This might very well be the first time you've ever taken a cruise, or you could be a veteran cruise aficionado, bobbing along the seas. Maybe you saved and saved and pinched pennies, avoiding those early morning lattes and bagels, passing up the daily newspaper, buying generic instead of brand name, eating in instead of dining out; all in order to be able to afford to treat yourself to a lovely week spent sunning yourself aboard the deck of this cruise liner, seeing sights you haven't seen before, and enjoying the company of others like yourself aboard your ship. Of course, you could be one of the few who can afford this kind of trip or perhaps it was gifted to you by generous parents, loving children, or hell, you could have even won it as a door prize at Thursday night Bingo! The point is, you are aboard this ship, enjoying yourself and oblivious to any care or worry.
Perhaps you are over your ideal weight, or you're entering your senior years. Maybe you're even morbidly obese, but yet, you are still on this cruise, having a great time. You're with family, friends or loved ones; each one of you having a lovely holiday. Alternatively, you could be alone on this cruise, enjoying the ease of doing things on your own, without a bottom to wipe, a floor to mop, or mounds of laundry to wash.
There could be myriad reasons why you are on this cruise. The point is, this is your vacation and you're going to enjoy it.
So here you are, aboard the ship, minding your own business. Maybe you're not at your ideal weight - you could even be like me, morbidly obese. You might even be advanced past the age that some consider "ripe" for wearing things like a two-piece bathing suit. Whoever you are, once again, you're minding your own business, having a blast and totally oblivious to those around you or their intentions.
Unbeknownst to you one of your fellow passengers is sitting there with a camera not unlike most of the other people aboard the ship. She sits there and takes pictures of anything that catches her fancy and you don't give her a second thought. Wait just a second though...you don't know this but as you stand there, obese, in your bikini, she's taking pictures of you. You're a very large man shampooing your hair in the pool shower and she's taking pictures of you. You're an elderly person in a swim suit that isn't really the most flattering style for you, despite the fact that you're comfortable in it, and she's taking pictures of you too! Or you're the woman in the pool that isn't obese, or elderly; you probably just can't swim that well so you're wearing what appears to be a brightly colored pair of children's floaties whilst you swim. There's a good chance you're more muscle mass than fat and not being a strong swimmer you might sink were it not for the floaties. Sure, it's a pretty uncommon sight for an adult to wear swim floaties, but hey, it works for you! There's that woman again, she's taking pictures of you in your floaties, enjoying a swim. Say cheese!
The cruise is over. The woman with the camera taking pictures of the obese and unsightly never asked permission to take the photos of those she captured behind her lens. She isn't a professional paparazzo, isn't working for the likes of a Perez Hilton type blogger, and wasn't on the cruise at the employ of an organization who makes a point of mocking those who look/are different (something akin to People of WalMart, and for the record, I don't visit that site because I think it's cruel and because I'm terrified of finding a picture of myself out there, from one of my rare, but necessary trips to Wally World!), are obese, or just don't have perfect bodies. A few days later this woman uploads the photos from her cruise to her computer and then to Facebook, where the images she took of you (and they are clearly of you, not of scenery behind or nearby you, you were her "target.") she labels with derisive, demeaning and mocking commentary and she posts on her wall, for all on her friends list and those who are not (up until then, her images on Facebook were available for anyone to see as that's how she had her privacy options set), to see and mock along with her. But hey, you don't know anything about it, so it's OK. Right?
No! It's NOT OK! It's not alright. It's not funny and it sure as hell isn't acceptable!
The picture I drew above is in fact, not just a hypothetical scenario I imagined in order to make a point or illustrated in order to engage in a "fat acceptance" rant. If you've read me in the past and really and truly understood my words about living with morbid obesity then you know that I am not OK living like this and that I don't for a minute think it's healthy or something to aspire to. However, you also know that because I am obese I have been the focus of some of the most heinous mockery and derision that a person can be subject to.
You've read past posts where I have been painfully honest about what the words of people who feel that by being obese, you are less of a human and therefore not worthy of be accepted; how deeply those words have cut me. You know that once upon a time in the not too terribly distant past, after feeling myself worthless and invisible, I sat in my bathtub with razor blades to my wrist and was ready to take my own life in order to end the pain, humiliation, embarrassment and shame that being this large has caused me. I was in a very deep, dark and miserable abyss for a long time. Had it not been for the love of my family, and the help of a wonderful psychiatrist and the realization that, well, people can be assholes, but it doesn't mean I deserve what happened; well if it weren't for all of that, I probably wouldn't be here.
It's no secret that I've eaten myself into this unfortunate state after dealing with things from my past including the death of my toddler son, by using food to numb the pain of loss and the humiliation and shame of having inappropriate things done to me. It doesn't make it OK to stay this way, but it does shed light onto why I got here in the first place. Should those reasons, the reasons why anyone has come to be so utterly morbidly obese, matter? Does it matter to you, sitting there reading this? Or, do you feel, like the woman with the camera, it doesn't matter because we're disgusting and fodder for the masses?
Let's go back, for a moment, to the woman who took those pictures on the cruise with the intent to ridicule and deride those unlucky individuals, very openly and without shame, on Facebook. Yesterday I logged onto Facebook and like everyone else who does this, the first thing you see is your live feed. So I'm scrolling down and I come to some photos posted by a friend and the ensuing commentary beneath the photos was becoming rather heated. The photos were exactly as I described above. People in various means of enjoying themselves on a cruise, obese people in bathing suits, the elderly in bathing suits, a hugely obese man showering and shampooing after a swim.
