weeks or months figuring out how to sound like that annoying kid who just keeps asking "why?" to everything. The majority of fat people are fat because of choices. Maybe it was their parents choice to feed them cookies and ice cream for dinner, or their choice to be lazy, but it is not because they are unable to get healthy. There is a percentage of cases where they don't know better (mental disease or some other reason) or phyiscal/biological condition. But to use that as your argument is disingenuous. I don't have any data to back that up but I highly doubt that in the past thirty years people all had some mutation that caused them to gain weight and that it has nothing to do with the fact that they've never exercised in their lives.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, too. If it was just a question of desire, then all of the people who show up at gyms and sit on the elliptical for an hour would look the way they wanted. Many people legitimately have no idea what they're doing, often because they get their information from all the wrong sources. If workouts from most magazines and websites were effective, then they wouldn't need to release new issues and articles promising the world every week.
I was thinking about this in the car on the way to my doc's appointment. I think my examples in my last post were terrible, I'll think about this more.