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 