fatness as an act of resistance
one of the news stories doing the rounds in the UK today is about the government’s new proposal to push weight loss drugs on unemployed people (presumably including those classed as unable to work, based on their previous rhetoric), in an attempt to get them into employment.
if you’re seeing this post you probably don’t need me to explain the extremely dubious ethics of such an idea, or the way it stereotypes unemployed people, or indeed the way it frames fatness as something that must be “cured”.
but something that’s been stuck in my mind all day is the concept of fatness as an act of rebellion. it’s an idea I’ve been interested in for ages (I’d love to write a longer-form story using it at some point), but it’s been brought to the fore by this story.
fatness is already a rejection of so many toxic aspects of society, but particularly so in the case of choosing to be fat. to decide for yourself that actually, you do want to allow yourself to overindulge. you want to live a little hedonistically, because you only get one go at life; you don’t want to waste it living a life of compromise and restriction.
to be fat, and to enjoy being fat, is to stick two fingers up at every expectation placed upon you by the world we live in. when we’re innately expected to hate fatness, to be scared of it; I think it’s beautifully disobedient to reject that mentality and choose a different outlook.
we’re expected to view fatness as undesirable and disgusting, but why? fuck that, fatness is magical. a life prioritising pleasure and joy sounds infinitely more fulfilling than one centred around fetishising control and shame. as a culture we only perceive fatness negatively because that’s the mentality that surrounds us; there isn’t really any substantive justification for that view.
to then hear the government itself stigmatise fatness in a cheap attempt at winning favour with a particular section of the public; it doesn’t half make me double down on viewing fatness as a fundamentally bold and rebellious state of being. if it isn’t already – though you could certainly argue it is – it would make deciding to be fat a political choice in its own right.
tl;dr it’s punk as fuck to be fat and happy about it, and I think you’re cool as hell for it
