Someone call CPS...THIS. IS. CHILD ABUSE!
As previously brought up on this page, the latest piece of news in the fat hating saga is this idea that parents should lose custody of their obese kids. Of course, being a fatty-fatty-fat-fat that these types of people hate so much, my first instinct was to roll my eyes, move on and let the better bloggers tackle this issue. But I started really thinking about it and figured, you know what? No. There is so much terrible in this article and in this very idea itself that I have to throw my two cents–or maybe more appropriate in this case two cheeseburgers–in.
First off, I hate concern trolling about people’s health, especially with weight. I have actually determined that there are two “but we care about your health” things out there that have nothing to do with the person. Smoking and fat. We will deride, demean, and say the nastiest things to people who smoke and who are fat and dress it up in “oh but it’s about your health!” like it’s supposed to make us feel better. Fuck you it’s about MY health. As a non smoker who has dealt with non smokers, people hate smoking because it stinks, it can end up making them stink and they just don’t like the look of it. Health becomes the after thought when the smoker gets enraged. With fat it’s much worse. We’re held back for promotions, make less money, get bullied endlessly even by GROWN ASS ADULTS (Dan Savage, looking at you, you fucking hypocrite), get told that all of our problems will be magically solved if we just stopped being fat, told that we’re disgusting to look at, sit next to, or smell…..oh but WE CARE ABOUT YOUR HEALTH. Let me tell you frankly and honestly, if you’re a reader who does any of these things or justifies fat hatred, go fuck yourself. If you’re offended that I just told you to go fuck yourself, then go fuck yourself harder, because I owe no courtesy to anyone who would demean me as a human being based on my pant size, wax poetic about my health, and make me feel like I should justify my fatness to them. You can huff and puff all you want with your dramatic “but it’s NOT OKAY TO BE FAT OMG READ THE STUDIES YOU COW!!!!!!11!!11!!11ELEVENTY!!!” it doesn’t make you any less of a jackass. But you know what? At least I have the opportunity to stand up for myself.
You know who doesn’t? Children.
That right there to me is the worst part of this all. In the States you have the First fucking Lady jumping on the fat shame bandwagon, you have articles like these, and all sorts that will snidely tell you that a fat kid is a sign of child abuse. Usually the last types don’t even have children and think putting nail polish on your kid is child abuse too, but let’s face in, it this society, when one of the most important people in your country is telling kids “you’re fat, and that makes you inferior” we’re starting to take those assholes seriously. Think about that for a second, and then think about how easy it is to shatter a kid’s self esteem. We are telling these children that they are not good enough. We are telling these kids that there is something wrong with them because of what they look like on the outside (we continue these thoughts and actions well into adulthood…it gets better my ass). We are telling children that they can’t reach their full potential because they’re fat….and you know what they’re doing about it? They’re going to rip you out of your home and take you away from your parents until someone makes you un-fat.
They’ll take you away as if your parents are drug dealers who beat the shit out of you, just because you’re fat.
That’s their solution. Instead of looking at the issue of food deserts, low income, bad job prospects, and the other things that come along with sacrificing healthy food for a full belly and roof over your head…they’ll take your kids away. Instead of helping people who need these resources, they’ll call you an unfit parent for doing everything you can to keep your family afloat and take the kids away. They’re trying to say that it’s totally no blame on the parent, but we all know that’s a lie I shouldn’t even have to explain. Fuck how much psychological damage it’ll cause a child who is taken from their loving, caring parents for basically no reason. Hell, I got fat as a child because I had early puberty, hormone issues, and ate a lot behind my parents’ backs. These people suggesting this tactic would take me away from two parents who didn’t do anything wrong.
