Is Fat A Fundamental Issue?

Fat is famously a feminist issue, but more than that, it's undeniably a psychological one. If you were fat as a kid, you'll know what it's like to be bullied because of how you look - though of course, chances are, you'll know what it's like to be bullied for something, whether you were a fat kid or not. If you were a fat teen, then you went one of two ways - the Wallflower Way, watching all the aesthetically 'normal' people as though they were some alien species going through elaborate courtship and mating rituals that had nothing to do with you, or owning your size by sheer force of personality and winning your share of the game. And if you were a fat kid, and a fat teen, and then in the never-quite-full-enough fullness of time you became a fat fuck, chances are high that this part of yourself has had at least a partial effect in the development of your personality, your self-image, and your life.

The cliches of course are many and easy to spot. The laughers-at-themselves-before-anyone-else-does, who carve themselves into a crowd by being 'the funny one.' The bitter blokes who think they're cleverer or better than all the 'ordinaries' and end up with peculiar, insular hobbies-for-one. The girls who use their fat as an excuse for their painful shyness, and grow up physically illiterate and proud they didn't succumb. The 'easy' girls, who give themselves away, some mistaking sex for love, some mistaking nothing and not willing to be wallflowered. The Good Friends, who seat themselves so close to someone else's life and confidences that they become characters in other people's stories, without ever having stories of their own. The genuinely glandular, who start every conversation with "I'm not fat, I've got glandular issues..." The roaring, screw-you, I'm here and I'm a fat fuck, deal with it or get out of the way types who still, given a chance, nip out of photos or the path of vicious mirrors...

I said a few days ago that being fat gives you an outsider sense of humour. That's true if you grow up with it, I think, because you're fundamentally told at every opportunity that you're really not an 'insider'. People never come out and absolutely say it - at least not to you - but there's a sense of fat being a kind of self-inflicted disability, a self-exclusion from the dreams that everyone else has. With a handful of notable exceptions, you don't see fat heroes or heroines in the movies, famous men who get fat are 'past it' - and the horrendous hounding that women who put on weight get in the tabloids and the magazines is positively shameful to the profession of journalism, but it's feeding the same public conception - fat people deserve to be ostracised. There's even talk of making people bigger than a certain size buy two seats on planes - mainly it seems because the non-fat are inconvenienced by our bulk.

I'm not entirely sure what's prompted this fairly dour entry. Mainly, I think, a rage against stereotypes, and against people who think it's somehow 'right' to treat fat people like second-class citizens simply by virtue of their inability to fit into cultural or aesthetic boundaries. It's to some extent the same lazy thinking that denies the full range of human emotions, dreams, ambitions and frustrations to people with disabilities - except where people with disabilities get condescension and 'pity', fat people get bitterness because 'they brought it on themselves'.

Most of the people I know who are trying to lose weight are actually trying to do it for health reasons, rather than social or aesthetic ones, but there will undoubtedly be social, aesthetic and psychological side-benefits. The question, I suppose, is how much being fat is a part of who you are at a fundamental level, and what happens if you radically change that - do you become more human in in the eyes of some people, and how much of how you see yourself changes. If you've been 'the funny one' all your life, do people still think you're as funny if you're not as fat? If you've had your social and sexual life determined for decades by by being an outsider, how do you change the person you've become if you suddenly become an insider?

Ach, ignore me. I only started in this philosophical vein because surely not every day can be 'ate this, rode that, shat my brains out twice...'