Fat shaming?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by parmalee, Dec 18, 2018.

  1. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    https://www.glamour.com/story/this-...r-exercising-at-an-in-n-out-burger?verso=true

    By my own admission, I harbor an irrational prejudice against fat people. I really do try to keep it in check, and I am, at least, aware of my own prejudice and I know that it is kinda ridiculous and unfair, but...

    How is this fat shaming? It's certainly... weird, and kinda stupid, but fat shaming? If anything, i would argue that she is simply calling out inactive people who eat shitty food, in a preposterously ineffective manner.

     
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  3. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    or
    fat shamming

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    fat suit
     
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  5. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Agree. It's not.
    Simply saying "I don't eat here" is not the same thing as "I hate fat people". It is more like "I don't eat unhealthy food." (But even at that, we don't know why she doesn't eat there.)

    That will not stop proponents of anti fat-shamers from using it as free publicity to start a debate.
     
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  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    I do find it interesting that weight is the last societally-acceptable form of prejudice.
    There's no shortage in entertainment of "fat" people obsessed with eating, or stuffing their faces with food or being just plain clumsy.

    Just watched Kung Fu Panda again. Oh that Rolly Rolly Po! - can only get motivated to learn if food is dangled in front of him...

    "obese Panda", right there in the story synopsis.
     
  8. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    seriously:
    I too have an innate prejudice against the morbidly obese---
    That being said:
    I am also fat---bmi 26.4------(I've been trying to lose 10 pounds for a couple years now--- the 1st 10 were easy ---a few extra pounds at my age is probably a good thing?)
     
  9. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    hmph ...amateur...

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    At least I'm still under a 30....

    Doesn't help that it's my height that's shrinking... I was a 27 when I was 2" taller.
     
  10. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, it's slowly becoming unacceptable, but "fat humor" an marginalization of overweight persons in various arenas of life--especially film and television--is still commonplace.

    That said, I find a lot of the attempted societal corrections, i.e., putting a positive spin on being overweight--plus-size models, "fat is beautiful," etc., a bit unsettling. Obesity is an epidemic, most especially in the U.S., and it's costs to the medical system are extraordinary. And the primary causes--crap diet and inactivity--are hardly trifling concerns.

    I mean, no one should be made to feel ashamed, but... I'm ridiculously epileptic, and while I certainly oughtn't see that as some sort of moral failure, I'm also not gonna describe myself as "delightfully spastic."
     
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  11. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    The general wisdom is to decouple "fat" from "unhealthy".
    Having a high BMI is not, in-and-of-itself, unhealthy. Plenty of high-BMI people are perfectly healthy, and may well put a bigger burden on the system by trying to unnaturally reach for a normalized goal - a goal that is really just a statistical bell curve- not an ideal.

    You treat unhealthy people, not fat people.
     
  12. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    BMI has kind of gotten a bad rap of late, but it is actually a fairly reliable indicator:

    Where it tends to fail is with extraordinarily athletic persons, who tend to have higher BMIs which often put them in the obese column, when, in fact, they are not obese. Or, with people like me: my BMI is under 18, but I'm not underweight nor lacking muscle, I just have an unusually small (narrow) frame. Both groups are somewhat extreme outliers. Likewise, there are those with very little muscle, and consequently, lower weights. The BMI may put them as "normal" or "overweight," when they may well be obese (as measured by percentage of fat).

    Edit: Maybe I should have said "a somewhat reliable indicator." Point being: BMI fails sometimes, but not in the way most people seem to think. It's not that there a lot of healthy people the BMI deems obese, but rather, there are a fair number of obese persons for whom the BMI would describe them as "normal" or "overweight."
     
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2018
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  13. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    You answer your own question. The point was her own self-indulgence.
     
  14. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    That's not the same as fat shaming.
    As I pointed out, the more direct implication is that she is shitty-food-eating shaming.
     
  15. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    the USA is a litigious culture.
    the ability for people to scream victim & then try and sue people is normal culture.
    the people jumping up and down are simply doing that.

    the irony is that in-and-out is liked by quite a few different people, including various celebraties who post their own pictures of themselves eating the food inside the businesses and/or at home.
    this is quite funny as it has all the various cultural and legal issues all rolled up with everyone trying to make money off it while claiming some type of superior moral objective.

    my personal opinion is that you should not be subjected to being videod or photographed without your explicit consent while in certain types of places.
    no different to a hospital or gym or hotel room, a restaurant or place of eating should be free of being subjected to outsider harasment and persecution which is what being filmed or photographed is.

    would it be any different to filming someone putting on make up ?

    if someone can see in through one of your windows where the curtain has not been shut properly, and you and your family are naked and/or engaging in behaviour that you personally would consider subject to copywrite privacy...
    is that legal and/or legaly immoral ?

    good luck trying to find enough opinions of those who are not trying to make money off the situation.
     