The part that makes me most sick is that it’s a known issue that someone people will call CPS (or CFS up here) because they have personal issues with the parent. I don’t know how many times a bunch of us had a falling out with friends and said at the end “well CFS is probably going to visit soon”…because you’d be surprised how many people are assholes and will dig at your kids. So imagine the ammunition which assholes, and now fat haters, have at their disposal. People will get these agencies called on them just because people hate fat people, or hate them personally. These agencies are required to look at this, and you know what I call that? A HUGE FUCKING WASTE OF PRECIOUS RESOURCES. Now I know some people are thinking “nawwwww, that’ll never happen!”, but y’know, they’re probably the same people who thought that women who have miscarriages wouldn’t be charged under double homicide laws and other essentially anti-choice ‘child endangerment’ laws, but they are. So yes, the system is bogged down and lagged enough as it is, and people are suggesting that we take the time out to punish the fatties.
You’re actually concerned about the health of people and children in this country? Fine, while you judge away sucking at minding your own business, why don’t you try to find real solutions to the problem? How about reinstating funds to schools so they don’t cut Phys. Ed. as a program? How about better access to healthier food? How about subsidizing fruits and vegetables instead of weird shit like the corn industry? How about JOBS YOU MOTHERFUCKING REPUBLICANS that give not only a decent wage to live, but a decent wage to feed? How about better incentives, rates, and tax breaks for sports?
Apparently no. We’d rather damage the psyche of children to further the crusade against disgusting fatties than actually fix the problem. This is wrong, and if you think that there’s nothing wrong with shaming/destroying kids and parents in this manner, then maybe you should go down the yellow brick road to find a heart along with the brain you somehow dropped along with your humanity.
And you know the line to foster obese poor black kids will be around the block, right? otoh, i know a kid who’s a senior in high school and recently had the stomach band surgery. He’s been dangerously overweight for years, but his parents are white and upper middle class, so somehow I doubt that CYS would be knocking on their door.
I don’t agree with you about Michelle Obama, though. This is what her page says: Mrs. Obama recently launched the Let’s Move! campaign to bring together community leaders, teachers, doctors, nurses, moms and dads in a nationwide effort to tackle the challenge of childhood obesity. Let’s Move! has an ambitious but important goal: to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.
Let’s Move! will give parents the support they need, provide healthier food in schools, help our kids to be more physically active, and make healthy, affordable food available in every part of our country.
To me that sounds like it’s not an attack on fat kids but rather a campaign to see that all kids get the nutrition and exercise they deserve.
@mischiefmanager
I’ll refer you to this:http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/02/lets-move-part-ii.html for some of the reasons why the ‘Let’s Move’ initiative is problematic.
It’s all in the language too. Notice the important goal isn’t “to make kids healthier” but to “solve obesity”, which lends the the whole idea that thin is better than fat or being fat and healthy (which does exist).
Forgive me for having a little tin foil hat (conspiracy) moment here, but I think this is one more way to demonize women.
Bear with me …
Does it not seem to anyone else that this new taking kids away thing could be unduly prejudice towards single mothers? Think about it. A two-parent household is (not always, of course) more likely to have enough income to buy healthier foods and fresh produce. A single mother is much more likely to need to resort to canned veggies, frozen chicken fingers and other processed (but inexpensive) crap, not to mention Happy Meals and other fast food.
Perhaps this is the GOPs way of fixing their perceived “welfare mother” problem. Force these women to become dependent on the welfare system, force them to have no choice but to feed their children processed crap, remove the children from their custody … boom. One less family receiving food stamps! Money saved!
I agree with mischiefmanager as well. I’ve always thought that Michelle’s campaign was more about teaching children about nutrition and exercise as opposed to fat shaming. That said, I do wish she chose a different campaign because I’ve heard “Why is a black woman telling us how to eat?” entirely too often. (And I say this as an overweight black woman).
