Why should fat people hide away?

Overweight people are often subjected to discrimination, demonisation and even abuse. But what are their critics really afraid of?

IT SEEMS it was one mince pie too many for the 5,000 people recently kicked off dating site BeautifulPeople.com. Cruelly dubbed “festive fatties”, they were shunned from the site for putting on weight over Christmas. Harsh it may be, but BeautifulPeople.com – which styles itself as “an online club where every member works the door”, and has a strict ban on “ugly people” – claims a democratic mandate for the worldwide chop. Who stays or goes is entirely down to the collective decision of existing members, who vote on whether individuals are sufficiently gorgeous to be worthy of inclusion.

While the site itself claims a lofty impartiality on the matter – “BeautifulPeople does not define beauty; it simply gives an accurate representation of what society’s ideal of beauty is” – it’s clear that its owners have a distinct aversion to flab. Founder Robert Hintze insists that “letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded”.

The site is encouraging rejected members to re-apply once they have dealt with the spare tyre and double chin.

BeautifulPeople’s chubby cull is just the latest example of widespread hostility to overweight people. It has been claimed that people are insulted or even attacked on the street: a recent survey found that nine out of 10 overweight people experienced name-calling because of their excess pounds. (Perhaps significantly, though, many of those hurling the insults emerged as overweight or obese themselves.)

Psychotherapist Susie Orbach claims we are now living in “a culture that is so fat-phobic you wouldn’t have thought fat people could be any more demonised”.

And attacking the obese also provides a rare point of convergence for commentators from either end of the political spectrum. As writer Daniel Hannan observes, “fattism unites a number of disparate constituencies: anti-Americans who see fat as a US issue; snobs who cling to the last acceptable form of class prejudice; elf-locked anti-globalisation protesters, snatching at another club with which to belabour McDonald’s; and, above all, bureaucracies seeking to enlarge their powers”.

Columnist Amanda Platell certainly makes no secret of her distaste for fatness: “I find obese people unappealing in almost every regard. They are physically unattractive, they lead unhealthy lives, they take up too much space on public transport”. Railing against a society “where so many people feel the need to channel their energy into the consumption of as many bumper packs of Wotsits as possible,” former stripper Ruth Fowler announces, “Yes, I’m a fattist, and not afraid to admit it. Chew on that, chubby.”

Even the eccentric German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has waded in, insisting that protests against size-zero girls were orchestrated by “fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly”.

It seems that fatty-bashing is the last acceptable prejudice of our era, fuelled in some cases by a near pathological loathing of obesity. For instance, the writer of a British blog called “Exercise Escapades of a Gym Bunny” takes secret pictures of overweight people in supermarkets while she’s out shopping for low fat cottage cheese and extra low fat mayonnaise. She then offers them up on her blog for public ridicule.

“My first ‘encounter’ involved me nearly losing my eyesight,” writes Gym Bunny, alongside the photograph of her unwitting victim. “I thought it was the end of the world: as I rounded the corner of the lingerie section, it all went dark. Had I suddenly disconnected an optical nerve? Maybe it was a power-cut? Nope. T’was a bent-over Chubby! The moment I realised she was perilously close to the thong section I ran for my life . . . not a sight I wanted to see.”

Snapped by ultra-skinny women hiding in supermarkets, passed over for promotion, excoriated by commentators for hoovering up precious health service resources and freely mocked by comedians in search of an easy laugh, it’s no wonder that fat people are feeling fragile. So why so much hatred? Scientists at the University of British Columbia put an evolutionary spin on the issue when they proposed that obese people suffer abuse because being too fat is mistaken by the brain for a sign of disease.

Researchers suggested that the immune system can be triggered into action at the sight of obesity because it doesn’t like the look of what it sees, and associates it with infection.

Although they are often dressed up as concern for individual and social wellbeing, it’s true that there is a deep-rooted, visceral quality to many of the attacks on fat people. But perhaps the real reason behind our profound ambivalence about the obese is the contemporary cultural obsession with staying skinny at any cost. Susie Orbach says that “often it’s not the larger person’s excess weight that is the problem, it’s the other people’s obsession with being thin”. She says that the fear and unhappiness that comes with worrying about your own size can translate into abuse and attacks. “It’s a way of people disassociating themselves from what they fear the most – getting fat.”

So it’s not the slow-moving fat person in the queue in front that’s really annoying you. It’s the prospect that you, a few super-size jars of Nutella later, could look exactly the same.

Too fat to... tales of excess

TOO FAT TO FLY?

Last year Ryanair urged passengers to vote on a potential tax on fat fliers. 40 per cent of respondents voted for excess fees to be applied to travellers with a high body mass index. Meanwhile, new rules by Chicago-based United Airlines mean that overweight passengers may be forced to upgrade to a larger business class seat or buy two seats on the next flight.

TOO FAT TO ADOPT?

An adoption application by a British couple, Charlotte and Damien Hall, both teetotal non-smokers with a stable 11-year marriage behind them, was rejected because Mr Hall was considered morbidly obese.

TOO FAT TO GRADUATE?

At Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, students with a body mass index of 30 or above must take a fitness course that meets three hours per week. Those who are assigned to the class but do not complete it are not permitted to graduate.

TOO FAT TO FIGHT?

Last summer, a leaked army memo indicated that thousands of British troops cannot be sent to Afghanistan because they are too fat to fight. According to the emergency memo, a “worrying trend of obesity” was preventing soldiers from being deployed in Helmand province.

TOO FAT TO PARTY?

A group of female clubbers were refused entry to a nightclub in Jersey after staff informed them that fat people were bad for business.