Come Off It Already
scrappybadger March 31st, 2009
Few things motivate me like anger, and blog posts are not exempt from this rule. Though I’ve thought of lots of things I would like to write about in the last couple of months it wasn’t until now that I actually put fingers to keyboard. I suppose it is the warmish weather that is finally starting to show its face that is making people fucking stupid as all hell again. Don’t get me wrong, I love the springtime. I am a fan of sunshine — bright, high in the sky, warm on your face, intense sunshine. What I don’t love is the so-called getting in shape fervor that comes with it.
Seriously, I just want to start handing out big double deckers of shut the fuck up with extra cheese. That’s right. This isn’t one of those introspective, academic blog posts. This is my full fury distilled into a few shortish paragraphs with a dash (or a generous spoonful) of profanity thrown in for good measure and catharsis.
Simply put, I am sick to death already of hearing how FUN it is to exercise and go on a diet. That’s right, FUN. And that isn’t my word. Oh no, that is the word that keeps popping up in various announcements, in emails that come to my work email address about Weight Watchers (don’t get me started on the inappropriateness of that), and in Facebook status updates. The worst part is that I can’t do what I really want to do, which is to say wake up and stop being a prisoner in your own body. Stop using little mind tricks to convince yourself that intense, arduous exercise is actually fun. Stop using that word to describe what you really know is both tortuous and boring. Sure, you have an adrenaline rush after wards, but that doesn’t make the activity itself fun. Being in a near fatal plane crash would probably give me a wicked adrenaline rush, but that doesn’t mean I’m hoping it will happen! For fuck sake, stop being so stupid, and stop buying into the idea that your body is flawed and/or that fat is so goddamned horrible.
I suppose I could say those things, but no one wants to hear them. They certainly don’t want to hear them from someone who is fat because the assumption is that I’m just angry that I’m not thin. Everyone jumps to the conclusion that I am really just covering up for the fact that I want to be skinny like the rest of them do. My utter lack of authority reminds me of a documentary I watched recently. It was a filmed speech by Tim Wise about white privilege. In it he begins by telling the audience that he isn’t saying anything new; he isn’t telling them anything that hundreds of people of color haven’t been saying for years. He is, however, asked to speak about the topic all the time because he has earned the authority to talk about white privilege because he has it. It is one of the sad ironies of how oppression works. If you live it you can’t possibly be trusted to talk about it because you can’t see beyond that giant ax that you’re grinding. It’s the “special rights” argument. You know, the one that says, “You want special treatment just because we’ve oppressed and treated you and people like you like shit for the last several thousand, million years. That’s not fair that you want special treatment.” So here I am surrounded by all these supposedly progressive people unable to really examine in a public way things like fat and class oppression.
I just find it hilarious that, among other things, people will buy hybrids and talk about the environment and then rush to a gym to use a treadmill, powered by electricity, to do what their legs are designed to do using only their own energy. Oh, and they are also watching tv and consuming bottled water.* The thing is, we can’t talk about those things; or at least I can’t. And I sure as hell can’t talk about the warped ideas that we have about health. I can’t ask why someone who looks like me is automagically assumed to be less healthy than someone who looks like me minus 100+ pounds. I can’t ask why it is considered healthy to injure yourself in the name of getting in shape. I can’t ask why we take something like yoga that is about being centered and in tune with the world and “powerize” it.
Well, I guess I can, but not without hearing the unspoken, “It’s just ’cause she’s fat.”
* I’m not pretending to be perfect. I’m far from it. I buy bottled water sometimes; I get fast food wrapped in paper from virgin southern U.S. forests; I use electricity. I hope, though, that by acknowledging those things I can come up with ways to address my own impact and/or hypocrisy.
