Call African-Americans lazy, and you are, of course, a racist. But call a fat person lazy, and nobody will raise an eyebrowe, except maybe in laughter. Gusa Vice-presidential candidate Andrew Geiger graduated to the Hoya News (February 27th), delivering the following funny one-liner during the radio broadcast of a presidential election forum: "Will the fat kid at the salad bar please opt for low-fat salad dressing?"
I ask you not to take his remark too lightly. Comments like that have a heavy impact. While others may crack up laughing, Geiger's joke cracks the self-esteem of many Americans whose body-shape does not conform to ordinary fashion standards and random health insurance charts. Fat-bashing is the last safe sport for prejudiced Americans, and it is sanctioned by the diet-industry that sends millions of people in the fitness treadmills, generating more than 30 billion dollar per year on the vicious cycle of diets that don't work. And a media that feeds off the advertisement for more than 2000 diet products continues to tell you Kate Winslet looked fat in Titanic, that Monica Seles is terribly out of shape, and that the modern heroine ought to look like a heroin addict.
There is a gender difference. While your big football player 'eats healthy', the slim cheerleader 'pigs out'. Women have a heavier lot to bear than man when it comes to body image, because it is important for them to look beautiful. And in a time where men feel threatened by the new self-esteem that feminism has brought to American women as a group, beauty means a transperent frailty, a disinterested pale appearance of a hollow image. Check out these fashiioon mags: beautiful is a Kate Moss who seems to subsist on cigarette-smoke alone, and inspires eating disorders en masse among teenage girls and young women.
I have heard an Italian say that he believes the idea of slimness and fitness naturally arises in a culture that has no resources to support bigger people. That is partially true. In my native Germany, we traditionally have a lot of heavy food, and of course, beer. Our kings and leaders have often been large. Look at the 300 pounds of presence of our chancellor Helmut Kohl. Or think of the embodiment of the German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic wonder of the fifties, economic minister Ludwig Erhard. He was a short fat man with a fat cigar. And my Italian friend was thinking of the pasta-tradition in his country and the voluptousness of people that we know from Fellini's movies.
But the US is a competitive society. Fitness counts, success, the first impression, image, speed, agility, mobility. All these concepts exclude the possibility of "beauty-fully figured" women, but ironically, they produce fast-food restaurants, ever bigger burgers, and a lot of fad diets that lead to yoyo-dieting. It's all a cruel game on our democratic idea of being able to rise above reality, to obtain an ideal. In this case it is the superficial ideal of a weight coming in one package with the happiness with which diet-dolls dangle in your face on TV, dying for your diet-dollars. The blond slim suburban Barbie has long and cruelly invaded children's dreams and self-perception.
In America, there is no place for sizes 12 and up, though women come in bigger sizes naturally. A fat-phobic society that knows no moderation is literally, figuratively and emotionally killing a whole generation of young women, sending 8th graders to Weigth Watchers instead of Girl Scouts, and to a fat farm instead of the leadership camp. Along with temporary weight loss young women loose self-confidence, a lot of time, energy, and focus on the real challenges of life. Up to 81 percent of 10-year-old girls have disordered eating through fear of fat, according to a California study. And 90 percent of the women in the United States believe they should loose weight.
I recommend a bit more German "Gemuetlichkeit", a bit more leisureliness, composure, and tolerance. Take it easy with that fat fitness craze. Germans are eating heartily, yet they are not as heavy as Americans. But it will be a long way to go towards Gemuetlichkeit in a country where an organization named "Shape up America" calls a guy named Michael Fumento "health policy specialist". Listen to the de-humanizing insults Fumento made in the honorable Washington Times (Oct. 15th, 97). According to his editorial, Body-Shop posters depicted "a cross between a nude Barbie and a dirigible" - "flattery" for "huge customers"; obesity is "a contagious social disease"; it is "no coincidence" that Americans are fattening up while "dumbing down"; and studies showed that "aversion to corpulence is built into our genes". Likening people of substance to zeppelins, suggesting that they are dumb and "contagious" company, and certainly not sexually attractive, Fumento takes his mouth way too full. It should be food for thought for all of us.