In recent decades, the British population has grown in girth. The NHS England obesity report for 2017 found that 58 per cent of women and 68 per cent of the men were overweight or obese, as well as one in five children aged three to four, and more than one in three children aged ten to eleven. These weight issues are thus broadly in line with a perturbing global trend. The majority of the world's population now lives in countries where obesity kills more people than does being underweight. Worldwide, obesity – defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 – has nearly tripled since 1975.
Yet in spite of their steadily growing numbers, the overweight are still subject to contempt and discrimination. Notwithstanding concerted attempts to change latent or blatant anti-fat bias, fat-shaming remains the most widespread and socially acceptable form of discrimination based on appearance. Alarmist newspaper articles about the global obesity “epidemic” have contributed to the problem, creating the impression that our weightier peers are about to drag us all into a biopolitical apocalypse.
In 2015, a particularly cruel fat-shaming initiative made headlines. A group calling itself “Overweight Haters Ltd” distributed cards to unsuspecting victims on the London Underground, bearing the following message:
It's really not glandular, it's your gluttony … Our organisation hates and resents fat people. We object to the enormous amount of food resources you consume while half the world starves. We disapprove of your wasting NHS money to treat your selfish greed … We also object that the beatiful [sic] pig is used as an insult. You are not a pig. You are a fat, ugly human.
Although there was a collective outcry about this callous stunt, the card neatly sums up the key assumptions that, in the popular imagination, legitimize fat-shaming. Being overweight is frequently associated with disagreeable personality traits (greed, weakness, lack of self-control); the selfish wasting of resources (of food and precious NHS capacity); and an anti-social assault on the health, gene pool and future of the nation. It is also deemed an aesthetic attack on our visual sensibilities. Overweight people, the card suggests, provoke a disgust so profound that a derogatory animal metaphor cannot capture it. Not merely sub-human, their wobbly bodies are sub-animal, thus approximating the condition of abjection.
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