MO’s campaign would be all well and good if it focused on health instead of weight, but it’s focused on getting rid of childhood obesity within a generation. What does that tell fat kids? I’ll wait while you figure it out…………Now, we don’t even have a safe, effective way to make fat adults thin that works more than 5% of the time, so if we can’t do it for adults, how the hell are we going to do it for kids? This is why the diet industry makes $60 billion a year – if their product was effective, no one would be fat, and their product wouldn’t be needed anymore (I don’t see that happening anytime soon, do you?). Conflating weight with health is a mistake that all too many people make, and I for one am sick to death of hearing it. I’m just thankful that my son is an adult and I don’t have to worry about anyone coming to take him away from me, and that none of my grandkids fit the criteria, so far, that they would be taken away for the crime of being “obese”.
I’m going to join Krissie S. in her conspiracy theory about this disproportionately affecting single mom, and I’m going to up the ante by saying it’s likely racist as well, as it will disproportionally affects single non-white mothers. Because, let’s face it…obese children who live in affluent white suburbs are almost certainly not going to be affected by this, while black and Latino children in poor neighborhoods almost certainly will, because they are more likely to be obese. Of course, they’re obese because of poverty, lack of access to affordable, healthy food and exercise facilities or even just the chance to go outside and play (if you live in a high-crime urban neighborhood, spending time riding your bike around or playing outdoors might be downright dangerous). Bringing CPS into the picture simply because kids are obese punishes kids for factors largely beyond their control, and doubles down on kids who are already suffering from a hell of a lot of other disadvantages. It’s fucking inhumane.
Personally, I don’t find Michelle Obama’s campaign fat-shaming…I think it’s always been focused on encouraging exercise and changing attitudes about nutrition for a generation of kids whose eating habits are so unhealthy that many children are actually overweight and malnourished at the same time. Of course, you can only turn things around up to a point with that approach unless you’re also addressing the problem of ‘food deserts’ and the high cost of healthy food.
I laughed when I first read about this. Not because the subject is funny, it isn’t. I laughed at the ridiculousness of this proposal’s practical application. Around the area in which I work in the social services, cps doesn’t take kids away from drug dealing or neglectful families or families in which mild to moderate abuse is the norm. So the idea that they would stir to remove an overweight child is ludicrous. Which really makes me think that the whole proposal is nothing but fear-mongering and the bullying that you speak of. Other professionals who work with children and, therefore, cps have supported this whole thing (doctors) and they too must know cps could never jump on this bandwagon. Again I think it is fist shaking to the tune of “stop annoying us with your fat…and with your poverty too…OR ELSE!”
vesta44 is spot on and said it way better than I ever could
@FallStar I think what makes it especially disturbing is that the article states that children being removed from the home for being fat has indeed already happened a few times. Which boggles my mind since you’re right about kids being awfully neglected staying in their homes.
It’s just another form of fat, poverty, and mother shaming (because let’s face it, a dad going out for ice cream with their kids is ‘awwww’).
Word, MA. Thanks for writing the post I was too inarticulate to put together!
I just had a conversation with my mother last month about fat shaming and automatic weight checking at the doctor’s office. She was resistant to thinking it would be better best practice to forgo the automatic weigh-in for more holistic assessment of someone’s health, but after a few weeks of thinking she emailed me to say she’s starting to understand my perspective. It was a heartening conversation.
I think it’s SO HARD for us to see the way that discussion about body weight in our culture implicitly invokes shame and moral judgment because of all the powerful cultural narratives that link body size with moral fitness. We’re so used to that it’s invisible to us. So when us contrarians are like, “talking about obesity as THE public health crisis of the century is totally shaming,” folks are like, “what?! but it’s health!??!” without understanding how “health” stands in for judging someone’s moral fitness … and leads to crap like this suggestion that overweight children be punished for their “flawed” bodies by being taken away from their parents. W.T.F. society. Take a step back and think about where you’re going there.
i am right in line with krissie!
if i might add, if an impoverished mother were seen purchasing healthy foods like lean cuts of beef or skinless chicken, or fresh vegetables, which are far more expensive, there is always going to be some wingnut screaming about the lazy welfare mother buying steaks with food stamps.
she’s damned if she does, and she’s damned if she doesn’t!
if the state wants to get involved, they can do it by ensuring that these families are able to afford healthy nourishing foods instead of the cheap crap loaded with fat and empty calories that do nothing more than fill an empty belly.
we pay taxes so that people who need help can have it, not for politicos to have extra perks and for bureaucrats to take children out of a home with loving devoted parents.
