Without a lot of fanfare, a movement has been underway in this country for some time to outlaw the idea of “fat phobia,” which literally means “fear of fat people.”
Of course, like most of the other new “phobias” that have been discovered in the past fifteen minutes or so, “fat phobia” is a misnomer. No one’s really afraid of fat people, just like no one’s afraid of people who call themselves transgender. People are afraid of being fat, however, which makes sense. A fear of being fat is really just a fear of heart disease and early death.
Which are both things that a normal person is afraid of, or at least interested in avoiding. But this is still not a fear of other people who are fat.
Now it’s true that many Americans have, let’s say, an aesthetic aversion to morbid obesity. But this is also understandable, for lots of deeply ingrained biological reasons, humans have come to value traits like physical fitness. We also tend to prefer that women look like women, and men look like men, because that’s how the species propagates itself. This is human nature. The only way to outlaw this is to outlaw humanity.
And increasingly, it looks like that’s indeed the goal.
Earlier this year, in New York City, fat activists successfully campaigned to enact a law that makes it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their weight. What this means, in practice, is that every employer that fires a fat person in the city of New York can look forward to an investigation from the city’s Commission on Human Rights. Watch:
There are “still gaps” in the bill, remarks the fat activist. And if there’s one thing fat activists want to ensure, it’s that there are no gaps anywhere. They want to fill that space, they want to fill every space. And they’re going to expand their ranks until they’ve accomplished that objective. They certainly don’t want anyone to lose weight. They don’t want to reduce the number of people who die due to obesity in this country, which is one-in-six, by some estimates. That would make too much sense. The last thing they want is to encourage Americans to become less obese. Instead, as you just heard, they want to re-order all of society so that we “accommodate” the morbidly obese.
To that end, the New York legislation bans discrimination on height and weight in the areas of housing, the workplace, and public accommodation. The only real exception is for jobs where (in the eyes of New York city politicians) it’s “essential” for people to be physically fit.
What does that mean, exactly? And how often have people been fired for being fat in New York? Those are good starter questions when you’re talking about passing a sweeping new law like this, which has ramifications for every business in the city. And yet, no one has the answer to either of them.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
What little data we do have doesn’t seem very credible. For example, there’s one study on fat phobia that was cited by the Washington Post recently. Using data from 1979, this paper concludes that, “a woman’s hourly pay can drop by almost 2% for every one-unit increase in BMI.” It’s the standard story. We’ve all heard it. A woman gets called into the boss’s office and told that she’s getting a pay cut because she’s too fat. It happens all the time, except for the fact that it never happens. If it did, by the way, lots of people in this country would be getting paid negative $50,000 a year at this point. They would be charged money to go to work.
The whole premise is absurd, and yet, as the Daily Mail reports this week, these laws against fat phobia are becoming increasingly common. Even Colorado — which is the thinnest state in the entire country — the one that’s presumably less “fat phobic” than any other state — is now about to pass a law outlawing discrimination on the basis of weight. This would be the first time a law like this has been passed statewide in decades. Michigan apparently passed a law banning discrimination based on weight around 50 years ago, followed by Washington state. Now Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are looking to do the same.
But Colorado is unique because it’s a state that, even accepting these fat activists’ standards, needs these protections the least. Their obesity rate is just 25%, which is, sadly, quite low by U.S. standards. But they’re about to get some new regulations for the benefit of the morbidly obese.
According to The Hill, “The law aims to prevent landlords from denying rentals based on weight limits and to implement workplace accommodations for overweight Americans.”
You’re supposed to accept that explanation of the law on face, but it raises a couple of obvious questions. First of all, how big do you have to be to exceed the weight limit for an apartment building? Second, what kind of “accommodations” are workplaces supposed to make for fat people exactly?
It’s hard to get straight answers to these questions, but if you look around on social media, you’ll find some specific proposals. You might have seen this TikTok video that was everywhere a few weeks ago. It features Jaelynn Chaney, a self-described travel and lifestyle creator based in Vancouver.
Here she is, to give you some idea of what these fat activists want:
So Chaney is basically demanding that every hotel and restaurant in the United States be razed to the ground, and rebuilt with new, super-wide hallways and wide bathrooms and elevators. She also wants to make life worse for everyone else, including by removing chairs with arm rests in rooms and common areas.
