Obsession with Weight, Part 6

The Obesity Myth
by Paul Campos, J.D.

(Page 6 of 6)

In America today, it is impossible for anyone above the age of about five - recent news reports indicate that fat anxiety is becoming common among six- to eight-year-olds - to somehow miss the fact that power and privilege in all of its forms are associated with thinness, and, especially in the case of women, unhealthy extremes of thinness. Go into any supermarket, look at any magazine rack, glance at any television screen, visit any movie theater, enter any office building, peruse any glossy entrepreneurial profile - indeed, walk down a city street with your eyes open, and you will get the message. What's amazing is that, as we have seen, Critser gets the message loud and clear when he recognizes that thinness and economic privilege are closely connected in our culture - and yet he instantly forgets this fact when he attempts to explain why the have-nots are getting fatter.

His thesis that "those with true cultural power, those in the academy and the publishing industry who have the ability to shape public opinion" have been so cowed by feminists and the like that they display a systematic "reluctance to face [the] facts" about fat is, under the circumstances, nothing less than bizarre. After all, Critser's essay itself manages to remain almost fact-free in regard to the obesity debate (indeed, he seems unaware there is a debate) precisely because it is a product of a cultural atmosphere in which investigative journalists writing for high-profile magazines have been so thoroughly brainwashed about the supposed health risks of fat that they don't bother to engage in the most cursory investigation of their topic. Critser concludes on an apocalyptic note:

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.

Fifty years ago, America was full of people that the social elites could look upon with something approaching open disgust: blacks in particular, of course, but also other ethnic minorities, the poor, women, Jews, homosexuals, and so on. (An example: I remember from my childhood in the 1970s that Polish jokes were a regular feature of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show monologue.) Yet over the last half-century, the classes of candidates available for open pariah status have gradually shrunk. This has become a problem on at least two levels. As many a vulgar social psychologist has (correctly) observed, societies need pariahs. In most cultures, some class of people is more or less required to play the role of those who make everybody else feel superior by comparison. Furthermore, the feelings of disgust elicited in others by traditional pariah-class individuals do not simply disappear as soon as it becomes unacceptable to express those feelings openly.

As The Handbook of Obesity Studies notes (Critser himself cites this precise quote): "In heterogeneous and affluent societies such as the United States, there is a strong inverse correlation of social class and obesity, particularly for females." In other words, on average, poor people in America are fat, and rich people are thin. A strong correlation also exists between obesity and ethnic minority status - one that goes beyond the class correlation itself. Particularly among African American women, changing class status does not appear to strongly influence obesity rates (in America, the demographic group with the highest obesity rate is that comprised of black women in their fifties). Critser notes this as well, and muses that some observers might claim "black women find affirmation for being heavy from black men, or believe themselves to be 'naturally' heavy." He then adds prissily that "such assertions do not change mortality statistics."

This last observation is really too much. As we have seen, Critser does not appear to have looked at (or at any rate understood) any mortality statistics whatsoever. If he had, he might have discovered that studies investigating the relationship between weight and health among African-American women have found no correlation between increasing weight and mortality among such women, even at very high levels of "obesity."

Yet ultimately all this is beside the point. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics, and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority engendered in thin people by the sight of fat people. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected onto some other distinguishing characteristic. In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unself-conscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitized soul. But the sight of a fat woman - make that an "obese" - better yet a "morbidly [sic] obese" woman going into Wal-Mart ... ah, that is something else again.

And, precisely because we live in a culture obsessed with fat hatred, the otherwise potentially disturbing fact that this woman, who often elicits feelings of disgust in white upper-class observers, also just happens to be poor and non-white can be dismissed by those observers as an irrelevant coincidence. (It's difficult to imagine a magazine such as Harper's publishing the sort of ethnic insults that fill Critser's article in any context other than one in which those insults are aimed at fat people.)

At bottom, the reason upper-class Americans are so disgusted by, and terrified of, fat is that in this culture fat has the power to contaminate. Fat has the power, metaphorically speaking, to make us non-white and poor - and under current cultural conditions it is much easier for an upper-class white person to become fat than it is for him or her to become poor, let alone non-white.

Seen in this light, the almost pornographic quality of Critser's descriptions of fat people eating fast food begins to make sense. For what Critser calls "we diet-and-shape-conscious folk," a Krispy Kreme doughnut is not just a doughnut: It is a fetishistic, almost magical object, with the power to contaminate and transform those who allow themselves to be seduced by its quasi-erotic charms. Each bite of that doughnut, each moment of weakness that tempts us to supersize those fries, or to surrender to the orgiastic frenzy in which we imagine little Miguelito and the millions like him greedily ripping apart their enormous apple fritters, pushes us closer to death - and to something even worse.

In his studies of the comparative development of cultures, Jared Diamond has noted that as societies become more complex, they almost always become more sedentary, bureaucratic, and hierarchical. In America today, we are generally quite sensitive to the first two trends, while ignoring or denying the third. But who can deny that, in a nation where, as Critser himself puts it, "no one, and I mean no one" in the pages of the glossy magazines within which the elite project their image of themselves is anything like fat, the hierarchy of acceptable body types is becoming more rigid, exclusive, and well-defined than ever before?

The image on the cover of Harper's is not merely, in one sense, pornographic: It is fraught with implications of death. A colleague to whom I showed the image to illustrate the concept of "food porn" commented that it was also, as she put it, an image of "death by sundae." And indeed, when seen through the lens of the anxieties of the upper classes in America today - when seen through the eyes of we who are afraid of being enveloped, smothered, crushed, and, most of all, contaminated by the rippling mountains of fat cascading down the bodies of our social inferiors - the message of Sundae I becomes quite clear: Eat fat and die. Or worse yet: Become one of them.

Copyright © 2004 Paul Campos

About the Author

A professor of law at the University of Colorado and a nationally recognized expert on America's war on fat, Paul Campos is the author of a weekly opinion column that appears in more than forty newspapers nationwide. His articles have appeared in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.