Posts Tagged ‘radio’

I’m currently laying in bed feeling a little under the weather. I’ve never really found a comfortable position to lay down and use a laptop, but this is as good as any.

This week there has been a lot of talk regarding Mia Freedman’s recent blog posts on gainers and how she believes they are glorifying obesity. I have no intention of linking to the post; you can find it through a Google search but I have no intention of providing any more readers to that blog post.

Those of you who know me well know that I don’t take a lot of time out of my day to read the blogs of the fatosphere. I certainly don’t read Mama Mia, which seems to be a blog about women’s fashion, body image and similar. The first I had heard of the blog post and the ensuing debate was yesterday morning when contacted by a producer for the Steve Vizard radio show on 3MTR in Melbourne.

So despite my ignorance, I read the blog post and it actually seemed pretty innocuous to me. Then again, I’ve read on a few other sites that it has been edited to tone down the language. The comments are still full of fat hatred and I would think that someone in Mia’s position would realise the need to moderate the discussion to remove the blatantly fat phobic comments.

She also didn’t do herself any favours by suggesting fat activists had eaten a “big bowl of crazy for breakfast” in one of her comments. Actually, that entire comment seems to show that she doesn’t understand fat acceptance.

So what is fat acceptance? This will mean different things to differnet people. To me, fat acceptance is about learning to love and accept yourself for who you are, no matter your weight, shape and size. It is also accepting and respecting people no matter what shape or weight they are. If we were to throw in the idea of accepting people no matter their religion, colour, or ethnic background you could really turn “fat acceptance” into “human acceptance”.

The reason for a separate stream called fat acceptance is that there are issues that affect fat people that don’t affect those discriminated based on their sexuality or colour or religion. We may share some issues but we don’t share them in the same way either.

Some of the issues that I notice being a fat person is:

• The assumption that being fat, and therefore calling someone fat, is offensive.
• Being fat means you are disorganised, unclean and somehow defective.
• A fat person cannot be fit and healthy.
• Fat people must change themselves to fit the norms that are decided by the rest of society.
• Fat people should be blamed for sky rocketing health costs.
• A fat person cannot expect to go into a clothing store and find clothes that will fit and look good on them.
• A fat person should expect that any health issue they suffer is because they are fat. Mental health included.

As I mentioned earlier, a producer for the Steve Vizard show on Melbourne’s 3MTR contacted me regarding the Mia Freedman incident. I did a phone interview with Steve and while we did touch on the Mia Freedman issue a bit, most of the discussion was about what fat acceptance really is and what it means to be fat. Have a listen and let me know if you think I got it right or not.

Being a fat activist means that I am fighting these issues and more every day. I don’t blog about this every day but it is important to remind ourselves regularly of what issues we face. I’ve noticed that LGBT groups get together the protest about the right to marry and that other groups have held protests over the years to fight discrimination. It’s weird that fat people don’t feel the need to get together and fight this stuff ‘in the field’.

Perhaps fat people are used to being put in the corner. Perhaps we feel it is our deserved place; after all that is what everyone tells us.

What do you think?