That was the good. Now here’s
the bad:
A recent episode featured a doctor who was selling internal organs to
wealthy (and unscrupulous) people who were ill but for whatever reason weren’t
eligible or couldn’t wait to be on a legal list for a transplant.
Right away I knew what was coming.
Queue the negative fat stereotyping.
Sure enough, the show soon cut to a shot of an obese man portrayed
sitting at table in a restaurant scarfing down piles of what I believe were
chicken wings in a slovenly fashion – covered in sauce and practically grunting
like a pig, with an oxygen tube in his nose to boot.
Why does he have to purchase a new heart? Because he doesn’t deserve one, of
course. He’s fat! He eats chicken wings non-stop (seriously –
there wasn’t a single shot of this character where he wasn’t at the table with
obscene piles of food in front of him).
Obviously putting a new heart in him would amount to throwing it away
because he’s slovenly and disgusting and undisciplined, so he’s got to buy one
on the black market.
This character managed to portray, in only about ten minutes of screen
time, almost every negative stereotype about fat people there is. Here’s a list:
1)
Fat people never
stop eating and rarely move, and that’s the sole reason they are fat.
2)
Fat people are disgusting, sloppy, and pig like.
3)
Fat people do not deserve medical intervention and
treatment for the reasons listed above.
4)
Only a pervert would find a fat person
attractive (there was a slim, beautiful blonde who never spoke seated beside
the fat character. The main character
remarked with dismayed awe on how she could possibly stand to get anywhere near
him – the subtext being that only piles of money can trump fat where women are
concerned. Negative stereotypes for
all!)
As I stated up front I do generally love this show, but this episode
obviously left me pretty cold.
My husband is about six feet tall and falls into the perfectly normal
range on the BMI scale. I fall into the
obese 1 range, right on the border of merely being overweight, even after
shedding 75 lbs. Ironically once I enter
the overweight range I will be in the group with the longest expected life span
since statistics show that overweights tend to live longer than normals. We both exercise regularly and can hike four
or five miles with no problem. Of the
two of us, he’s the one that is likely to consume twenty chicken wings in a
sitting. He orders cheese steaks while I
dine on spinach and romaine sandwiches with roasted red pepper, mozzarella and
balsamic. He’s pre-diabetic and I am
not.
In truth, both of us are pretty healthy. Although my husband’s dreadfully inefficient metabolism
allows him to eat like that while quite simply refusing to hang onto any excess
calories, he’s also great at remembering to eat his servings of vegetables
every day. But of the two of us I
absolutely work at it harder – I cut up veggies, buy fruits, and plan every
lunch down to the calorie and fat gram at the beginning of every week while he
casually heads over to Subway or Wendy’s whenever he gets around to noticing
he’s hungry. If I ate the same diet he
did my extraordinarily calorie-efficient metabolism would store pounds of fat
at a truly terrifying rate. I can manage
not to starve to death on far, far less calories than he can (bring it on,
nuclear winter!) But because society has
had it drilled into them over and over and over that our eyeballs are the only
diagnostic tool needed, if strangers were asked to look at us both and point to
which of us lived a healthier lifestyle – I would bet every penny I own that
the majority of people would point at my husband and not at me. I am the one in danger of experiencing poor
and neglectful medical care (though thankfully this has only happened to me
once) on account of my appearance, and he is not.
Over the years I’ve read story after story after story about fat people
dying from medical neglect. Either
because coming into a doctor’s office with a head cold and being told to lose
weight caused them to avoid preventive care for years, or because doctors
dismiss them and their symptoms due to a deeply ingrained bias and fat
hatred. The media that we consume, both
entertainment media and through news stories – is basically the transfer method
by which fat hatred and bias filters into the public consciousness.
People are fat for a myriad of different reasons. In fact I would go so far as to say the
reason for being fat is probably 100% unique to each fat person. Yet the thing we most often see portrayed in
entertainment are images like the one illustrated above: the fat person is an
undisciplined, disgusting hog who deserves to die, who can only be loved if
they pay someone to love them.
That is why this is important.
The constant streaming reinforcement of these negative and incorrect
stereotypes into our brains via the media isn’t just the annoyance of TV being
its usual, stupid, shallow self. It
could literally be costing some people their lives.
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