Chinese language - Fat no longer a feminist but a victim issue

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Opinion / Commentary

Fat no longer a feminist but a victim issue

By Barbara Ellen (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-09-19 07:23

Is obesity an infectious condition? Only if you have eaten a takeaway and
a chocolate bar first?

Please excuse me; I am unwell. I think I may have caught "being fat" from
a stranger, probably on the subway. At first I could not believe it
either. Then, one evening, after an Indian takeaway, several glasses of
wine, and two chocolate bars, I was sprawled on the sofa, with my jeans
undone, wondering how on earth it could be that I had put on so much
weight, when I came across a report in the New England Journal about
"socially contagious weight gain" and "fat influencing relationships".
(Basically, hang around fat people long enough and you become fat, too).

Piecing this together with other recent reports about a "fat virus"
causing "infectobesity"... and everything became clear: despite the fact
I delight in exuding all the physical dynamism of a sack of wet sand, my
blubber is not my own doing after all. Either because of a corpulent
stranger on a tube train, or the random horror of "infectobesity", this
fat thing had been done to me.

Sound ridiculous? Do not count on it. Fat is not a feminist issue any
more. It is a victim issue: anyone's fault but your own. Or so the new
rationale goes. And obviously it would be lovely to believe in "fat
viruses" and the rest. People like me would not have to blame our
repellent stomachs on our sloth and greed. We could just say: "I've gone
and caught that fat virus, you know the one in the papers."

From black death to social death in a few easy centuries, how frightfully
convenient.

All of which makes you long for more honest times, when the overweight
would merely stutter excuses about "glands". Indeed, how did it come to
this? When did otherwise sentient people decide to conjure an entire
belief system out of their own faux-corpulence? For it is my belief that
it is not, as always presumed, the long-suffering people with genuine
weight problems who inspire this kind of thing, it is rather those
individuals (some men, but usually women) who are not fat at all, yet
fear fat to such a phobic degree that they seize upon all the pseudo
science they can get on the subject.

In short, the same people who neurotically read the calories and the
carbs on the backs of food packets are the same people driving the
ludicrous "Where is fat from?" industry.

The New England Journal findings do not even seem to understand the basic
fat people/thin people axis. It is always been my understanding that, far
from loathing bigger people, the professionally thin adore them because
they make them look smaller.

So, fat people do not make you fat at all, if anything they make you feel
a lot thinner. The Spices comeback photo shoot was a case in point. While
Posh was in her exultant Twiglet-thin element, the rest of the Spices
were reportedly scrabbling not to stand next to her because they knew, by
comparison, they would resemble beanbags with facial features.

Some weeks on, the magazines, rather chillingly, are full of Geri's
"drastic new diet", and Mel B's "rigorous exercise regime", which on the
face of it seems to prove the New England Jounal's point that, just as
one can "catch fat", one can also "catch thin". Alternatively it could be
proof that a once strangely real and touching group of friends have
turned into ropey paranoid baggages quite prepared to sacrifice any
semblance of real friendship, or creative unity, just to be the thinnest.
And there we were thinking girl power was dead.

Of course one understands the point that constantly being around thin,
attractive people makes you up your game. One also sympathizes with those
with real weight problems who truly hope that there really is some kind
of "fat virus" and subsequently a "fat antidote". However, the rest of us
could probably do ourselves a favor by realizing that sedentary is Latin
for "lazy cow" and accepting some responsibility for our own actions.

And to that end, I am going to buy a bike. I am not going to ride it, but
I am definitely going to buy it.

With things so bad, what is the future for female camaraderie - some
murky unforgiving whirl of self-delusion, one-upmanship and competitive
dieting? Getting to that terrible point where we could quite truthfully
claim: we are all Spice Girls now.

The Guardian

(China Daily 09/19/2007 page11)

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