I Don’t Need Your Obesity PSA. Or Your Fat Joke.
By: Melissa Boles
Tags: Fat, Obesity, Fatphobia, Covid 19, Donald Trump

I Don’t Need Your Obesity PSA. Or Your Fat Joke.

Our continued othering of fat people is getting old.

I don’t know why I am surprised by this. I shouldn’t be — I’ve been the subject of fat jokes and the receiver of diet and exercise advice since the fifth grade. And yet here I am, 32 years old and surprised.

Surprised is maybe the wrong word. To tell you the truth, I’m not surprised at all. Part of me is astounded we’re still doing this but most of me has just reached the peak of frustration. Apparently it doesn’t matter who we are or why our body might look the way it does — we are fat, so we are stupid, we are gross, we are less than.

On October 27, Variety released a PSA from The Creative Coalition about the connection between Obesity and Covid-19. The PSA came out earlier than that — I grimaced through it on The Creative Coalition’s Television Humanitarian Awards on September 17, and it popped up on their Twitter and The Obesity Society’s Twitter at the end of September — but the end of October was when it gained some traction on Twitter.

Meghan Tonjes was who I saw post about it first, and then it started to pop up on the Twitter accounts of other fat activists. It gained just enough traction that I started to get frustrated again — more so than the first time I saw it.

The PSA is effectively this: if you’re fat, you could die from Covid-19, so you should go to the doctor. As we have learned over the last year, however, Covid-19 is unpredictable. Twenty-somethings who exercise every day and have no underlying conditions are dying. People in their fifties and seventies are dying. People you think can’t possibly make it come out seemingly unharmed.

Covid-19 isn’t a discriminatory disease. Are there people who are more at risk to have a severe case if they get it? Sure. But anyone can catch this virus.

I believe the Creative Coalition’s PSA comes from a well-intentioned place. Maybe that’s naive, but I don’t think any of them came at this from a negative perspective. I do think that our society has set itself up to assume that fat people are inherently lazy or bad. The Creative Coalition, however, pushes for obesity to be talked about as a disease.

Here’s the thing, though. Some of us? We’re just fat. And people need to learn to be okay with that.

The PSA encourages people who are fat to talk to their doctor about their weight and Covid-19. As a fat person, I can tell you right now that the last thing I’m going to do during a pandemic is go to the doctor unnecessarily. Talk about putting myself at risk (fat or not). On top of that, I do not know a single fat person who has never talked to a doctor about their weight. Most of the time, those doctors aren’t exactly helpful. Often, they encourage behavior that leads to disordered eating.

What is helpful, and what does keep someone who is fat protected from getting Covid-19, are mask mandates and stay-at-home orders. The Creative Coalition could have made a PSA about that if their primary concern was keeping people from getting Covid-19. As I mentioned, I think that was where they were coming from. I also think their PSA was fatphobic and ableist.

I started thinking about this again after Anderson Cooper’s horrendous comment on CNN late on November 5. Cooper is not the first person, nor will he be the last, to make a fat joke about Donald Trump. He’s just the most recent.

I am certainly not defending Donald Trump. His speech November 5 was chock full of lies and very clearly the words of someone who is used to being in control and suddenly isn’t anymore. But none of that has anything to do with him being fat.

If you missed it (or aren’t on Twitter), after Trump’s speech about the election Anderson Cooper said “That is the President of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world. And we see him as an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realizing that his time is over.” The sketches people have drawn to accompany these words are awful. For a while, #obeseturtle was even trending on Twitter.

Cooper could have made this same point without the word obese. A turtle flailing on its back is just as distinct an image as an obese one. But the fact of the matter is this: it’s easy to throw Donald Trump under the bus for being fat when you believe fat = bad. The problem is that it’s not just Donald Trump you’re attacking.

Sure, Cooper was probably just thinking about Trump when he made the comment. But every fat person who saw that or heard about it later heard “Donald Trump is a bad person because he is fat.”

Fatphobia runs deep in our country, and around the world. There is a constant push for people to be a certain size or shape. Has there been progress in the last decade in how we talk about different sized bodies? There absolutely has. And it is undermined every time someone makes a fat joke or equates someone’s negative characteristics with the size of their body.

The number one group of people discriminated against based on size is not men, and it’s not white women like me. It is fat Black women. And every fat comment about Donald Trump, every PSA about how if you’re fat you could die (whether it’s about Covid-19 or not), puts fat Black women in danger. Doctors notoriously do not believe fat people, and especially fat Black women, when they come in for support. Their textbook answer is to suggest the patient lose weight. People have died from treatable diseases due to this advice.

As we begin working towards what comes next for our country, one of the issues we must tackle is our country’s fatphobia. Fat people are not stupid. Fat people are not lazy. Fat people are not diseased. Fat people are not less deserving of healthcare. We are just fat, and at some point people are going to have to realize that fat people are as much of a person as anyone else. Making fat jokes about Trump (or anyone else) gives people permission to continue to hate fat people, and pushing for fat people to be seen as having a disease that puts them at risk for contracting a virus in a pandemic doesn’t protect them, it others them.

I have spent much of my life being seen as less than or different because of my body. Less deserving of respect, less deserving of love, less deserving of the basic care everyone else is given. I’m not interested in being told how I could be better if I was thinner. I’m just interested in being loved for who I am. And each time someone who is racist and sexist and homophobic gets called out not for those traits but for being fat, I feel a little more like who I am will never matter if you don’t like how I look.

We have exhibited pretty clearly that we are not yet better than these comments. With work, I hope we can be.