I usually leave my fat blogging to my Red No. 3 blog, but this is too damn silly not to post here. Apparently, being friend, even thousands of miles of way, will make you FAT. Oh, wait, I used to be not fat. Maybe I'm already a victim! Hanging out with all those fat girls in high school clearly is what made me fat. Its a social contagion! Its what all the cool kids are doing. Fatties are a bad influence! Those kids your mom warned you about.

Getting past the sensationalized "fat is contagious" nonsense, what they are really saying is that the existence of fat people around you fools people into thinking its okay to be fat. Which both makes the absurd suggestion that fat people are actually setting the trends on body size and the even more absurd suggestion that the real problem in our society is that fat people have it too easy.

I'm sure I've got a few friends who believe that who may also now be fretting that I'll make them by my presence on their Friends list. Let me just clear something up. Fat people do NOT have it easy. We're discriminated against in jobs, in housing, and oh, yes, social relationships as well. (Sure not to get better with people saying our fat is literally or socially contagious). We get paid less. Fat women get less emotional and financial support for pursuing a college education. We spend every day of our lives being bombarded by marketing which tells us our bodies are wrong, diseased, ugly, and worse. And nearly all fat people completely internalize all of this and do as much work as anyone beating themselves up for being fat, trying diet after diet, becoming drug dependent or amputating their organs, and always blaming themselves when these efforts fail instead of questioning the expectations they've been sold on. Fat people do NOT exist because our culture has made things easy on fat people. No matter what snarky little retort you think proves how our culture encourages fatness, it just doesn't. It does everything to create a hostile environment for fat people. No amount of fretting over imagined "social contagions" will change that fact. We're not infecting people with fatness. We're not encouraging people to follow us into fatness. We're not making the world safe for fatness. I'd love it if our society were more accepting of fat people. I want that. But I have the perspective to recognize that it most certainly isn't anything resembling accepting of fat people today.

That's my rant. The always wonderful Kate Harding offers a far more patient take down of this nonsense than I could muster, so by all means check it out if you're interesting in the topic. The rest of you, feel free to go about your business Simpsonizing yourselves, again. Sorry for the interuption. :D