The National Obsession - 2nd October

My new pal Joe started reading some Disappearing Man yesterday. Didn't particularly ask her to, but did share a link with her. One thing she said about the very first entry, all that time ago, struck home.

"The chances are, you're not as fat as you think you are," I'd written, or something like it.
She messaged me back almost immediately. "Most people who think they're fat...are fat, you know," she said.

I wondered about that. With a society that obsesses about how people look - how women in particular look, what happens to their bodies, and in particular, what they weigh, I was skeptical. Have a feeling that, coming to it new, Joe may well have got the wrong end of the two-ended stick of weight perception. I'm under no illusions of course that fat people think they're thin. You can't, I suspect, be fat in the modern world and not know it - because if it wasn't enough to get body images of what beauty looks like to the half-dozen people in the world who get to decide what beauty and fashion are these days flung at you mercilessly from every ad campaign - with the none-too-subtle underlining that "you must look like this or you're not beautiful, and therefore not worth anything - particularly not worth anybody wanting to love or have sex with, ya fat fuck!" - people will come up and tell you. They really will - apparently concerned folk will come up to you and tell you you're fat. Young people (some of whom the old reactionary in my soul wants to ban) feel it incumbent on them to point and laugh, and feel that society is probably on their side, so don't particularly hide their intent. It is surely beyond a shadow of doubt that fat people know they are fat.

But the point is that in this body-obsessive society, not-fat people also know they're fat. Because the goalposts of fat are frequently set by the insane. Which is to say the fashionmasters, who design, as I've heard it described, clothes for pre-pubescent 12 year-old boys, and then sell them to women. You can be by any rational definition significantly not-fat and still think, be told, be blackmailed and brainwashed by an advertising and celebrity culture gone entirely round the bend, that you're not not-fat enough, not thin enough, not perfect enough.

I was mulling that as I wandered through the magazine section at Tesco tonight. Normally of course, I avoid the gossip magazines like the plague they are, but tonight I looked up. Dawn French - Heavier Than She Was was the headline on one. Beach Body Epic Failures was the headline on another. Some C-Lister Whose Name I Can't Remember - Friends Worry As Weight Balloons was very nearly the headline of a third.

Just a couple of years ago, we had a scandal in this country because journalists were crossing the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour, hacking people's mobile phones. How, then, is it still acceptable to peddle body-image neurosis to a largely female readership, and get them to pay for the privilege of having fingers pointed indirectly and through the avatars of the famous or allegedly famous, at them, telling them what's wrong with their bodies on a weekly basis? Can we maybe, just for once in our lives, be a bit freakin' nicer to women, please?