Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Hate crimes

News from London:
Overweight people in London have launched a campaign to make the capital more fat-friendly.
It comes after one woman was beaten up on a train for being fat.
Now read some of the comments ranging from the abusive, "Why don't fat people simply stop stuffing their pie-holes?"; the unthinking, "I wish the obese would accept that they have a problem and start doing something about it"; to the oh so caring and understanding liberals, who call for "compassion" (I think they're the worst).

It's a classic moral panic. As people become sensitised to the definition of fat people as a 'problem', then us fatties become the target of abuse, resentment, pseudo-psychological diagnoses, ludicrous newspaper columns and, worst of all, condescension.

I am a person of the rotund persuasion. It isn't a problem. People come in various shapes and sizes and it has been the same throughout history. We are different, all of us. We can be healthy, sickly, active, lazy; fat or thin, tall or short, dark or fair. And one day we will all die. It is life, simply that.

Now the attitudes of the playground bully are infecting the panic-struck media and reaching politicians in search of a cause. Let us be. Anti-fat sentiment is pretty trivial. It is a far cry from the murderous brutality of racism, there is no Action T4 seeking out the obese, these permissible prejudices are normally just an irritation and inconvenience. But this rare act of public violence, highlights the damage that can be done when we lose a sense of proportion and relapse from reality into panic. And the result elsewhere is many more victims, treated far worse than us plumps.

Hat tip Kev

1 comment:

Alex Garvey said...

Hi Peter,

We represent a client who runs bingo events and he’s launching a campaign to save the caller’s phrase “two fat ladies” after some female customers complained it should be gender neutral and that the word fat is derogatory.

At present, given we can’t track down the people who made the complaints, our release for the media only has comments from the bingo business and the Campaign for Plain English, both of whom think its acceptable terminology.

It would be great to get a comment from somebody who protested to make London more fat friendly.
Obviously any quote we used would include a namecheck for their site / organisation.

Is this somethat that you could help with?

Many thanks,

Alex