I know plenty of other fatosphere bloggers have talked about and shared this piece by sugaredvenom over on Tumblr and I’m not sure I have much more to add to what has already been said. But because I get someone pretty much every day commenting that I should just “get over” being fat in this world and quit being so angry/political/whiny/vocal and so on, I just want to put it out there again.
Because I get very tired of hearing the same old “you’re just imagining it” thing over and over. We’re told we’re paranoid, that we read too much into what people say and do about fat bodies and fat people. We’re told that we’re the ones creating animosity about fatness. But I think sugaredvenom has found some very clear proof that we do not imagine the hateful attitude towards fat people.
Just because I believe in having a look if I can replicate the results myself, and to follow her advice and look to see if there were the same amount of negative ones for thin people (there are not, Brian over at RedNo3 demonstrates this) I was doing some Google searches myself. I came up with the same results as sugaredvenom for the searches she ran, but found a few doozies myself.
How about this one:
Then there is this one:
Smaller brains and no reason to live hey?
This one suggests we use more gas as well as being unattractive and ugly:
Just in case we didn’t know, we make people sick and must die.
And of course we’ve all heard how gross we are and that we should just go be fat somewhere else, and again, we’re to blame for global warming.
It’s pretty clear that fat hatred is well entrenched in our culture. If enough people are entering those search terms that they are trending on Google to make your searches easier, then I think we’ve got enough proof that fat hatred is a valid thing that people suffer at the hands of others on a daily basis. Just looking through the Google search terms that brought people to this very blog, the most prominent searches over the past few months have been the terms:
fat sluts; fat women don’t deserve happiness; shut the fuck up fat bitch; fat should kill themselves; fat women suck; fat people ruin everything; fat people take food from thin people; bitches are fat; nobody will fuck you fatty; fat bitch from Glee; kill yourself fat…
and a whole bunch of other terribly misspelled terms along the same lines. One thing about fat haters… a lot of them have really awful spelling!
Fat hatred is rife. Nobody is making it up, or being paranoid by speaking out about it. Those who minimise or dismiss the very real feelings of pain, anger and fear that many fat people have are simply adding to that fat hatred and hostility.
Fat Heffalump 
Hatred is directly tied to ignorance. If you’re ignorant it’s so much easier to hate on someone. The more educated you become about a person or group of people, the less likely it is that you can hold on to your hatred, as it’s usually not based in anything rational.
Sobering thoughts, indeed.
As Jen said, hatred is based on ignorance, but it’s also based on fear – fear of the different/unknown/out of the “norm”. It used to be that people at both ends of the bell curve, the so-called “abnormally” thin and fat, were the ones hated and made fun of. Thanks to the media, and the instantaneous nature of news gathering and dissemination, the fat end of the bell curve has been getting narrower and narrower as far as the attention paid to the people on it and the hatred applied to them. People who were never before considered OMGDEATHFAT or even just OMGFAT are now because of the wide-spread use of the BMI and publishing it for all and sundry to see and harp on about. It doesn’t help that MSM has used only the severely obese people as illustrations for the made-up “obesity epi-panic” and made them headless to boot. Take away their heads, take away their humanity and make it easy to turn them into objects worthy of hate and spite and malice.
These Google searches are a poignant reminder that fat hatred is very much alive. It is ridiculous how much time and effort some put into hating people.
Another “tool” that might provide interesting side-by-side comparisons is: http://www.googlefight.com/
Hopefully your posts will ultimately enlighten those who come here to spew hatred!
But hey, at least we have Wisconsin, right?
::headdesk::
As predictable as they are, this post attracted a lot of fat hatred and troll comments. It even brought the serial trolls back who really should know by now that their comments go straight to spam without me ever having to read them. Yay spam filters!
But all they do is illustrate my point beautifully.
The article referencing both this article and sugaredvenom’s I wrote for Manolo for the Big Girl this weekend got at least sixty spam messages for weight loss.
Cute, huh?
I’ve got quite a few spam messages, but I’ve had far more trollery. The very hate that is denounced as something we imagine is the very thing that I’m getting in response to this piece.
BTW, I tried this and under ‘Fat People Should,’ the first result I got (this is an actual website, not just the end of the google search) was “Fat People Should be Raped and Killed.”
True story. I really wish it wasn’t.
What’s amazing to me is not only the fat hate that these searches show, but that the hatred is so great that not only do people feel and believe these things, but they make the choice to put energy into searching these topics on google! I mean, really, how much negativity must a person carry around in their heart in order to sit down at a computer and search for “fat people make me sick”. It’s not even a question! It’s a statement!
Absolutely! Who has time in their lives to do that shit? Certainly not anyone who has a healthy, happy, full life.