So Southwest Airlines may have just a minor miscalculation in their ongoing war against fat people.
They booted Kevin Smith off a flight.
Yes, the writer and director who regularly has his on-screen alter ego Silent Bob described as tubby, was already seated, with armrests down and seatbelt buckled, when Southwest decided that he was the wrong size to fly.
Smith announced his defenestration via his (warning, at times incredibly NSFW — which goes without saying; this is Kevin Smith we’re taking about) Twitter feed. Kate Harding was kind enough to stitch a few of Smith’s tweets together:
@SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was wrongly ejected from the flight (even [attendant] Suzanne eventually agreed). And fuck your apologetic $100 voucher, @SouthwestAir. Thank God I don’t embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir.
Right on. Smith has no reason to be embarrassed — Southwest does. They’ve been actively trying to dehumanize fat people for some time now, and you just knew eventually they’d dehumanize the wrong one; here’s hoping that Smith’s very vocal and justified outrage over this will lead the airline to remember that fat people are, in fact, people. We shall see.
No matter what, it’s got Smith angry — and not just for his own situation. His last two tweets, condensed:
Hey @SouthwestAir? Fuck making it right for me just ’cause I have a platform. I sat next to a big girl who was chastised for not buying an extra ticket because “all passengers deserve their space.” Fucking flight wasn’t even full! Fuck your size-ist policy. Rude…
Word.
Incidentally, the title of this post is a play on a line from one of the great films in cinematic history.
Surprisingly enough, NPR’s site has the requisite “lose some weight fatty” (no comma intentional) comments.
Must be a bunch of Whole Foods enthusiasts there, or people who’ve Smoked Themselves Thin with American Spirits, the natural, healthy cigarette!
The Freakonomics blog compares sitting next to a fat person on an airplane to sitting behind a guy who insists on leaving his seat in a reclined position during take-off: they’re both examples of one passenger “invading the space” of another.
Which might be fair, if the fat person had deliberately gained an extra fifty pounds or so just to inconvenience his neighbor.
That is to say, one person is being an ass, the other is just crammed into a too tiny seat. Worrying about the fat people in planes comes way below worrying about the men with the giant invisible testicles in my worries about space invasions in airplanes.