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When Thin People Hurt Fat People Out of Love
Their bigotry, they tell themselves, is for my own good
“I hear you’re writing quite a bit lately!” An excited family member finds me at a barbecue, eager to celebrate an accomplishment. “What have you been writing about?”
“Being fat,” I say. “I write about the social realities of living as a very fat person.”
Upon hearing the word — fat — she screws up her face, ready to object, but instead asks for examples. I tell her about the fat tax, the constant street harassment, the intense loneliness in the face of endless judgment and discrimination.
“I just can’t believe it. I just treat everyone the same. Why would they do that to you?” She shakes her head ruefully. I watch her face and remember her gift to me the last time we saw one another: a small stack of books about the paleo diet. I wonder if, in her egalitarianism, she gives these same books to the thinner people she knows.
This, then, is the gulf between the two of us — she sees anti-fatness as an exception, an intentional break from a norm of acceptance. For her, it is an act of purposeful harm, a conscious slight rooted in malice. To me, it is something else entirely. Anti-fatness has wrestled me to the ground so many times, pinned me mercilessly — but there’s so much intimacy in that fight. I have come to know its contours, have come to find its bias in even the kindest faces. The people I love most regularly expose their bias, bemoan bodies that look like mine, offer unsolicited diet and clothing advice to fatter people. I see anti-fat bias as the rule, something that we don’t shed until we take on proactive work to do so. Each of us has spent a lifetime breathing in the polluted air of anti-fatness. How could we exhale anything else?
The worst of it comes from a purported concern for my health, I tell her. Strangers take items out of my grocery cart, change my orders at restaurants, shout slurs and directives. She is startled, suddenly, and angry.
“But that’s not discrimination,” she snaps. “They just said it — they’re doing it for you. They’re looking out for you. They love you. That’s love.”
That’s love.
