Fat Phobia and Fat Fancy

Lawmakers in Mississippi are proposing a bill that would ban fat people from eating in public. This news is disconcerting to say the least, even if the bill does not pass, which it likely won't. I have never considered myself a libertarian or even really thought I had a libertarian streak, but the kinds of measures that are passing in legislatures across the country make me seriously question whether we are losing our personal freedoms as citizens–from smoking bans to this very extreme and hateful bill that would ban fat people from eating in public–these government incursions into citizens' private lives are not only totally frightening, but deeply flawed philosophically.

There is a strange chiasmus of the public and the private here: the "obesity epidemic" is a "public health" concern, and somehow by making fat people retreat into the private sphere, obesity would disappear? This logic is mind-boggling. The Mississippi ban places the responsibility for fatness squarely on the fat individual. The bill purports to protect the American people from the "obesity epidemic," as if fatness was a contagion that you could catch from sitting next to someone at a restaurant. The bill also ignores the role of structural factors in people's lives that contribute to the general weight gain of the American population that the government could actually take measures to mitigate, such as forcing processed food manufacturers to use real sugar instead of corn syrup (by not, you know, giving corn farmers subsidies all over the place). As opposed to trans-fat, which occurs naturally in some cases, corn syrup is neither naturally-occurring nor tasty–it's one of those things that exists solely to make manufacturing of myriad products exponentially cheaper for the manufacturer and shittier for the consumer. The government forcing manufacturers to uphold public health by making healthier products would constitute the government acting in its appropriate role, protecting its citizens on a large scale from industries that will do anything to raise their bottom line including drastically lowering the quality of their products. This would be a refreshing alternative to legislating the citizen's personal behavior. But it's more convenient to blame fat people for the obesity epidemic than to go after the Coca-Cola corporation. Yet, what the government can actually do to ameliorate public health in America is ultimately kind of besides the point anyway.

The terrifying heart of this bill that we must examine is that it's legally sanctioned discrimination against fat people. Exclamations of hatred and fear aimed at fat people are the final frontier of acceptable public hate speech. Not to mention that one of the biggest class markers in this country is the type of food you have access to: and if you're improverished, you're just not going to spend the five dollars for a smallish box of organic greens at Whole Paycheck (I've been in this position). I would further contend that fat phobia is a very acceptable form of classism (which is not to say that all poor people are fat or all fat people poor, but there are demographic correlations); fat is the intersection where class becomes visible. But even this class argument, which I would stand by as basically true, brings us back to the question of what causes fatness and how fatness can be cured, when the real point is that fat citizens are entitled to the same rights as non-fat citizens (that sounds like non-fat yoghurt to me, ha).

This issue is important to me on many levels: I've been varying degrees of fat in my lifetime (to quote Moe from Jezebel, 'I'm in no danger of being anyone's thinspiration'), I have fat friends who I love and care about deeply, and lastly and most importantly, I want to live in a world where an infinite variety of body types is free to live without shame or recrimination. I don't have a solution but I do know people who are fighting for increased fat visibility and cultural acceptance like my friend Annie Maribona, who started a fat vintage clothing in Portland called FAT FANCY. The road to fat acceptance looks stylish.