Fatties need to get a grip

From Red No. 3:

"This ever-expanding national girth is a reflection of our over-tolerant attitude to fatness. It is a much more comfortable social experience to be fat in the UK or the US than it is in Europe. Call it body fascism if you like, but in Europe excessive weight gain, much like excessive drinking, is socially disapproved of.

In the UK, on the other hand, being fat is so common as to be acceptable, even expected. Indeed we live in the era of fat militancy, borrowed from the US, where clothes shops catering for teenagers are taken to task for not stocking previously unheard-of sizes upwards of extra large, and where the design of everything from toilet seats to bus aisles is rapidly being scaled up to cater for greatly enlarged dimensions."

-Joanna Blythman

Over-tolerant attitude toward fatness? Greatly enlarged dimensions? What fricking planet is she living on? In the last 40 years, women have gotten, on average, an inch taller (5' 3" to 5' 4") and their average weight has gone from 140 lbs to 164 lbs. That sounds like a modest increase to me, not "greatly enlarged". And she's pissed because fat people want accommodation in clothing? Would she rather see our fat asses wandering around naked? If she thinks fat is so ugly clothed, what would she think of it unclothed? Does she think all fat people should stay at home, naked, doing absolutely nothing but exercising like hamsters on speed and restricting calories until they get thin enough to suit her before going out and contributing to the global economy? Fat people are supposed to put their lives on hold, because she thinks fat is ugly? I want to know who died and made people like her Grand Poohbah of the Universe. Did she ever stop to think that without the contributions ALL people make, no matter their size, this world would be a much poorer place in which to live? By her notions, Luciano Pavarotti would have had to lose weight in order to be an opera star, what a loss to the world that would have been. Queen Latifah would have had to get thin before becoming the amazing actress that she is. We would never have heard Cass Elliot's amazing voice, never been able to read the many books written by fat authors, never had the many scientific breakthroughs made by fat scientists, not to mention the medical breakthroughs found by fat doctors. Not everyone who is a genius is thin, and if we wait for those fat geniuses to get thin and stay thin before they contribute to society, the world will miss out on so much that could enrich it today and in the future.

I don't think she realizes that manufacturers of clothing and other items used and needed by fat people may have just decided that we are a vast, untapped source of income. Maybe that is why they are starting to make clothing, toilet seats, furniture, etc that fit the larger person. After all, our money spends just as well as a thin/average person's money. It's not tainted with our "fat germs", no one is going to catch "TEH FAT" from handling our money and catering to our needs. After all, the diet industry has been doing it for years (in addition to brainwashing fat people into thinking they have to keep trying to be thin, even with failure after failure after failure of every WLD plan out there).

Joanna, you really need to get a life and quit worrying about other people's size. It's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. You don't pay their bills, buy their groceries, clean their houses, raise their kids, do their laundry, or take care of any of the other myriad parts of fat people's lives. So get over yourself already. Your opinion is just that, an opinion. And guess what? Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.