The issue is not weight — the issue is health. To tacitly say that because a child is larger than “average” is a sign of abuse is absurd without measuring the child’s actual physical health. This is just one more instance of the “nanny state” mentality that creeps into government, where legislators given power by the people see fit to tell those self-same people how they should go about living their lives.
And more often than not, the reasons kids are obese are simple enough to enumerate: a) lack of exercise, b) lack of good food choices, c) lack of convenient grocery stores with fresh, cheap produce, d) the proliferation of fast food, and e) advertising of high-calorie foods over healthier foods.
We don’t have a good understanding of how the human body as a complete system operates. We makes gross assumptions which may be right in a general way, but obscure the actual truth of how the system in question really works in concert with other systems in the body. We cannot say with any certainty that obesity is actually, of itself, a health problem for everyone. Plenty of people are heavy their whole lives and seem to get along just fine. We have to stop predicating our judgments on incomplete information.
@NefariousNewt: And more often than not, the reasons kids are obese are simple enough to enumerate
I would suggest that any list like that needs to include genetics and health conditions, both of which over-determine someone’s body mass. While one’s health may be correlated with types of food consumed, exercise, etc., one’s weight is generally much more difficult to control through caloric intake and exercise.
Popping in to give you a Standing Ovation on this blog post.
If Obama’s campaign was just called “Let’s Move” and didn’t say word one about weight or obesity, I would agree that it is not fat shaming.
But it targets obesity right there in the goal “Let’s Move! has an ambitious but important goal: to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.”
Calling obesity an epidemic that needs to be solved IS fat shaming. Y’all who don’t see that may be in the same position as the guy who doesn’t understand why some women prefer to carry their own luggage, thank you.
@Krissie: Yep. And how much do you want to bet that the same people who came up with this brilliant plan are the first to scream about government interference when someone expects them to pay their taxes?
@Anna: You can’t not weigh people. That piece of data, like blood pressure, can be indicative of a problem, and especially since we’re all so sensitive on the topic, a recent unexplained gain or loss is something the patient might not choose to raise. The problem isn’t the weighing, it’s the toxic attitudes our culture has about body shape and size.
@mischiefmanager mmm. I think the weighing conversation might be a more involved one than this comment thread should be asked to sustain, but I would argue this: that there’s a difference between routine weighing as part of intake at virtually every doctor’s appointments (even specialists do it) and tracking the body mass of someone with whom you are working in a holistic manner and have decided (together) that tracking weight is part of your plan to better health. Routine taking of a person’s weight often just causes feelings of shame and has driven a number of women I know personally away from seeking medical care for any number of conditions (and I know from reading fat activist blogs this is not uncommon). So, from the perspective of a doctor who is seeking to reach patients who are not getting care it might be worth considering how de-emphasizing weight as part of the intake procedure might actually facilitate better outcomes for patients at the heavier end of the spectrum.
You hit the nail on the head when you said “we’d rather damage the psyche of children to further the crusade against disgusting fatties than actually fix the problem” thing. Right on, sister.
However. I read your post earlier today, and I thought about not commenting due to avoid hijacking the comment thread, being deemed an asshole, having all of the harpies hate me, etc., but something you said has been bothering me all damn day so I’m just gonna say it.
It’s the smoking part. I don’t agree that being concerned about smoking equals being a “health troll” in the same way that fat shaming does. I don’t agree that you can be healthy and be a cigarette smoker.
