Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(20)
Like all of us, Dan fucks up. Like all of us, he is sometimes slow to find the right side of an issue. And when he has an opinion on something, he expresses it in vivid, uncompromising prose to a rapt audience of millions—over and over and over again, because he is as prolific as he is stubborn. He also, like all of us, can be intractable and defensive when criticized, and because he is very funny and very smart, he can also be very snide, and when such a person does actually happen to be wrong, but mistakes totally warranted criticism for petty sniping, and responds not with openness but with sneering acidity to a critic who is just trying to advocate for their own humanity, it can be a very bad look.
This is the great curse of popularity and the great luxury of obscurity: People only care about your mistakes when they can hear you. Only failures can afford to be cavalier and careless.
Unfortunately for my personal emotional cankers, in the mid-to-late aughts Dan was on something of an “obesity epidemic” kick. He wasn’t alone. At the same time that I was tentatively opening to the idea that my humanity was not hostage to my BMI, the rest of the nation had declared a “war on obesity.” They’d whipped up a host of reasons why it was right and good to hate fat people: our repulsive, unsexy bodies, of course (the classic!), but also our drain on the healthcare system, our hogging of plane armrests, our impact on “the children,” our pathetic inability and/or monstrous refusal to swap austerity for gluttony (like thin people, who, as you know, are moderate and virtuous in all ways). Oh, and our “health.” Because they care. They abuse us for our own good. (Do you know what is actually not a good way to help a group of people, it turns out? Advocating for their eradication.)
Dan was on that train, and I don’t blame him—it was a very popular (and, I imagine, gratifying) ticket at the time, and, even more so than today, it was considered very roguish to “tell it like it is” about fat people (as though that wasn’t the status quo, as though we hadn’t gotten the message). I understand; I had only recently snapped out of some of the same thought patterns myself. I had to learn how to look at pictures of fat people, and I am one.
The problem is, fat people are an extremely suboptimal bogeyman, the roots of America’s “obesity epidemic” lying largely in systemic poverty and agribusiness, not in those exploited thereby; the problems with America’s fucked-up healthcare system stemming entirely from America’s preposterous healthcare system, not from the people attempting to survive within it (and use a service they pay tremendous amounts of money for); new research finding that it’s a sedentary lifestyle, not size, that correlates with increased health risks; and fat people turning out to be people whose lives are impossibly complex snarls of external and internal forces and who do not, in fact, owe you shit. As Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby wrote in their book Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere, health is not a moral imperative.
However, it is easier to mock and deride individual fat people than to fix food deserts, school lunches, corn subsidies, inadequate or nonexistent public transportation, unsafe sidewalks and parks, healthcare, mental healthcare, the minimum wage, and your own insecurities. So, “personal responsibility” was de rigueur, and my boss was on board.
It was the same bunk you were hearing everywhere around that time—imperious declarations about fat people’s delusions and gluttony, soaked in plausible deniability about “health.” Dan’s main sticking point seemed to be fat people (like me) who insisted we weren’t imminently dying—he fiercely and persistently defended his “refusal to take the self-esteem-boosting/public-health-shredding position that you can be obese and healthy.”
In one 2004 column, the root of a whole pantload of his fatphobia accusations, Dan got grumpy about women, “particularly obese people,” wearing low-rise jeans, and dismissed the impact that stigmatizing language has on young women:
“It’s an article of faith that we can’t talk about how much crap we’re eating—or how awful we look in low-rise jeans—without inducing eating disorders in millions of silly and suggestible young women… Our obsession with anorexia… not only covers up America’s true eating disorder (we eat too much and we’re too fat!), but it also hamstrings efforts to combat obesity, a condition that kills almost as many people every year as smoking does. Eating disorders, by way of comparison, lead to only a handful of deaths every year. If you’re truly concerned about the health and well-being of young women… worry more about the skyrocketing rates of obesity-related diseases in young people—like type 2 diabetes—and less about the imaginary link between anorexia and my low opinion of low-rise jeans.”
Okay, man. We get it. You are not into those pants.
More than anything, though, this passage from his 2005 book The Commitment sums up the overall tone of his stance, at the time, on fatties:
Two days later, in a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I came to a couple of realizations: First, anyone who denies the existence of the obesity epidemic in the United States hasn’t been to a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (The owners of water parks in the U.S. must be saving a fortune on water and chlorine bills; floating in the deep end of the wave pool with D.J., Terry observed that there was an awful lot of water being displaced. If the South Dakotans floating around us all got out of the pool at the same time, the water level would most likely have dropped six feet.)