Clean Sty —

There’s an old saying (which I cannot for the life of me find a reliable attribution for) in politics: “Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”

While good advice, it’s only true for a person in power.

The problem comes when pigs are in control.

That’s the situation we’re facing. Some of the most hateful, spiteful, vitriolic assholes on earth are allowed to speak freely, unchallenged by journalists because the current political climate makes extremist anti-obesity rhetoric tolerable.

Several people asked me why I would want interview MeMe Fucking Roth. Why would I want to lend her credibility? Why would I want to waste my time enduring her insanity? You aren’t going to change her mind, so what the hell was the point?

My aim wasn’t to persuade MeMe Fucking Roth that she’s an idiot. Because, for one, I don’t think she is an idiot.

Mentally unstable? Probably.

Intellectually dishonest? Oh, hell yeah.

Dangerously zealous? You betcha.

But stupid? Not one bit.

She knows her shit, people, when it comes to obesity research. Granted, she accepts a lot of junk science, but she also accepts certain truths that most fat haters won’t, such as the futility of dieting and the environmental factors that have led to our 20 year weight spike (from what I can tell (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the weight change began in the mid-70s, but seemed to pick up speed after 1980 and continued until 2000 (not counting the ’98 BMI BS), then the weight increase for women and children tapered off, followed by men five years later).

Frankly, it’s not her knowledge that’s messed up.

It’s her inspiration, interpretation and application.

That’s where she’s gone off the fucking rails.

Her anti-obesity inspiration (publicly, she’s spoken of that her mother embarrassed her in kindergarten for coming to her class fat and her grandmother’s end of life struggles) is a mix of disgust toward and loathing of fat people, as well as an impression of fatness as immobilizing and, well, self-shitting.

Her scientific interpretation is deeply biased (fat women have more sex because college guys pity them/take advantage of them/expect them to put out and fat women are too desperate to turn it down), wildly contradictory (the human body resists weight loss and yet the 95% failure rate is due to personal failure), and nonfactual (over 90% of fat people are fat from poor lifestyle choices, based on… what again?).

Her application of all this is to employ heavy doses of fat shaming and radical civil liberty restrictions for the sake of saving us from ourselves.

And yet, MeMe Fucking Roth is hailed as a hero by those who share her contempt for fat people.

What do we do?

Do we ignore her, while she goes on Fox News against soft ball opposition from Cavuto? Do we scream at our televisions as she filters the events of Silent Bobgate through her intense obtuseness? Do we write letters and call studios and raise a ruckus and try to shut her up?

No.

No we don’t.

Of all the goals of Fat Acceptance, the one we will never achieve is eliminating fat hatred.

What we can do, however, is make fat hatred less acceptable.

The way you do that is by confronting the MeMe Fucking Roths of the world and exposing her hatred for what it is. Not in a futile effort to change her mind, but in order to change the minds of those around us.

And we do it until the day it no longer becomes necessary to defend our right to exist outside public scrutiny.

In order to do that, we’re gonna have to Get in the Mud.

Or GitM.

GitM means fighting fat hatred on their turf.

We tend to think that we have to first convince people of the evidence in favor of Fat Acceptance or HAES, but you’re only able to jump right to the meat and potatoes if the other person is open to hearing evidence that runs contrary to popular opinion.

Take, for instance, the claim that obesity costs $147 billion a year in healthcare costs (and an estimated $344 billion by 2018)

You could counter that by explaining that the $147 billion estimate was reached by assuming all metabolic diseases are caused by obesity (meaning thin people don’t have heart attacks, diabetes or hypertension) or that if a fat person went to the hospital with two separate problems (such as diabetes and heart attack), those costs were counted twice.

Now, come to the realization that what the other person hears is “Wa wa wa wah wa wah wah wa wa wah.”

Stop trying to pull them out of the mud. They’re stuck, people.

Instead, Get in the Mud.

Explain that, okay, if healthcare costs are so important, that we have to enact an authoritarian intervention, then it would stand to reason that we shouldn’t go after fat people, but thin people. Seeing as how thin people supposedly live longer, then their lifelong healthcare costs are much more expensive than the brief lives of fatties.

Take the fight to them. Accept their logic, then show them how it doesn’t even work in MeMeLand.

Get in the Mud.

Someday we won’t have to GitM. Someday popular opinion will level off and fat people won’t be the folk devils of the day. Common sense will prevail and we won’t be seen as a burden to save or a plight to overcome. I don’t know how long it will be until that day, as the good Dr. King once said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

That all being said, I introduce the latest Theme in our arsenal: Muddy Mondays, where we’ll practice mucking it up with the fat haters. Prepare to play Devil’s Advocate (one of my favorite games) because I want FFFs to be a Fierce, Freethinking Fatty training camp. I want to give anyone who wants it the ammunition to dismantle fat hatred piece by piece.

So, stick around because it’s bound to get interesting.

In the mean time, go GitM.