Fat Hatred: Family Friendly & Realistic?
Kate Harding posted an entry on a children's book, The Gulps, which promotes an anti-fat message. Worse is that the first review for the book on Amazon claims it has a "realistic message". The Gulps are a family which eat constantly, are slobs, etc. - perhaps the people at Woot have heard of them?
On a similar note, my car has Sirius satellite radio and, as you can imagine, there are a few comedy stations. I was in some nasty traffic a couple weeks back so I turned one of them on. Everything was fine until a fat joke came on. "No big deal," I thought, "I'll change channels." So I did and... there's vintage (?) Bill Cosby, telling fat jokes of the non-Fat Albert variety. I thought, "Okay, I'll change again." I landed on "Raw Dog" - you can guess what I heard on that station.
I flipped once again to a station that promoted itself as "family friendly" comedy. Okay, great. Something funny, anything funny. So on comes Jeff Foxworthy... with... fat jokes.
I know we've talked about fat jokes before, and personally I'm not sure when they're "okay" or not. But more often than not they bug me. This instance was particularly nasty specifically because this Sirius station was promoting itself as "clean", "family friendly" comedy. I'm not sure why fat jokes, talking about people so big one can see them from outer space, are family friendly... maybe because they didn't contain the cursing on Raw Dog?
In any case, a letter is on its way to them (via this contact page with the easy URL).
Woot! Fatphobic! | Joy Nash Has a Posse (and a Blog)
Posted by paul on June 26, 2007
I'm not sure where I stand on fat jokes. I think that they bother me sometimes beacuse I'm not 100% comfortable with my own fatness yet. I don't have a problem with most women/Jewish jokes (I'm both), but sometimes those bother me as well. I think that there are funny jokes, and then there are jokes that are just simply mean and meant to humiliate. I guess it's a fine line.
I left a comment on Amazon.
Wow. Just...wow. What an awful book. How shameful.
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"The first thing you lose on a diet is brain mass."
~Margaret Cho
How can this be considered a positive message? The pointing out of normal differences in a negative way is what kids need?
Ugh. Pure nastiness being shovelled into a children's book. Personally, I think it's disgusting and I have no idea how the writer of the second editorial review could possibly refer to it as "cautionary yet supportive" unless they're being paid to do so or they're completely lacking in any sense of compassion or empathy. Admittedly, I haven't read the book itself, but the summaries given in the editorial reviews are enough to tell me how spiteful this story is. Kids aren't going to learn anything positive from this. If anything, it's given the kids who taunt (or even bully) fat kids more ammunition and it's given the fat kids yet another place to find the message that because they're fat, they're somehow less worthwhile than the kids who aren't.
And as for the fat jokes—I say that if it's unacceptable to ridicule people for any other reason, then it's unacceptable to ridicule people because they're fat. Now, I can take a joke as well as anyone else, but only if it's actually a joke that's worthy of the name. I've never heard a fat joke that wasn't chock-full of disgust or cruelty, even if the person telling it was trying to pass it off as being a good-natured jibe.
Reminds me of Stephen Cosgrove and Catundra. I came across it recently and skimmed through it, remembering liking Leo the Lop as a kid, and... ugh! More or less the same premise as this book.
I vaguely remember a Sirius pop-up ad that had pictures of two women: one fat in a mini and a low cut top labeled "regular radio", one in average-everyday clothes and average-sized labeled "sirius radio". I wish I'd screenshotted it, but it put Sirius on my do-not-want list pretty quick (the "regular radio" chick was pretty hot!).
That reminds me of a spot G4 did last year when all the new gaming platforms came out. They were comparing the PS3 to another platform (XBox? Wii? I don't remember). The chick personalizing the PS3 was all done up as a fat librarian type- sweather vest, long sleeved button-down shirt, slacks, "sensible" shoes, and glasses. She talked about how difficult she was to use, and how her "vibrate" function had been removed. The girl portraying the other platform was skinny and done up in an Avril Lavigne type punk style- and she acted all ditzy and "easy" to use.
My soul already belongs to the PlayStation, but that just really turned me off.
I have noticed recently how much the anti-fat message is being sent to kids on a daily basis. Most cartoons have a fat character as the villain or the fat one is stupid. Kids as young as four will look at someone fat and say, "ew, she's fat". They are being taught fat=bad, scary, not human. I am afraid that fat hatred is being spread to the next generation in abundance and most people don't see it as a problem.
Fat jokes are easy because, unfortunately, they always get a laugh. After all it ok to laugh at the fatties because we let ourselves get this way. I think that most people need to feel superior to someone and fat people seem like the best choice (especially since there is an "obesity epidemic"). It is not that I can't laugh at myself but I have yet to hear a fat joke that wasn't mean spirited or a cop out.
I think fat jokes are almost always in poor taste, but it depends on the execution. If it's a fat person making jokes about how hard it is to be fat, I might find that funny. If it's a thin person or a fat person making jokes about how fat people are ugly, lazy, smelly, gluttonous, etc., then I would think it was in poor taste. So basically I think fat jokes are like other kinds of humor about stereotyped groups - only funny if the person making the joke is part of the group and "out" about it.
As for the family-friendly part - anything is family-friendly as long as it doesn't have swear words or sex in it. Besides, if kids don't learn young that it's bad to be fat, they might grow up to be fat ('cause it worked so well for us, of course).
I'd like to point out, from the -- ahem -- fat and stupid perspective I have that the joke on seeing a fat person from outer space is scientifically ridiculous. With the very best orbiting telescope in visual wavelengths, HST, couldn't distinguish two lit headlights of a mid-sized sedan on the moon -- and they'd be lit up.
The small angle formula from trig is D = X · d / 206,265 , if you needed to know that, which tells us the relationship between distance from and the diameter of an object and how much of a circle that would subtend--that is, spread over, in arcseconds.. The Hubble has a resolution of .1 arcseconds. You can do the math and figure out not even a beached blue whale would be visible from outer space.
So I laugh--in derision at a pea-brained comedian, as ignorant as so many thin people, don't you know--but not at the joke.