become one of "them"

[undergroundpanther]

.... What do the fat, darker, exploited poor, with their unbridled primal appetites, have to offer us but a chance for we diet-and-shape-conscious folk to live vicariously? Call it boundary envy. Or, rather, boundary-free envy ... Meanwhile, in the City of Fat Angels, we lounge through a slow-motion epidemic. Mami buys another apple fritter. Papi slams his second sugar and cream. Another young Carl supersizes and double supersizes, then supersizes again. Waistlines surge. Any minute now, the belt will run out of holes.

In his book The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller traces the ways in which that emotion is related to both fear and moral judgment. We become disgusted when what would otherwise remain mere contempt becomes enriched by, among other things, a fear of contamination: “We know when we are disgusted and we usually know when we are afraid. But the two are frequently co-experienced: thus the easiness and the justness of the collocation ‘fear and loathing.’ ... Intense disgust invites fear to attend, because contamination is a frightful thing.”

Indeed it is. As Miller points out, disgust “operates in a kind of miasmic gloom, in the realm of horror, in regions of dark unbelievability, and never too far away from the body’s and, by extension, the self’s interiors.”

If one were forced to come up with a six-word explanation for the otherwise inexplicable ferocity of America’s war on fat, it would be this: Americans think being fat is disgusting. It really is, on the most important cultural and political levels, as simple as that. Critser’s article is merely an unusually clear example of the commonplace social process by which a visceral reaction is transmuted into an aesthetic judgment, which in turn becomes a series of (imaginary) facts about the relationship between weight and health.

Critser dismisses as “vulgar social psychology” the idea that hatred of fat might be driven by “our need for an identifiable outsider.” Yet a few strokes of Occam’s razor makes it evident that this is in fact a highly plausible explanation for the genesis of the sort of hysterical diatribe Critser himself produces, featuring as it does so much voyeuristic ogling of fat Mexicans enjoying giant apple fritters...

read more to find out why liberal fat hating bigots(like you sometimews even see on DU) are not as liberal and"enlightened" as they like to think they are...


http://www.obesitymyth.com/excerpt2.html

[chickenscratching]

1. oh god

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