Let’s talk about Fat Shaming and the Health At Every Size (“HAES”)
fucking farce. Right off the bat, let’s get out of the way the critical
distinction to be drawn between [razzing someone b/c they’re chubby, or
different or whatever / satire / unintentional notation of some
physical feature that deviates from the generally-agreed-upon norm] and
[bullying / intentional verbal, emotional abuse].
America is a
relatively young country, in the grand scheme of things. Sure, there
are younger countries that exist today, but they’re about as relevant as
expansion teams and no one gives a shit about those, except the Houston
Oil- er, Texans; they’re pretty cool. If we use America’s relative
youth as a metaphor and go back a few decades, we can parse things as
babies growing into toddlers, then teenager (demons!) then young adult
to actual adult. Using the human biological / chronological scale as a
construct, and applying it to society as a whole, we have evolved in the
last 50 or 60 years.
Things that were once completely normal and
acceptable socially have been revisited and revised to better align with
our ongoing implied, unspoken [epic? Tome? Primer? Guidebook?]
“Generally Held Tenets of Decent Society in the Modern Age”.
As
the nation of America has evolved as a whole, so too has American
society evolved. The predecessor to the polarizing, angry “Fat Shaming /
HAES” movement of today was body acceptance. Before that, “self-love”;
earlier still was the contemplation then conceptualization of “self” as
a thing unto itself. For most of recorded history, the singular goal
was simply survival; the existence and concept of “self” was, by
necessity, irrelevant and unimportant. Who the fuck had time for such
seemingly narcissistic introspection? There were meals to hunt, fires
to stoke, fields to plow.
As we evolved technologically and
transitioned from an agrarian existence to an industrial one, we began
to enjoy a marked upswing in the availability of free time. Time during
which we weren’t hunting our next meal, gathering wood for the
life-sustaining fire, plowing the fields, dying in childbirth, fighting
off invading marauders was now freed up for other pursuits - reading,
writing, contemplation of theories on how the universe worked, figuring
out the human body - those sorts of lofty pursuits. Along with this
dearth of extra time (idle hands are the devil’s tools, yo!) came the
ability to contemplate, on a deeper level than ever before, our
conceptualization of “the self”.
Skipping ahead a number of
decades, we find ourselves in post-post-Great Depression, post-WWII
America. Manufacturing was roaring, suburbs were burgeoning, tasks and
processes were being automated with lightning speed. Once again, we
found ourselves with what bordered on “too much damned time on our
hands”. In reality? Not entirely true. But conceptually and when
viewed on the broader timescale of modern history? Absolutely. Farming
the land, weaving your own cloth, sewing your own clothes, stitching up
your own wounds - none of these things were mandatory any longer. Need
food? Grocery store! Need to get somewhere? Yay, cars, trains,
airplanes! Needed to convey a message quickly? Sorry, guy on a horse,
we have telephones now! It was truly a brave new world in America.
We
now had all this free time to fill, but the question became “with
what?”. The answer was television, radio, leisurely pursuits, sporting
leagues, college, scientific research, TV dinners - we couldn’t invent
things fast enough, we had so many ideas! The challenge was
transitioning from an existence comprised of the singular directive to
merely survive to an existence in which our goals became improvement,
greater efficiency and/or the reinvention of the how and what of
everything we do, use, eat, watch, drive, fly…” - you get the point.
And that’s exactly what we did, as a nation, in the post-WWII era. We
literally (allegedly? Ha ha) put a man on the moon. We developed
technologies that, to this day, some six decades later, remain
incomprehensible to the population at large. We made everything work
better, smarter, faster, more efficiently! It was a glorious time. We
were really on to something!!
The natural by-product of an
ever-growing ratio of available leisure time to “shit I have to do to
survive” time is ennui. Find yourself with enough free time on your
hands and you’re going to either develop new areas of interest, more
productive pursuits or, like me, you’re going to chew up the furniture,
piss on the carpet and become a general fucking nuisance to everyone
around you. Humans suck at boredom. We’re not wired for it, we’ve
never been good at it. Humans with too much leisure time on their hands
quickly grow bored, and the available options for excitement become
pretty much fucking, fighting, thinking and dying. Not a particularly
variegated menu there.
When afforded previously unimaginable
blocks of leisure time, what happens to society? How does the landscape
change? When we’re given the chance to look in the mirror and engage in
introspection, we don’t just contemplate our own existence - that gets
pretty boring, pretty quickly, if it isn’t not something you’re
accustomed to. Naturally, when we predictably grow tired of thinking
about who we are, where do we go from there? The answer? Yep, other people!
Other
People are a fucking fantastic carnival of randomness, hidden dangers,
unexplored gems. We aren’t privy to what they literally think and feel
at any given moment, so we’re relegated to drawing our own conclusions
from their words, mannerisms, gestures, actions. Similar to the
blank-canvas space freed up by not being able to hear every thought and
experience every feeling by others, we have (yet more) space to fill.
So, we do what our brains have evolved to do and we fill in the blanks;
we engage in mano y mano “Mad Libs” of sorts. We see another person
and we have only those details available to our 5 senses; the ambiguous
things we either have to make up in our own heads, or just forget about
completely. Pretty sure we usually go with the Mad Libs method - sure
beats gaping holes or boredom, right?
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Together we’ve walked the path from cave-people to wherever / whatever
we are now, and thus we can get to the meaty bits -The Archetypes, or
stereotypes, not quite sure which word really fits there.
Decades ago,
being different in any way was usually noted, and as a matter of course,
routinely mocked, often stigmatized. If you weren’t an ably-bodied,
white anglo-saxon, cis-gendered “normie”, the immaturity of our
collective conscious reacted to anomalies much in the way that children
do when they encounter something novel or out of the realm of their
limited experience. Well into the 20th century and beyond, you could
get away with making fun of the ‘retarded’ kid, the fat kid, the weak
kid, the short kid, the kid with glasses or a limp. Sure, it was mean
and everyone knew it, but it was, if not sanctioned, per se, certainly
subtly condoned and perhaps even encouraged it. See: movies like Animal
House, Back to the Future, Revenge of the Nerds, 16 Candles, Weird
Science and absolutely any coming-of-age themed plot in any movie made
in the last 40+ years.
Archetypical characters like the high school
football star, masculine tough guys a la the “Greasers”, James Dean -
the list goes on and on; history is replete with it’s David vs. Goliath /
Nerds vs. Jocks / Strong vs. Weak archetypes.
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