I’m in graduate school to be an SLP, and I work with adults with acquired aphasia who have had strokes. One of the risk factors for stroke is smoking. And let me tell you, working with stroke patients can be fucking sad. Rewarding, but sad. I have one woman who can only speak a handful of words, one at a time, for the rest of her life. I don’t know if all the people in the aphasia clinic were smokers, or if smoking led to stroke moreso than other factors in individual clients, but what I am saying is that smoking puts a person at risk for some really, really terrible shit. And unless a person has a condition in which s/he can medically benefit from cigarette smoking (such as someone with schizophrenia), I think about smoking the same way I think about crack cocaine.
This is why I don’t feel bad about ragging on my dad to quit, or commending the new graphic FDA banners that will soon be attached to every cigarette box, or being glad that places like airports, hospitals, restaurants, and shopping malls are smoke-free in the USA.
So when something like fat-shaming, something I find inhumane and completely unacceptable, is lumped together with smoking, I get a little upset. It’s just not same thing.
(One more PSA announcement, sorry: btw, smoking cigarettes while on BC increases risk of blood clots, which increases risk of stroke.)
@underbelly: What’s an SLP?
@Anna: I see your point. Still, though, docs collect all kinds of data that we as patients find uncomfortable to discuss-what our eating and exercise habits are, for example. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs thoroughly if they didn’t. So I wonder how we can balance the externally imposed shame that many people feel about many aspects of their health with the doctor’s responsibility to be upfront with the patient.
Ok,this is kind of a threadjack.
Maybe a dedicated post would be better…
This is not, of course, the first time CPS (or an analogue) has been used in a racist way. That’s why I’m always concerned about expanding the definition of “child abuse” to things that may not be in the parents’ cotrol, and especially to something that may be in the parents’ control but is hard to link to clear, inevitable harm to the child (vegan parents losing their children, say).
@mischiefmanager
an SLP is a speech-language pathologist. someone who stutters goes to see an SLP, etc.
Small, maybe meaningless anecdote:
Long time ago I took a picture of my baby daughter using black and white film sitting in a high chair. Her face was covered in some gloppy dark stuff, like she’d just put her face in a chocolate cake, just like the kid above.
I showed it to my co-worker. “Isn’t she the cutest!” I was a proud new mama.
My co-worker looked a little shocked and asked me with some not so well-contained disdain: “Is that chocolate on her face?”
I remember his reaction even though it’s been 19 years. And I totally bought into his attitude. I was so glad to be able to say, truthfully, “No, it’s prunes.” Now I look back on that and consider what he was thinking and what I was thinking.
I agree with Krissie S, Becky Sharper, and rogelio. Single moms, the poor, and minorities, are exactly who would be targeted with this. I would like to join The Nerd in a standing ovation.
@underbelly- I see what you are saying about smoking being not quite the same as fat, but I don’t think shaming is going to have a positive effect because it tends to just make people mad or, um, shamed…and then they go have a cigarette. Confronting and educating smokers is one thing, but there’s still a line that can be crossed, and at the end of the day you still can’t control their choices, even when they are choices you don’t approve of (for very good reasons).
I’m a little late on the topic and this isn’t entirely on point, but I’m just curious if you can point out the Dan Savage hypocrisy bit for me? I’ve heard a lot of negative shit about him second-hand but don’t really know any actual instances where he’s been bullying fat people. I’m no huge Dan Savage fan or anything, I’m just curious for some concrete examples if you have them? Thank you!
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2011/02/dan-savage-please-stop.html
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/10/savage-advice.html
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/01/sweet-jesus-i-hate-dan-savage.html
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/09/03/dan-savage-chill-with-your-race-baiting/
http://tigerbeatdown.blogspot.com/2008/11/profiles-in-douchery-dan-savage.html
All with appropriate links and whatnot. The guy is a total juicebox who has no business telling people that it’s going to be okay because ‘it get’s better’….apparently when you’re lesbian, bi, fat or a rape victim, you’re still fair game.
Awesome, thanks for that Marie! I live in Seattle & I read the Stranger every week (of which Savage is the editor), so I like to know the kind of person who’s behind it…
Thanks again!