Exciting times for those of us who are fatter than we should be. The feeling of being put upon may be, at a stroke, translated into full-on discrimination status if researchers at University College London have their way. According to academics at UCL who’ve conducted research into the effects of fattist stigma, ‘shaming and blaming’ fat people is counterproductive and society needs to confront one of ‘the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice’. Their research proves that although two thirds of British adults are overweight and a third are obese, nagging and jeering at them only makes the situation worse.
Tell me about it. I am merely a stone or so overweight (a size 12 in M&S, since you ask) – and following a useful piece in the Sunday Times Magazine last week, I’m putting it down to stress rather than greed – but you’d never think it to judge from the wounding comments of my children and their friends. ‘You’re as big as a tank’ said my daughter cheerfully. She’s seven, but it’s never too late for infanticide. ‘No, a house!’ said her little friend, who will never be invited for tea again. My son has been discussing me in this vein for years. When talking about someone properly big, he’ll say wonderingly, ‘she’s even fatter than you are’. Beasts. When the happy day comes when fat is the new black, I know who I’ll be grassing on to the thought police.
Meanwhile, there’s competition on the victim front from the geeks. David Harding, a hedge fund manager who has donated £5 million towards the cost of establishing a maths gallery at the Science Museum in Kensington, has said that ‘I feel these words [geek and nerd] are as insulting as nigger. I find it insulting’.
Well, being black doesn’t always translate into acquiring a £900 million fortune, which is what Mr Harding has got, following his own career as geek-made-good. There’s nothing like making a great deal of money setting up Microsoft or Apple or whatever to get you over the childhood pain of being called a nerd. Yet, asks Mr Harding, ‘are these words really used affectionately by society? … I feel they’re used with a slight fear and a slight putting something down so you don’t have to be respectful’. Well, no doubt they’re not respectful. But calling the swots swots or the nerds nerds can be interpreted another way: as the only comeback the dim children have against their peers who will, in the fullness of time, outshine them all by being in possession of skills valued by the market.
We shouldn’t, of course, underestimate the pain caused by being jeered at. I was regarded as a bit of an outsider at school, partly because I read quite a lot, and teenage girls have a way of punishing any kind of non-conformity. Neither do I have any illusions that being called a fatty will drive me to slimness. The looking glass does that all by itself, thank you. But what’s really tiresome is our genius for victimhood, our capacity to create formal categories of discrimination out of the rough and tumble of everyday rudery. Race and disability may just about cut it when it comes to getting protection from discrimination – but being a geeky fat swot really doesn’t.
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