Let’s Talk: Fat Shaming – The Most Committed Tolerated Crime Existing Right Now

Guns, knives, our own fists, lit matches… a few of the things that come to mind when we think of ‘crimes’ right? Whether it’s part of a robbery act, a feud between two people or simply out of pleasure, using these weapons to attempt to kill, threaten or harm others generally break the laws societies of the world put up in an attempt to keep the peace.

However, there’s one act that harms and threatens people practically every day, with the majority of the world either disregarding it or justifying why they do it. In comparison to other crimes, you don’t need to buy anything physically in order to enact it. All you need a lack of disrespect for these people and a brain filled with the ideas that fat people are either a disease, burden or mistake in the world.

That’s right: Fat-Shaming.

So for those who ‘might’ be unfamiliar with the term, fat-shaming basically is shaming a person for a body image considered ‘fat’. Rest assured, fat is NOT a bad word, it’s a size. So why do I say it’s a crime? The short version: It seriously impacts people’s lives which makes them change in a negative manner.

At this point you might be thinking: ‘But Matt! Being fat isn’t good for you! It’s unhealthy! You get a bunch of diseases and die early I know because my family members had it because they were fat!’ But what you don’t know is that attitude comes under a dangerous concept called ‘healthism’. Healthism is basically prioritising health in your life before anything else. And in the world we live in, being fat apparently means you’re automatically unhealthy. This is not true. There’s so many people who are unhealthy, but they’re not fat. And there’s also fat people out there who are healthy. Unfortunately for fat people, they get called instead either ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’, which are terms used to called fat people ‘unhuman’ or generally not normal. Which is pretty disrespectful.

From healthism, the medical industry have also taken part in fat-shaming; this has been done by either exaggerating research results to make it seem like being fat has been a major cause of death, or the media hiding information that debunks research of what they end up portraying on the news (e.g. diets being a means to lose weight, when in reality 95% of people who have tried to failed [and 5% who succeeded ended up with eating disorders]). And for a lot of fat people, going to the doctors ends up with a prescription which I believe is called ‘weight-based/weight-first’ treatment. They’re either denying any results that deems a fat person ‘healthy’ or just being judgemental by looking at them at a glance. Or even checking the flawed BMI charts. Have you heard about the woman who had cancer and it was only when her life was seriously at risk it actually got recognised? She could’ve died. Medical discrimination can get that bad.

But fat-shaming didn’t necessarily begin for some people because the medical industry manipulated them with fear and over-exaggerated research as the years went by. With films and TV shows being prominent in the mid-late 20th century, there’s definitely been persuasion that unrelated to health which allowed fat-shaming to look okay to the public.

Remember the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland? Or Dr. Robotnik, now known as Eggman in the Sonic the Hedgehog games? Or Olivia from the Walking Dead, who got fat-shamed straight up and got killed near the mid-season seven finale? When you see fat characters presented in the media, no matter what age group it’s suited for, they’re often, if not always depicted in a negative picture, either for comedic, realistic, or villain purposes. What do I mean? Here’s some examples:

• A fat character’s body image being part of a joke from another character (Team Fortress 2’s Scout mocking the character ‘Heavy’ remarking how his “hard arteries don’t stop bullets”).
• Fat characters consistently mentioning or eating food or drink and possibly eating ‘slobby’ (Mouse Hunt with one of the auctioneers near the end of the movie, eating berries quickly at the auction).
• Fat characters being the main villain of a story (Sonic the Hedgehog’s Dr. Robotnik, A.K.A. Eggman).
• Fat characters having no character development or basically there to die later on.
• Mentions of weight loss (Kung Fu Panda’s ‘Po’ in the second movie).

I could go on, but when you as children or adults ignoring the news basically get ‘conditioned’ to view fat characters as either comedic, evil or meaningless in whatever media you watch, read or play… like how damaging is that? Like imagine having watched a movie like WALL-E as a kid and assuming your parents were fat, subconsciously thinking negatively of them because of what you saw. To those who can relate, rest assured we were all guilty back then. But as we get older there’s no excuse to not give a fat person basic respect, unless it’s something that will always comes off as ‘I’m an asshole’.

Which goes into the whole situation regarding children in school and high school as well. Tying in with healthism, when other children, teenagers and adults call fat people out for their body image and what they eat, it makes them insecure and self-conscious. And that can lead to eating disorders, starvation, and a desperate desire to be thin which is near impossible. And in the most extreme of circumstances, feel worthless and driven to the point of suicide.

All these factors above being the cause of fat-shaming is why so many fat people are suffering horribly during the past decades and century. You grow up with the reality that all fat people eat a lot and are okay to laugh and mock at as a kid believing almost anything that showed on TV, and as you go into adolescence and adulthood, get exposed to research and terms which pretty much tell you to hate fat people, make even further jokes on them because of heath reasons and even blame them for things you don’t understand the full context about, like how they apparently use too much healthcare.

The worst bit about fat-shaming? Everyone’s fine with it.

Because healthism and associated research is a manipulative tool to persuade people straight up that being fat is bad, ‘unhealthy’, worthless and so much negativity. The reality we live in now is one where fat people are pressured so much to lose weight, where people would rather have fat people who have recovered from anorexia and eating disorders stay thin and suffer, where you get punished basically for basically existing as a fat person, and most horribly, forget that fat people are human too.

So what are we going to do? Why are we letting fat hate kill and harm so many fat people ‘in the name of health’? Why is no one serving justice towards those whose health has been scarred purely because of fat hate? What can we do to better ourselves as a human race to become accepting of fat people of all sizes?