Kirst,
Yep, as I said above, the fat people should be able to wear what they want. I was not really arguing against that point but I was trying to figure out the reason for my angst that was linked to it.
I pay an arm and a leg for a fruit box to be delivered on Fridays. We live in rural Wiltshire and although we have supermarkets in Marlborough and nearby Pewsey, the 'fresh' food is not as 'fresh' as that that comes in the fruit box. It is also a local business and I support that and it saves on driving to the supermarket etc. But the point I am making is this is over and above to try and make a difference.
It costs an arm and a leg to pay for swimming club sessions and to drive them there etc.
In this society of ours, it is much easier and cheaper to be fat I reckon. Fat food is also not just cheaper it also quite often tastes better than healthy food.
Ok, I see what you're saying, but you were posting about clothes without explaining all your other thoughts, so it seemed to me that you were questioning if fat people should have clothes.
It used to be that poor people were thin and fat people were rich. Now it seems that poor people seem more likely to be fat - and at the same time, malnourished.
Fat/thin isn't just a medical issue though. You can look at it in terms of medical consequences fairly easily, but the attitudes to weight and size and shape come from much more complex contributing factors.
And people find it very difficult to talk about. Look at the way the media use "curvy" to describe a celeb who's getting fatter than they used to be. Curvy isn't a volume, it's a shape. I was curvy when I was thin - because I'll always have hips and tits - and I'm curvy when I'm fat. Other people are more straight up and down, whether they're fat or thin. Look at the fuss about Christina Hendricks who plays Joan in Mad Men - she's not fat, she's the epitome of curvy, but because she's not stick thin, in Hollywood terms she's fat. And a few years ago when there was all that fuss about Jennifer Lopez's arse I read an article which said that she was 5'6" and 8 stone - if that article was true, then technically she was underweight, but people were going on about her as if she was a heifer.
Meanwhile of course no one should riducled or abused for being fat (or skinny), and good clothing should be available for everyone. I think it's dodgy though to publically celebrate and defend gross obesity as if there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, as some celebrities have done.
Think of it as people reacting to the decades of abuse and criticism they've suffered. I know people who have been verbally abused and in some cases physically assaulted by strangers in the street because of their size. Well, not because of their size, that's victim blaming, but because some people think it's ok to abuse and assault people if they're fat. If you've spent years of your life reading magazines or watching telly or films or overhearing conversations which make it very clear that your size and shape are not socially acceptable, or being bullied at school, or laughed at by your colleagues, or turned down for jobs you can do, then you might want to say a big "fuck you world, I'm fat, get over it."