This "friend', whilst someone I have never met outside of the internet is a woman I thought of with a great deal of admiration. We became acquainted through a birth board for our "January 2006 Babies" and several of us who used that board naturally let the friendships evolve and flow through to Facebook and Twitter. Through our pregnancies and birth journeys we shared bits of ourselves with one another...our struggles with past addictions, abusive relationships and battles with weight. I had a very hard time with reconciling myself that someone I'd admired was capable of such ugliness - and remorseless ugliness at that.
Once I got a good look at the photos and saw some of the other women's comments, I wanted to automatically unsee it. I worried that some of my other close friends, women I have actually gotten the nerve up to meet and become close friends with, who were also part of this birth board, would wonder if I'd already seen it and how it made me feel? I didn't want to get involved because I didn't want the pity. Yet, whilst I sat there with the bitter tears of self-hatred flowing down my cheeks, something happened. I got angry. I left a comment on her thread which was almost immediately deleted because it was becoming apparent that others were offended by the nature of the photos and her mean and ugly captions beneath the photos. My comment wasn't hateful nor did it take on the tone of someone trying to act as her moral compass...or maybe it did. The point is, I tried to be polite and explain how hurtful this was, despite the fact that it wasn't directly about me, by extension it was.
So, I wondered, openly on Facebook, what if it had been me on that cruise? Would she have taken my picture despite our "friendship" and then posted it the way she had the others? What about her other obese friends? Were we solely off limits because of our friendship? And if so, why? Are we special because she knows us and knows we shouldn't be made fun of, that it would hurt our feelings possibly? Are we somehow more human to her because she realizes there is more beneath the fat than Twinkies, Coke, Doritos and Big Macs?
What makes her other targets any different? Aren't they human beings with feelings and a right to enjoy their vacation without the risk of being made fodder for someone who gets off on debasing others?
Via my own comments on my Facebook wall, several women from this group of acquaintances chimed in with comments that asked what's the big deal, it's funny! There was even a comment from one woman in particular who is obese, she claimed that if she dressed herself in a bikini then she deserved whatever she got. To me, this kind of attitude takes human tolerance back several decades and says it's OK to hate others because they're different. So I posed a question to her and asked her, what if this woman, the one with the camera on the cruise, was not your friend but was someone who was interviewing you for a job? She has obvious issues with obese people and you are in fact obese. You are also the most highly qualified individual for the job however, because of your weight, she will not offer you the position. I asked her if she was going to sit there and tell me that sort of thing was alright. I never got an answer.
Let me say it again...this is not about "fat acceptance" whatever the hell that really is. It's about the fact that this woman with her camera took away the voice of the people she mocked...people like me or anyone else who is physically different in ways that are other than attractive. The woman with the camera thinks this
is a completely acceptable way to act and behave in a society that
fancies itself tolerant and accepting of others with differences.
Like I said earlier, others have chimed in, to the effect
that if you're fat, you deserve what you get, and if that comes to you
in the form of debasement, discrimination, and derision, so be it, you are worthy of
nothing better.
Screw that attitude. SCREW IT!
It's
taken me years to finally be able to stand up and say THE HELL WITH YOU
AND YOUR BACKWARDS DISCRIMINATORY ATTITUDE! I might be fat but I'm no
less worthy of common decency than any other person of normal size. And
that right there, common decency, is what this is all about! It's not about saying, love the fact that for whatever painful reason, I'm eating myself into an early grave. It's about the hate that stems from the disgust...disgust that really has no factual basis in reality because you do not know the person!
To answer a question that a very good friend of mine asked me, in regards to the woman with the camera, "Who is she to you?" - At
the end of the day the woman with the camera is no one to me. Not any more. But it
doesn't wash away the fact that I live in a world of people just like her and have
to deal with this sort of mindset on a day to day basis. It affects me and those
like me whether we want it to or not. We're automatically deemed
second-class citizens and worthless because of how we look and the things people
assume about us. So yeah, as much as I'd like to pretend that
attitudes like hers have no place in my life and don't affect me...it
does.
A few women who I admire a great deal have told me to let this go. Get off the computer and put my arms around Gaby and my husband. I don't want to be made to feel as if I have to defend my stance on this, or try and justify the time I've spent writing about it, or argue that I'm not neglecting my family. Believe me, Gareth would be the first to tell me to knock it off. This isn't just about me and the woman with the camera. It's moved well beyond that.
What if this had been you. Your mother? Your brother? Your daughter? Someone you love and care about. It could have been. I don't know who the people in those photographs were. But just think about it for a moment. What if it had been you?
This is about the fact that people still think this kind of thing is alright. People
are discriminated against every single day because of their weight. People
are taken less seriously and viewed as having less merit in the world
and less to offer because they're fat.
I am no less
intelligent, well spoken, or worthy because I'm fat; and I'm tired of
people saying it's perfectly acceptable to get off on debasing individuals like me. I'm not going to sit down and "hush" about this. Writing
is what I do. It's something I'm passionate about, just like this topic. I'd like to think I can make make a difference, but then...what do I know?
