Jude Hammerle
To primates, and to the primate part of humans, largeness is a highly threatening display of strength.
The average adult American today weighs 24 pounds more than he (and she) did in the early 1960s.[1] Normal America is so intimidated by the increasing size of our citizenry that it has propagated an all-out war of stigmatization, defamation and discrimination against fat people.[2]
Medical reports enumerating the dangers of obesity blare out day and night. Public transportation and public buildings scrupulously accommodate every physical challenge but this one. Airlines require large people to buy two seats. Sedans that comfortably suit large people are far more expensive than ones that don’t. Doctors recommend gastric bypass surgery, despite its serious, sometimes fatal complications. Clothing choices for large people are strictly limited. Skinny actresses don fat suits to be treated poorly for ratings. If the media really want to know how it feels to be fat, why don’t they ask fat people? Because Normal society wants to see skinny actresses laughing, not fat people crying. While we tolerate and protect extremes of identity and behavior from every other facet of society, we stubbornly insist that fat people change.
Wendy Kaufman, the beautiful person turned Snapple Lady turned Fatvocate once described her size challenge to me this way: “Sometimes I’m good, and sometimes I’m fat.” While Wendy has since adopted a deservedly more forgiving attitude toward herself, for far too many people big and small, fat is still the opposite of good.
As I see it, fat is really the opposite of weak. Fat is Strong.
While displays of any rebel identity are inherently competitive, the circles of behavior that result from Strong displays are uniquely challenging. Guns beget guns. Gangs beget gangs. Armies beget armies. Wars beget wars.
One’s weight is his/her most obvious and inevitable display of identity. Since everyone sees us react to his/her size, weight is both a very public and a very personal matter. Over time I have come to believe that the increasing size of Americans is simply a natural and very predictable response to the increasing size of Americans. In other words, with our weight we’re simply doing as we often do–we’re fighting Strong with Strong.
To date, the ironic effect of the booming $40 billion a year weight loss industry has been to add an average of twenty-four pounds to each of us since 1960. Perhaps if we stop thinking that big people are doing something wrong and start believing that we/they are doing something natural, then next year’s $40 billion might actually buy us what we’re being promised. I can certainly imagine several intriguing ways to create more identity-savvy weight-loss solutions, and I believe that after just a few more chapters, you’ll be able to also.
This is an excerpt from How Sex Sells: The Real Reasons We Buy, a work in process.
[1] http://dlutskiy.com/blog/2006/05/obesechart051506.pdf
[2] Meira Weiss in Conditional Love [1994] neatly summarizes the key literature on social stigmas, and mentions that some experts believe stigmatization is a response to a perceived threat (pp. 54-5).
October 27, 2008 at 10:22 pm
You are right; I think there are other dimensions to Americas obesity issues than what meets the eye and the stats. One is the striking similarity to the cigarette industry and how as a society we only reacted when the costs to the system (cancer rate) outweighed the benefits (tax income, employment). Now you also pointed out of how much friggin’ money is being made right now with all the weight loss industry – very interesting! The other dimension is of course the lack of movement, sports and over processed food ingredients. Remember, we came back from truly amazing mediterranean food ‘orgies’ in MIlan…
October 27, 2008 at 10:48 pm
… and had actually LOST weight! But others wrote already much about it. The next, more sociological component is the sublime and has less to do with food than with the transformation of our societal structures. Food becomes available everywhere and the ‘not-eating’ is a rare state of mind or moment in time. Food stands for ‘consumption’ and our system doesn’t work when nothing is consumed. ‘Growth” is needed for our U.S. society to prevail. “Sustainability’ towards one’s weight is a rare concept for most; more a sign of having given up to lose weight. Since the dawn of time, the human civilization was always in pursuit of food, so we can’t shut that drive off easily and it is deeply embedded in our genes. And it won’t adapt to a natural avoidance of Twinkies in a few million years. It has to be a conscious, educated effort to avoid them. Evolution tries to weed out the weak ones and the ones who are different. In the same way racists try to get the other races out of their perceived superior society, the ones who can fight their urges to eat (or digest the daily crap we serve as food faster) try to separate from the fat ones (bad genes, insulin resistance, character weakness, whatever reason). Discrimination laws take care of transgressions.
Yet another even more interesting aspect, is that by eating, one can avoid making decisions. Again, in the Stone Age we had to CONSTANTLY think about getting food. And about not being eaten. Decisions and plans had to be made to prevail. Decision making skills is a sign of being intelligent and able to survive longer. Having mastered the food supply, we should be able to move faster to other things, right? Not so! Those who are fat always are more worried than the rest of us of where from to get more food, faster. In an early human society their genes were important for the group. Nowadays they are more likely to destroy themselves. The focus of a U.S. society would be to unleash their worries towards problem solvings of a grander nature: Test if people who tend to be obese have higher problem solving skills under stress. I think you may find surprising results! And as a side note, stop serving food during meetings. Only afterwards. And then preferably italian food flown in freshly from Milan. Gotta eat something now – these blogs make me hungry. Now what should I eat…? decisions, decisions…
October 27, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Wow, thanks for all that. Many happy memories of Milano you conjured up there! I have a section about smoking in the book but you made me realize something that I had not thought about before.
Smoking is a classic Strong display. When they started putting death warnings on cigarettes, that actually made the display stronger. It wasn’t until smokers started being stigmatized as addicts that the power of the display diminished, because addiction is regarded as a weakness. Before that it was just a habit.
Thanks again for taking the time to push the envelope! Jude Hammerle