Obesity As Metaphor?
The day before yesterday I was walking down 6th Avenue with an urgent rumbling in my stomach, I chanced to pass, at the same time, a McDonald's on my left, and a morbidly obese man sipping cola out of a giant-sized McDonald's cup on my right. Moments earlier, I'd been thinking about stopping into McDonald's for a quick snack, but when I saw the fat man with the soda, I immediately and involuntarily registered disgust. And that's when it hit me: Is it possible, just maybe, that fat-bashing, which has recently become acceptable (c.f. books like Fast Food Nation and films like Supersize Me) when it is couched in terms of a critique of fast-food culture/American eating habits in general, might actually be a projection by affluent Americans (the kinds of urbanites who generally strive to eat healthfully, work out, and stay slim), onto the bodies of obese people who happen to often be people of poorer means (Greg Crister's great piece in Harper's in the early '90s established the link between obesity, fast-food consumption, and poverty), of their (the affluent people's) disgust with their own patterns of conspicuous consumption???
I'm saying: Isn't it interesting that educated/affluent people spend a lot of time criticizing and being disgusted by other Americans' consumption of low-quality calories, while those same people are often plagued by an obscure sense of guilt about the amount of resources (gasoline, electricity, water, plastic, disposable diapers, you-name-it) that they themselves require? Might it not be easier to displace that vague sense of guilt about one's own behaviors and their bad consequences for the Earth by fixating instead on the unrestrained appetites -- so similar to one's own, and yet so different -- of a class of people that they can comfortably define themselves as separate from?
I'm just saying, is all. Am I the first? Or is this just, as Meg suggested it might be, a case of intellectual "overreach"?
I confess. Having thoughts like these makes me wish I were back in school again, so I could transform them into a nifty paper. Hm. I should have done American Studies.
I'm saying: Isn't it interesting that educated/affluent people spend a lot of time criticizing and being disgusted by other Americans' consumption of low-quality calories, while those same people are often plagued by an obscure sense of guilt about the amount of resources (gasoline, electricity, water, plastic, disposable diapers, you-name-it) that they themselves require? Might it not be easier to displace that vague sense of guilt about one's own behaviors and their bad consequences for the Earth by fixating instead on the unrestrained appetites -- so similar to one's own, and yet so different -- of a class of people that they can comfortably define themselves as separate from?
I'm just saying, is all. Am I the first? Or is this just, as Meg suggested it might be, a case of intellectual "overreach"?
I confess. Having thoughts like these makes me wish I were back in school again, so I could transform them into a nifty paper. Hm. I should have done American Studies.
posted by katherine | 3:20 PM
2 Comments:
in my defense, i don't think i called it 'intellectual overreach' - let me try to make a more cohesive point out of whatever it was i did say. the thing is, to call obesity (or the decrying thereof) a metaphor (or a stand-in, i guess, is more what you're saying) for privileged guilt about too-large appetites in general is to imply that that guilt isn't manifested in direct condemnation of all those other behaviors, too. i mean, if we want to say it's fashionable to fat-bash and throw up our hands about american eating habits/obesity, we can also say it's just as modish to denounce consumption in general. i don't think there's any more of a PC taboo on looking down the nose at the over-air-conditioned, car-dependent, plastic-obsessed, water-wasting-ness of the american populace at large than there is on criticism of their figures.
so i think what i meant to say was, it stands to reason that the most visibly noticeable outgrowth of out-of-control consumption, i.e., obesity, is the one that's captured the elite/public/media's attention first. after all, we don't yet really see what happens when we waste resources. our brains' connection-drawing mechanisms have a much rougher time mapping out the consequences of our less obviously damaging behaviors. but fatness is RIGHT THERE, grossing us out like the fashion mags have long been telling us it should, and the health ramifications of obesity (diabetes, heart disease, etc) affect us or the people we know far more immediately than the problems caused by the much-harder-to-wrap-our-heads around issues like global warming...
...if that makes any sense.
meg, i think we agree.
although yes, i see what you're saying about the fact that urban elites also don't have a problem with denouncing overconsumption in general (even though i believe it's hypoctirical most times) -- viz. 'real simple' magazine. is it you who was reading that last week or something, and talking about how ridiculous it is?
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