(Only) Halfway to Everywhere

tesslynch:

I wish I could get my girl Mo’ to add like a buck fifty of her two cents to this issue

Uh oh! Someone wrote something stupid and I saw it!

First of all, I feel bad for even re-posting this, because imagine how you’d feel if you wrote something stupid and then more people than you know personally saw it and judged you for it. And you had to go back and write some kind of disclaimer after the article saying that you now realize how stupid you were (because thousands of people drew your attention to that fact), but you can’t just erase the article because it’s for Marie Claire dot com. You have to explain that you meant nothing that you wrote, even though you obviously did mean it or you never would have written it, and reveal all sorts of personal facts about yourself to justify why you had made the mistake of implying that fat people can’t be on television, especially if those fat people are being affectionate. I can, actually, imagine what this would be like — not to make this exact mistake, but a mistake like it, and the stomach-churning regret that would consume me afterwards — however, I can’t stop myself from commenting on it here. It’s too offensive.

What is it? Well, on Facebook I saw a post linking to an article on Marie Claire called “Should ‘Fatties’ Get a Room? (Even on TV?).” I clicked on it hoping that the conclusion would be, “No, And That’s a Stupid Question.” But strangely this was not the conclusion the author came to! No, she came to the opposite conclusion!:

So anyway, yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

Don’t worry, though, she’s not a “size-ist jerk” (“I have a few friends who could be called plump” !!!!) and she has lots of tips to help morbidly obese people trim pounds from their disgusting frames: cut down on sugar and exercise. I wonder why she revealed this breakthrough diet without some kind of appropriate fanfare— why not write a book about it and make a million dollars or go on Dr. Oz and blow his mind?

The most interesting thing to me is that, for this poor soul, watching an overweight person walk across a room is a disturbing event. There is something disturbing about obesity when considered in a Biggest-Loser-Crazy-Doctor-Huizenga way, just as there is something disturbing about brittle anorexics and people who pluck out all of their eyebrows and then tattoo them back on or people who have little fuzzy goatees or even people who wear thongs hiked up way above their jeans: that is, it’s disturbing to see a person make a choice for themselves that you, personally, disagree with. There is something to be disturbed about in every one of us: smokers are disturbing, drinkers are disturbing, dieters are disturbing, Seventh-Day Adventists are wicked disturbing. That’s because we decided at some point in the history of our civilization that other people’s personal decisions were our business, when in fact they’re not; though some of those things eat up tax dollars or annoy us or affect our relationships, there’s a certain amount of autonomy that we need to protect to make our short time on earth feel like our own. Guess what, Marie Claire lady, somewhere there’s someone who doesn’t like to watch you walk across the room. Are you getting enough vitamin D3, Marie Claire lady? Well, that’s what responsible people do to stave off illness. Do you eat enough greens? Do you report all of your earnings? Do you try to write off things that aren’t write-offable? Do you call your parents every week, just to chat?

But maybe it’s just about controlling the “aesthetic” world of television. Perhaps that’s a world we form by committee to eliminate any of the nuisances of real life: overweight people reminding us of pesky things like the fact that our bodies are stuffed with organs stamped with expiration dates, wrinkly actresses making us worry over our crow’s feet, junk food being vacuumed into the mouths of children. How horrible to see these things on the aspirational dream screen! There is no value in anything real, in mirroring how life actually is, just in presenting viewers with Jon Hamm staring into a mirror reflecting Jon Hamm back into a mirror behind him which reflects the back of Jon Hamm’s gorgeous head into a prism which gives every single person in the world a Jon Hamm boyfriend carbon copy. That’s the value of television.

The hundred-something pages of comments are worth skimming, at least. I have been fat. At some point, nearly everyone gets fat. One day you might wake up and find yourself just a little fat. It’s kind of great to go through this, just so that you can really get going when you see something like this wee article pop up: it’s so easy to recall how nasty people can be, without thinking, and it’s so easy to recall what that feels like when you spend your days starting another diet or crying in a dressing room. It’s something that never leaves you, I think, though it’s so small: your weight will change throughout your life, and it’s up to you to decide what to do about it. It’s impossible to know what it’s like to be someone else. It’s also impossible to know just who’s cringing when you cross the street or kiss your boyfriend, just because they disagree with who you are. If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that people are sensitive about their choices, and even if you don’t respect them, you never know when your stupid, stupid words are going to make someone feel like a trough of rotting banana peels; worse, you don’t know if that person already has endured a lifetime of feeling this way, and you’ll be the one to ruin their day/week/life as you try to protect the false, imaginary world you live in where everyone is exactly as you want them to be.

It would be nice if people’s editors would let them know when they’re full of shit, is what I mean.