Fat=immoral? WTF?

[kitanzi]

When did fat become a moral issue? Seriously, when?

I don’t mean “People are starving in Africa, why are we eating too much in America?” I mean television ads like one I saw last night. The sound was off (I was watching it at the gym) and the usual tv-actress-thin woman was looking in the window of a bakery with yearning in every line of her body, and a set of devil’s horns. She straightened up, reached into her pocket for whatever health bar they were selling, and immediately traded the horns for a halo and a blissful smile while she munched the marketed product. That doesn’t need words to make that message clear.

I mean women, every day in casual conversation, at work and on the street and me myself sometimes (I hate it but I admit it) talking about “being good” when they stick to a diet and “being bad” when they indulge. “I was very good today, I had a salad for lunch and did a half hour on the treadmill.” “Whoops, I was bad – I shouldn’t have had that brownie.”

When did this happen, and why are we buying it? Is it just me, or does this simultaneously trivialize morality in general and brand fat people as less moral than thin people? What other examples have folks seen, or even counter examples? I’d love to be convinced I’m mistaken on this, actually, but I don’t think so.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

That "being good/bad" language has been around for a long time. It used to be common for weight loss groups to use in-your-face guilt as an incentive; I don't hear as much about it now. So I suspect things are getting better, not worse, on that count.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

If I implied I thought it was new, I apologize. It's been around as long as I can remember, but every so often something rubs it in my face and I get pissed off enough to rant. I don't actually notice it getting better, myself, but you may be looking in different directions than I am.

[the-gwenzilliad.livejournal.com]

You are not mistaken. If you are fat, you must be lazy. You're probably stupid, too. That's the general consensus both in America and over here. I am currently losing weight, and I'm frequently disgusted by the guilt and reward language used in my weight loss group, both in meetings and online. If you cheat or 'lapse' on the diet, you've been 'bad'. If you don't eat anything you shouldn't, you're 'good'. Also, people are supposed to feel 'guilty' when they eat something 'bad'.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Yep. There's a lot of good/bad used in those terms like you would use it to a 4 year old - good is doing "what you're supposed to" and bad is not, usually defined as what you are told you should do. That pisses me off too, but this particular trigger was the explicity religious/moral symbols in the stupid commercial. I don't think morality has to be tied to religion, but that was a very explict set of symbolism.

[vila-resthal.livejournal.com]

You're not mistaken. For ages, people have promoted the view that being large-sized was a sure sign of being weak-willed. Proof that being fat was a choice, an option, rather than a quirk in one's metabolism. You can also see this in the unwarranted glorification of anorexically-thin models and actresses.

To me, skinny = unattractive and unhealthy. Of course, there are people whose health suffers from being overweight. But both extremes are a health matter, not a moral issue.

Just my 2¢ worth of opinion - YMMV,

Dan

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Yep. Being fat is, in my experience and observation, rarely as simple as weakwilled vs metabolic disorder, either, but even if it was, I really would not equate weakwilled with immoral. (And you know I agree with you about skinny being unappealing! *grin*)

[hrrunka]

The "high calorie snacks are naughty" viewpoint (with all sorts of imagery connected with the word "naughty" and various approximate synonyms, including the devil's horns etc.) has been around since I first encountered adverts on TV back in the early 70's, and might well have been going before then. I remember some brand of creamy edible item which was plugged using the slogan "Naughty, but nice!".

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Yep, and all the lovely rich desserts marketed as "sinful". Sin has very religious overtones.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

There's a thought experiment in one of my classes called the case of the innocent fat man, in which (to make it very very short) a fat guy gets stuck in the entrance to a cave, trapping everyone else inside; the cave is going to fill up with water when the tide comes in and everyone inside will drown. The question is whether it is permissible to blow him up (because, handily, they have a stick of dynamite with him) to save everyone inside. The idea is asking whether it's ever permissible to kill an innocent in order to save more innocents.

Now, the last thing on earth I want to do after my last attempt at discussing philosophy seriously on LJ is to actually talk about that case in any detail. However, I bring it up because there are a number of students every semester who try to argue that he is not, in fact, innocent and therefore can be blown up. One way that is often argued is based on his weight - that being fat is somehow immoral because you are acting irresponsibly (or something like that.) So, yes, I'd say that your observation is confirmed by other evidence. Sadly.

[madfilkentist]

I recall hearing of another example in which the student is asked whether it's morally justifiable to push a fat man off a bridge to save the lives of four people who are unknowingly standing in the path of an oncoming train. (It was many years ago, so I don't remember all the details.) Aside from the point that both situations are very contrived, it's interesting that they both involve sacrificing fat people.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I'm not surprised, but that's pretty damn depressing. That's a step further, saying fat's not just immoral but in some circumstances justifies killing the fat person. I could understand "We're trapped, there's no other way, killing one saves umpteen lives" (which seems to be the actual intended point of the scenario) but pegging it to his being fat to justify it makes me rather sick.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the whole point is that everyone involved are innocents. Trying to claim that he's not innocent because he's fat is a) cheating and b) really fairly disgusting, you know?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Too many examples to list. I have the full tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory on this if you're interested. But I suspect what has changed in the past couple of decades is not so much the moral polarisation itself, which as Rick says has been around for a long while (possibly even predating rationing over here) as the intensity of the bombardment. It's become less and less possible to escape the power of advertising, and the more deadened people in general become to it, the more intense it will get. Bad luck to those of us who aren't so good at filtering.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, you always seem to come up with great ones. It's an interesting question if it predated rationing, and/or how rationing modified it.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I've seen that, but I've also seen (and been) cases of someone talking about "being good" and remembering to eat, or eating a solid meal in contrast to "being bad" and just grabbing a quick bite on the run. I certainly talk about "being good" or "being bad" in terms of spending money on things I like. I think that phrasing is hard to avoid in contexts where it really means "I have used self-discipline to behave according to the requirements of the task I've set for myself, or I haven't." Whatever that task may be. If one has set for oneself the task of losing weight, then *for that purpose* and only for that purpose, because that is one's own *chosen* purpose, eating high-caloric things is 'bad'. If one has set for oneself the task of eating decently instead of forgetting all the time, as I have, then eating high-caloric things is usually 'good', and skipping a meal to reach for a diet bar instead is 'bad'.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