Separately, she’s also demanded that airlines provide extra free seats to obese people, so they have room to spread out: “As plus-size travelers, my partner and I have unfortunately experienced discrimination and discomfort while flying,” she says. She doesn’t care about the discomfort she caused non-obese passengers on the plane. Really, what she’s saying is she doesn’t want those people on the plane at all. She wants their seat for free.
And she’s not alone. The D.E.I. website Femin-uity assembled a list of similar demands on behalf of fat activists. Here are a few of them: “Communal spaces like dining areas, conference rooms, and relaxation rooms should have furniture like chairs, desks, sofas, and tables that are inclusive of fat people. It’s best to avoid stools, tiny benches, or chairs with rigid armrests. Creating a fat-inclusive office also means re-thinking every inch of the space. Avoid tight corners. …”
Yes, rethink every inch of space — remodel your entire office building — for the sake of people who have eaten so much that they can no longer comfortably walk down the hallway or sit in a chair. These are the demands, and they are actually being met. In London a few years ago, the mayor banned ads featuring attractive women in swimsuits from appearing on public transit. One of the ads asked, “Are you beach body ready?” That’s hate speech in London, evidently. Tens of thousands of people signed a petition to get the ads removed. They even vandalized it with graffiti. And ultimately they succeeded.
In this country, the school of public health at the University of Illinois Chicago recently proposed banning the word “obesity” entirely. As The Independent reported, the university claims that weight discrimination remains,“one of the only forms of discrimination actively condoned by society”. Which is just not remotely true. And the University of Illinois knows it’s not true, because they had an affirmative action plan, which discriminates against whites and Asians in all aspects of admissions and hiring. That’s one of the worst imaginable forms of discrimination, because it’s based on something people can’t control. But they condone it. In fact they practice it.
That’s the thing about alleged discrimination against the obese. Most of these examples of discrimination are made up and ridiculous. But even if there was some discrimination going on, it wouldn’t be in the same ballpark as discrimination based on something like race. Obesity is a choice. It is the result of a deliberate lifestyle. Obesity is a consequence of behavior. If you are 500 pounds and feeling discriminated against, you put yourself in that position — and the good news is that you can get yourself out of it.
A white man facing affirmative action discrimination cannot do anything to be not-white. But an obese person can, and should, and for his own health must, do something to make himself not-obese.
Obese people have become the next big victim group in America, but they are — like so many of the new, modern victim groups — victims of their own behavior. That’s why this has is such a growing and popular victim group — because anyone can eat their way into it. Just lie on the couch and gorge yourself on Pringles and very soon you, too, will be able to recast any criticism of you as bigotry. You, too, will be handed a “get out accountability” free card. You, too, can claim that anyone who upsets you or disagrees with you is some kind of -ist or -phobe.
In this way, the fat acceptance movement is no different from any other faux-victimhood movement. But it does stand apart, to some extent, as perhaps the most farcical example of modern society’s “me-first” ethos. The whole idea behind the movement is that the world should rearrange itself for the sake of making room for the morbidly obese. And they mean that literally — we need to literally rearrange the furniture so that these people can fit in the room. It’s on-the-nose to the point of absurdity.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP
Of course, the much easier, more cost effective, fairer, and more sane approach is for the morbidly obese to make some simple lifestyle changes so that they can more easily be included. But that puts the onus on the individual. That requires willpower and sacrifice. That can never be allowed. In our age, everyone else must sacrifice so that the individual sacrifices nothing. The self reigns supreme. All must bow to the self. Society must change for the sake of the self. Civilization must re-order itself. The world must stop on its axis and spin the opposite direction, if that is what the self demands. The self must be required to do nothing, and the world to do everything. The problem, of course, is that every individual is part of “the world,” which is how you end up with self-serving laws that hurt the people they’re supposedly trying to help. When you try to have a society where each individual is a god whose wishes, proclivities, and demands trump the good of humanity and of society, you end up with a predictable mess. You end up with decay and collapse and confusion.
We’ve seen this confusion for a while now. A decade ago, New York banned large sodas in order to make everyone skinnier. Now they’re mandating that everyone treat obesity as if it’s natural and healthy. No matter what the one thing politicians don’t want to do, because it would diminish their power, is to let people make their own choices. That includes the freedom to eat and drink to extraordinary excess. But also, more importantly, it includes the freedom to criticize those who do.