Kelly Rued, Etcetera

Ugh. Some of you tumblrs are fucking idiots. I can’t believe someone said these “fat seats” promote obesity. Does handicapped parking promote disabilities? Do wheelchair ramps promote people ending up in wheelchairs? Do swimming lessons for developmentally disabled people promote “swimming like a retard” or does wearing women’s sweat pants with any word spelled across the ass promote chlamydia? Ok, don’t answer that last one.

Why do gestures of accommodation toward obese people piss of the fatphobic people who think obesity is some kind of character flaw or something one falls into due to social encouragement? Seriously, any time someone makes something especially for fat people, somebody says it’s “promoting obesity.” Stores carrying any size over size 12 are accused of “promoting obesity” just for selling people clothes that fit rather then requiring every fatty to wear GLAD trash bags until he or she can whittle down to a weight that qualifies them for basic human rights. Ugh.

Being very obese is a health issue that’s best left between an individual, their doctor, and their therapist (if it’s related to emotional or behavioral issues). Very obese people suffer shame and discomfort trying to fit into the movie theater and airplane seats we all take for granted, and their plight is no different than that of anyone else who is physically differently abled. So if fat chairs and exceptions for companion animals and accessibility features on web sites piss you off or you consider them part of some imaginary propaganda campaign promoting physical diversity among human beings, I say fuck you and your temporarily-abled self. May you have an educational experience someday that gives you some informed perspective on what it’s like to have a health problem or be differently abled.

To the people who suggested benches as an alternative, it would only be a good substitute if there was back support and arm rests (often required for very large people to sit comfortably for extended periods). Most benches not only elminate the back support and arm rests, but they encourage multiple people to share the bench, invading physical space and otherwise making some people less comfortable in a public place. Might seem like a minor thing, but think about it this way: why shouldn’t a very large person be able to have their own seat when they are a customer/patron somewhere, same as a smaller person?

There is always a practical limit to how many such accomodations can be offered (like how many wheelchairs can be on one bus at a time, how many fat seats are installed in a plane versus regular width seats) but the point is that society should do what little it can to make vital services (like public transit) viable for differently abled people. If you’re 350 lb.s, you probably have knee and back pains that would make standing uncomfortably in a subway station a significant deterrant so yeah, this is a health and disability issue.

I’m not fat enough to require a special chair but who knows what my future will hold if I start making mad money and can afford my own mini-donut machine. So the time to campaign for fair treatment of morbidly obese people is now, while I’m socially acceptably hot enough for fatphobes to still listen to me.

shaneblog:

Subway Fat Seats

Brazilian subways have installed “priority seating for obese people”, with helpful color-coding. Weird, I thought everyone in Brazil looked like Gisele.