You have a rather different set of food issues, though. I can see where you've run into that, and I can see where good/bad can be applied to self-discipline (success = good, lack of success = bad), but the ad that prompted my little rant had rather explicit religious/moral symbols (though I'm certainly not trying to equate the two, I think many people do and they probably were.) I do believe I remember when you passed out at a con due to not eating, so it's certainly a bad *idea* for you to not eat, but I still wouldn't call you morally bad for it! (Unless you were trying to manipulate and harm someone else through it by some byzantine b.s., which I can't begin to imagine you doing!)

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree that the thing about eating, especially eating high-calorie stuff, being considered "morally wrong" has passed into the public image. It probably does have a religious origin, actually -- the whole thing within medieval Christianity about chastising the flesh and gluttony being a deadly sin. The fact that the high clergy of the time usually kept some of the finest tables in Europe didn't stop them from preaching about it. :)

[bedlamhouse]

I guess I see it as branding the choice, not the person, especially since the person in question is not fat.

Obese due to metabolism is not a choice, but how one handles one's diet once aware of that metabolism is very much a choice. At a certain level, it isn't any different than being a diabetic but choosing to continue to drink alcohol and eat sugar-filled candy bars. Choices that help your health would be recognized as "good" by just about anyone; choices that harm your health would be recognized as "bad".

Now, society's view of what is obese and what is acceptable is a whole 'nother can of gummi worms, especially as medical research keeps lowering the weight standards.

Me, I need to lose some 30 pounds for health reasons, so it's very easy to look at the choice in question as "bad".

[madfilkentist]

Clearly there are good and bad choices in eating, and these ultimately are grounded in the moral choice to take care of your body. But I think the issue is better phrased as one of guilt as a tool of manipulation or for claiming superiority.

[bedlamhouse]

While I'm sure marketers will accept whatever emotion gets you to buy their product, from the description (I've not seen the commercial) this sounds like a simple presentation of their concept of a "good choice" vs. their concept of a "bad choice". Any manipulation seems to be in the convincing of the consumer that the product is a "good choice".

Whether those concepts are valid, whether the choice of something "good" over "bad" can be accomplished without the concept of guilt (and the related idea, then, that pleasure over a "good" choice is just as damaging as guilt over a "bad" choice), whether the concept of "good" and the concept of "bad" are lines that need to be drawn a distance apart so that anything in between is not only neutral but comparing them to "good" or "bad" damages the concepts of "good" and "bad" - all of these are distinctly different questions.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm drawing a distinction between "that's a bad idea" and "that's an evil idea". The ad in question used very loaded symbolism to suggest that the bakery items were evil, and the Product Du Jour was salvation from them.

[bedlamhouse]

Ahh, "good vs. evil" is a whole different kettle of archetypal fish from "good vs. bad".

Having been brainwashed by cartoons at an early age, I think of the "shoulder angel" as the one who tells Jerry to do the "good" thing, while the "shoulder devil" is the one who tells Jerry to do the "bad" thing. Not apocalyptic "good" vs. "evil", just "nice" vs. "naughty".

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Good has a number of antonyms, including both bad and evil. With the religious symbolism they were throwing in, it certainly appeared to be aiming the equation at evil or at least morally wrong, given mainstream symbolism. I do think the shoulder devil/shoulder angel whispering in your ear thing is usually a bit different from saying someone *is* a devil or an angel.

[inaurolillium.livejournal.com]

There's some good discussion of the fat=immoral idea over here at Pandagon (http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2008/02/13/6729/), in a post on a book called Skinny Bitch. The comments are interesting, too, but there are a lot of them.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Ah ha, thank you! I'll bookmark it to read later, but the first bit sounds like it's pretty much directly relevant to this.

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

It's the same in German. If you eat what you "ought not" to eat, it is called "sündigen" = to sin.

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Yep, there's another one - rich foods are called sinful. It puts a very religious slant on it.

[maedbh7.livejournal.com]

First, I hear you and agree.

Meanwhile, in the realm of counter-evidence, there are more plus-sized lingerie stores now, there are more plus-sized models now, there is more talk in the public arena now about the health/wisdom of being size 0 and the scruples of ad machinery that require such a body, etc. It's not balancing the bombardment noted above, but it is evidence the pendulum is beginning to swing back the other way some.

Because, let's face it, curves are hot! And modest curves with a liberal base layer of muscle is actually healthier for everyone than being either fat or thin. -H...

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

You've got good points, though I agree also that it's nowhere near equal. And I agree about curves, as you know. *grin*