  16. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    By the way, did anyone actually watch the video? It's pretty damn funny:

    https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/1073296279231455234

    She somehow just finds herself at an In-n-Out Burger, eats a pear, exercises, and then a guy delivers her a bag of vegetables at the end. Putting a spin on this masterpiece of incoherence just seems like a travesty to me.

    In fact, I'd really like to see this turned into a feature length work: she could deliberate long and hard over whether to eat the red or the yellow bell pepper first--'cuz, obviously, no one is gonna eat the green pepper first. And how is she going to eat these peppers? Unless she's packing a knife, it seems that she's just gotta eat them whole, like an apple. Or, she might tear them apart with her hands--but what about the seeds? Will she scrape them out with her fingernails?
     
    Last edited: Dec 19, 2018
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, and y'know, she's not there to make any point to people who look like me.

    No, really, she's not.
     
  18. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    What would be an inference on your part, not necessarily the implication on her part.

    I mean, it might still be true, I'm just going to give her the benefit of the doubt until such time as I see clear indication she's targeting fat people in particular.

    Not all people who eat crappy food are fat. Some are average weight yet still unhealthy.
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    I get what you're after, but at some point the effort we need to put into leaving fat shaming out of it is just kind of silly.
     
  20. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    I think something that has not been considered here is that her message may potentially have nothing whatever to do with the patrons at all - it may well be interpreted as a statement about the ethics of fast food joints that so freely poison the people.

    Ol' what's his name attacked McDonalds for their use of ammonia in making non-food-grade meat into food-grade meat.
    Not that I'm suggesting this is quite the same level of sophistication, simply that an attack on crappy food is not necessary a judgment on the patrons.
     
  21. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Well, there is irony about the notion of preposterous inefficiency on this occasion, but the thing about the purveyor of preposterous inefficiency is also the idea of being so lazy as to make no better indication of an obscure meaning instead of the most facially apparent. That is to say, if she, say, goes down to the clinic to demonstrate her purity and note she never use baby-killing pills, most people are going to presume it has something to do with the pro-life movement; if the point is to communicate something or other about the ethics of industrial α-lactose harvesting techniques, that would probably need some modicum of particular explication.

    She wasn't there about Wilmar; In 'N' Out uses sunflower oil.

    Er ... ah ... oh ....

    But, yes, the problem with preposterous inefficiency is that people are going to attend the most apparent expression. One important point about LCD and Omni Syndrome politicking is that the lowest common denominator, the omni appeal, is inherently simplistic.

    And, besides, if I really needed to get down to chowing In 'N' Out with Ockham, I might recall a period when people used the word "racism" and "racist" as a catchall for supremacism—i.e., sexism, creedism, ageism—and then note, among the roundup via Elle magazine is faith and fashion author Jillian Lancour invoking body shaming, which is the more appropriate term and precisely correct. And, again, she's not talking to people like me; if she was, that would risk a different social controversy.

    And while there is something to be said for pierside traditions of California lore, most people, when encountering random fit people showing off in strange places, disdained the arrogance in general. Let's talk about sexism for a moment, because it's just not appropriate call her a dick, or make jokes about how small hers must be for the steroids, or any of the other retorts we reserve for men who behave that way.

    Asshole works fine, for the time being. We'll see what political correctness brings in the future, but it always cracks me up when we should stop using hard terms to describe people who deliberately behave poorly because it makes them feel badly about behaving poorly. We call it shitty behavior instead of saying she pulled a dick move.
     
  22. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Colour me obtuse. How is any of the above germane to that which was quoted? It kind of looks like it's made of straw.
     
  23. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    I wouldn't go that far--she is is definitely shaming somebody. Whether it's fat people, inactive people, or people who eat shitty food is unclear (to me, at least). Though we can conclude that she is not shaming patrons of In-n-Out Burger specifically, as at the beginning of the video, she doesn't even seem to know that she's at an In-n-Out Burger.

    Stigmatization of the overweight and obese is somewhat unique though, in that a sizable majority (~70 percent) of American adults are overweight or obese. So, in a sense, she is by default shaming fat people, but...

    Food in the U.S. is kind of a thorny issue generally. A growing number of Americans live in relative food deserts <<< (~10 percent), we use food additives that are outright banned in most prosperous nations, and we largely ignore--or make little effort to combat--what is by far the most prevalent and most destructive of public health epidemics (obesity).

    For fuck's sake, I can find passable food at a gas station convenience store in pretty much any other country on this planet. So-called "food" in American convenience stores is not only shitty, a not insignificant percentage of it can drastically lower my seizure threshold. Not that anyone ought to be procuring their sustenance from convenience stores, but for an awful lot of people there are no plausible alternatives.
     

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