Fat Justice

I'm a follower and fan of "My Fat Friend." She's an anonymous blogger whose experiences resonate with me:

• Living XXXL in a world made for S, M and L.
• Airplane horror stories, much worse than my humiliation of having to ask for a seat-belt extender.
• Having doctors ignore or dismiss the symptoms she describes, and tell her that losing weight will cure everything that ails her.
• Hearing mixed messages from family and friends, to "embrace your curves" but "exercise and diet, because we care about your health!"
• Fielding well-meaning but misguided advice about the joy of wearing thin-people clothes and improving her attractiveness to men (she's a lesbian).
• Hearing, from society at large, one decidedly un-mixed message -- that her body size is a reflection of her flaws, and that she's the waddling, talking epitome of gluttony, neglect and lack of self-control.

One recent "My Fat Friend" blog entry talks of Fat Justice. It's a concept that I hope will get some traction, though I doubt it will happen as long as we have a president who thought nothing of calling the winner of his own beauty contest "Miss Piggy" when she put on a few pounds.
Some of the tenets of Fat Justice listed in the blog include:

• Lobbying public accommodations, including airlines, to acknowledge the reality that people are getting larger, and more and more of them cannot fit with any measure of comfort into the seats, booths, tables or toilet stalls available to them. (I used to dread a public women's room with a toilet attached to the wall. I was afraid my girth would cause it to break right off the wall.)
• Educating doctors and other health care providers to make them aware of how their prejudice against large people -- particularly large women -- often causes them to overlook or dismiss symptoms that, with treatment much more immediate than a crash diet, could be addressed before they become chronic or life-threatening.
• Calling out the medical and pharmaceutical industries for too quickly approving diet pills that soon show themselves to have lethal side effects, or being too quick to recommend surgery whose lifelong side effects are more life-threatening than carrying extra pounds.
• Educating law enforcement about the frequency with which large women are sexually assaulted, and teaching police officers and prosecutors to treat large victims with sensitivity -- including NOT assuming that anyone who sexually assaults a large woman actually did her a favor.
• Challenging human resources departments and bosses about their tendency to reject hiring fat people -- especially fat women -- because of their assumptions about why people are fat. (Fat people also are paid less than their thin counterparts, says My Fat Friend.)

I can get on board with each and every one of these causes, although I'm not optimistic about success -- especially when you're dealing with the airlines executives who are bound and determined to cram as many seats onto a plane as possible, no matter how torturous it is for just about anybody to fly coach.
I can embrace my recent weight loss and new-found fitness, and do everything I can to ensure their permanence, while helping My Fat Friend raise awareness of the world's injustice to fat people.
And, I can acknowledge the health risks associated with obesity, but put them in perspective, and acknowledge that carrying extra pounds isn't always something to be cured, nor is it necessarily the least healthy alternative.

That is I, as a fat person, just two summers ago at my class reunion. Did I feel self-conscious? Yeah...but Nancy Newby, on the right, is a lovely person in all ways, as are most of my classmates.