In the Name of Superficiality

Posted on May 12, 2005 in Compassion Psycho-bunk Sugar and Fat

I closed the weight discussion after the broken record of false feminism began to sound. I don’t need to defend my compassion for those who are overweight or underweight. But I don’t endorse the terrible careening that some of my critics have inflicted in the name of “beauty”. As I said in my final comment in that thread, it is a teenybopper rendition of the life of Sylvia Plath who suddenly becomes so beautiful for killing herself; and Ted Hughes nothing but a monster because he married her. As I have said before, neither person in that relation was a villain: you had a woman who was mentally ill (like me) and a man who didn’t understand what was going on and reacted badly. Two human beings confused by a situation. I often wonder what would have happened if Sylvia had had recourse to lithium.

If we take the logic of the Fat Rights champions, I am being a bad person for suggesting that Sylvia was mentally ill and that medications would have helped ease her torment. It’s ever so much more chic to kill yourself than survive. And the Fats Rights people want to capture that cachet.

The Fat Rights movement also wants to grab the superficiality of beauty which is, to tell it from this man’s perspective, so much of what is wrong with the fashion and entertainment industry which promote anorexia. You are only your face and body. So, like these, the obesity advocates promote an unhealthy lifestyle, running straight against well-grounded medical information. And they never address the bigger issue of valuing more than the exoderm. You’re beautiful. You don’t have to have character or charm. Be nothing but your body. We’ll clap for you as you destroy it.

The spirit in which I speak is nothing new on this blog. Men do it too: witness how I commented on the self-destructive career of Hunter S. Thompson:

I look at what Thompson faced and I can say that the reason he chose to deny his disease was straightforward and simple: he got more respect being an alcoholic and a junkie.

And then there is the comment that I made in the roundup for that week:

Perhaps what bothers me more are those who function as enablers for celebrating Thompson’s mania. Instead of seeking treatment, Thompson went on boozing and going to crazier and crazier extremes until, finally, he decided to die “at the height of his glory” while talking to his wife on the telephone. No one ever bothered to tell him that that was an honor to be granted by the gods, not by cold steel.

The cult of Plath and the cult of Thompson bear much in common with the Cult of Fat Rights. The destructive behavior of the icon is regarded as something holy. Plath, fortunately or no, never heard the voices of those who wrapped themselves up in the Nazi lampshades of Lady Lazarus, telling her that she was ever so cool for killing herself. Thompson, on the other hand, did hear his fans and he pleased them, in the end, by doing his own spectacular suicide after a lengthy death run.

I see these as victims and I see those who scream about Fat Rights as enablers of the worst kind, urging women (but for some strange reason not men) to see themselves as beautiful even though they practice unhealthy overeating. Is this not unlike those who buy and drive gas-eating guzzlers? It is so quintessentially American, so consuming, putting our excess ahead of our discretion.

It’s a free country. People may lawfully gorge themselves and I am not one to propose a law forbidding it. Likewise they may starve themselves and I shall likewise leave the law out of it. But I shall not be silent when some call me evil for promoting wellness.