TIME "Ideas" Has New Idea: Fat People Are Gross

Oh my quarks, I'm going to murder something. Maybe this writer's hard drive.

This week, Time.com's "ideas" section features "Let's Stop Being Passive About Fighting Obesity" by Shannon "Fat People Are Gross" Brownlee.

"Even among thin people, who wouldn't be affected by the surcharge (and who therefore might even see lower health insurance premiums, although the survey may not have explained that), support for the fat tax fell short of a majority. Why? Smoking is seen as being completely in the individual's control, whereas obesity is viewed as a result of a combination of complex factors."  

It should go without saying that such a view of obesity is CLEARLY hallucinatory, amirite?

Here.  This should tell you about how she feels about overweight people:  "body mass index, the current term for degree of excess weight,"

Yeah, no.  body mass index is not the term for "degree of excess weight."  You aren't minus a BMI if you have no excess weight.  You aren't aiming for a BMI of zero.  That would mean you don't exist.

Talking about how the effects of second-hand smoke finally allowed people to really take up the anti-smoking cause, the writer argues, "Maybe it's time to be at least a little more willing to similarly demonize excess poundage."  

To paraphrase Kate Harding's tweet about this piece, I'mma need Shannon here to show her work on how "excess poundage" isn't already demonized enough.  

Why am I on about this?  Especially after radio silence, except for pictures here and there, for a few months?

You know how this reads to me, as someone with an eating disorder that is sometimes straight BN, sometimes AN-P?  This reads to me:

"Gaining weight is a terrible idea.  Gaining weight should frighten you.  Once you start gaining weight, you don't really have any guarantee you're going to stop.  Even if you don't end up obese, you'll end up chubby, and just like it says in this article, once you gain weight, it's incredibly hard to lose it.  Best not to gain any weight.  Just to be on the safe side."

That's how my eating disordered brain translates this article.


And let me be clear.  I need to gain weight right now.  I am officially at the cusp of an anorexic BMI.  It is nonsensical that I should be afraid of gaining weight.  However, that's what an eating disorder does to thought processes.  I get stressed (or sad, or what have you), I reroute it to food and weight, and my brain latches onto pieces of crap like this pageview-trolling travesty, and just kind of does its own thing from there.


So screw you, Shannon "Fat People Are Gross" Brownlee.  A BMI is not a "degree of excess weight," obesity is not the equivalent of secondhand smoke, and you sound like a hateful troll.