From MTV.com, an article about fatsuits inspired by the current movie Just Friends:
Subconsciously or not, it’s easier for the audience to laugh at the fat person if they know that the actor underneath is actually trim. Eddie Murphy in “The Nutty Professor” remakes; Julia Roberts in “America’s Sweetheart”; Martin Lawrence in “Big Momma’s House”; Kenan Thompson in “Fat Albert” … all make safe targets because they’re not really fat. (OK, Thompson’s not skinny, but he’s certainly not “Hey, Hey, Hey” huge).
But to the overweight person sitting in the audience, the experience must be similar to a black person watching an old blackface minstrel show. When the character is presented as mean-spiritedly as Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard character from the “Austin Powers” movies or scary-thin Courteney Cox-Arquette’s Fat Monica from flashback episodes of “Friends,” it becomes outright torture.
I ran into the MTV piece via Big Fat Blog. I was particularly struck by this dead-on comment by BFB reader “Shyly”:
I went to see “Just Friends” with my boyfriend and little brother and sister on Thanksgiving, not realizing that it was going to be so godawfully fat-phobic. The worst part was that during the real fat-mocking scenes, my sister kept looking at me, trying to figure out my reaction. I felt at such a loss, not knowing what to do. It really made my heart hurt to know that we were sitting watching this movie that essentially said that *I* am worthless, and by not getting up and leaving the theater, I condoned that and said it was okay. I could just kick myself.
Years ago, I went to see The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphy version) with my friend Phil. After the movie, Phil and I ended up discussing fatphobia, and he remarked that during the worse of the fat jokes in that movie I was squirming in obvious discomfort. So there we were, watching the movie: Me uncomfortable with the anti-fat bigotry on screen, and Phil made uncomfortably aware of the fact that what was on screen was anti-fat bigotry by my presence.
It was a weird dynamic. Probably a bit like going to see a Farrelly Brothers movie with a disabled friend.
That’s two “comparison of oppressions” metaphors in this post: fatsuits and blackface (a comparison that a lot of comment-writers at BFB question), and fat and disability. I’ve already done fat and gay, a little over a year ago.
But of course, no two oppressions are really the same. It’s not even the case that any two fat people necessarily feel the same oppression from anti-fat bigotry. In the comments to another post, Reddecca commented that it had never even occurred to her that fat women and fat men are facing the same oppression; she had always thought of fat-phobia as a women’s issue.
I don’t think it’s just worse for women, I think fat and body issues are qualitatively different for women than they are for men, and I’m not sure that looking through the lens of fat acceptance, or fat pride, or even criticisms of fat phobia don’t hide those differences.
She’s not right – after all, that legislator in Hawaii didn’t suggest that only female fat teachers should be weighed and “dealt with appropriately.” But she’s not wrong, either – a lot of the bigotry experienced by fat women is not merely a meaner form of what men experience, but qualitatively different, because of how fat and gender intersect. (For example, disgust at fatness harms both fat men and women; but it also functions as a way of socially controlling and limiting all women, fat or not. See Naomi Wolf’s wonderful polemic The Beauty Myth – or for that matter, Jill’s recent experiences (see especially Zuzu’s comment)). Both lenses – a feminist lens and a fat acceptance lens – are necessary.
Comparisons are onerous and difficult. On a different comments thread on Big Fat Blog, PCKim, herself both fat and Black, objected to the blackface/fatsuit comparison:
If you had to read your nationality compared to every ill in the darn world you’d get sick of it, too. I come here about accepting my weight and stopping weight based discrimination. Sometimes I don’t even all of you realize you do this constantly. You need an example of the crap we as fat people go through, drag out the black comparisons for extra punch!
Usually it’s not about just racism as an example it’s racism against black people specifically that’s used as examples here constantly. It’s like do you want to be reminded that you’re not thin every time you look around. We don’t want to be reminded every second we’re a minority in this country, or how the man stuck it to us. We have sites for that type of thing.
PCKim makes a great argument. At the same time, I’d hate to think that the civil rights struggle – surely one of the most important moral movemetns in American history – leaves no lessons that can be applied to other situations. Everything is different, but at the same time, every human life is different from every other life. It doesn’t mean that comparisons are always useless, or that fat people can’t learn anything about our own situation by considering the history of racism and sexism. No oppression is totally the same, but no oppression is totally different, either. (Later in her post, PCKim does seem to say that sometimes comparisons are appropriate).
(Postscript: Be sure to read this excellent post by Reddecca, too.)
...raise taxes on all red states to pay for free healthcare for undocumented immigrants. I don't know, that last one…