“The question I come back to again and again is ‘WHY DO YOU CARE IF I’M FAT?’ It’s my body. I know full well what I’m doing to it. I’m not blowing secondhand smoke on you. I’m not drunk-driving into you. I’m not taking food out of your mouth. Unless you’re crawling around in my skin, it doesn’t affect you in a direct way”
Wendy Shanker, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life (New York, Bloomsbury, 2004, p35)

A common misapprehension about language is that it is nothing more than a communication tool devised to transmit cold facts and that it has no link with identity. Such a reductivist attitude ignores the emotional content most eloquently captured by poets, whose finely crafted locutions articulate our passion and rage. One of the many pleasures of language is its malleability, its restless innovatory drive as it evolves to reflect technological and other developments. It seizes new concepts, pinning them down in bright splendour like the exotic butterfly collection of the Victorian amateur, lovingly recorded and preserved for the wonder of future generations (for whom the words and phrases will have fallen into disuse in much the same way as many of the rarer species will have been driven to extinction). Language both mirrors and shapes the societies in which we live, subtly channelling our perceptions. It reflects the preoccupations and anxieties of the moment of coinage with a playful inventiveness, drawing on extant concepts in its creative impulse. Dictionaries are the repository of a nation’s wit, fulfilling the function of the glass-topped display cabinet of the enthusiast who carefully categorises and labels his specimens. A report on the latest crop of new entries reveals the extent of our obsession with scrutinising every supposed blemish and defect of those around us (Daily Mail, unattributed, 30^th August 2006), Muffin top rolls out for the dictionary: “Once it was simply an anonymous roll of fat.

But that midriff flesh that bulges annoyingly over your waistband has been honoured with its own place in the English language.

‘Muffin top’ is one of 500 new words and phrases in the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary.

The new entries, to be published next month, feature a heavy concentration of body-conscious terms”.

Even age no longer exempts you from the drive to banish any manifestation of time’s unkind passage as another coinage demonstrates: “‘Bingo wing’, a flap of loose skin that hangs from the upper arm, also makes its debut.

The condition is apparently often spotted among bingo enthusiasts of a certain age when they raise their hands at a game.

A ‘munter’ is an unattractive person, especially a woman, while a ‘salad dodger’ is a person with an unhealthy diet”.

Emine Saner also commented on the trend in A word or two on muffin tops (The Guardian, 31^st August 2006): “‘Every time we create a new edition we get a snapshot of how the world has changed in the three years since we last did it,’ says Ian Brookes, editor of the Chambers Dictionary. Of the 500 new words that will make it into the dictionary in two weeks’ time, unsurprisingly the majority come from technology (remember when you had never heard of iPods or weblogs?) but a significant number focus on our obsession with physical appearance. ‘It is particularly noticeable,’ says Brookes, ‘because it is not an area where you always expect new words to come from. It certainly reflects out ideals of beauty’”.

As the main burden of maintaining a physique as close to the “perfect” as possible falls upon women, the bulk of the new vocabulary (the distillate of social disapproval) applies to them: “Brookes’ team of lexicographers scour publications looking for repeated examples of new words or phrases. Some magazines have made an art form of circling celebrities’ flaws and coming up with ever more cruel ways of describing them.

The success of the GI diet, followed by Kylie Minogue and Naomi Campbell, ensures an entry for ‘glycaemic index’ (how quickly carbohydrates are broken down into blood sugar). Those who don’t follow diets (‘salad dodgers’) have new words to describe them, none of them flattering. A ‘bingo wing’ is an unattractive wobbling underarm, seen on bingo players as they wave their arms around excitedly. A ‘muffin top’ is the roll of flab that rises, dough-like, from one’s too-tight, too-low waistband. ‘Munter’ is another word, used to describe someone physically unattractive. It is normally a woman – in fact, most of these words are usually used to describe women.

‘This range of words reflects an ideology and there is a need for feminist examination of the relationship between sexist language and ideology,’ says Dr Pia Pichler, a linguist at Goldsmith’s College, London. Men are given ‘metrosexual’ – a heterosexual man who takes time and effort over his appearance – which means he tries to look like David Beckham, and so is hardly a derogatory term”.

These terms were not new, as shown by David Wilkes in (Daily Mail, 16^th September 2005), Be honest, does my bouncy castle look big in this?: “Their bodies may not be perfect, but their sense of humour is in great shape.

Women are lightening up about the once-heavy burden of physical deficiency, and have invented a whole new language of self-deprecating code phrases to identify their faults.

‘Cankles’, ‘bee stings’ and ‘saddle bags’ may not appear in your dictionary, but to the body-conscious, but newly carefree female, they are definitive.

Some phrases, such as ‘bingo wings’ (untoned flesh on the upper arms) and ‘love handles’ (flesh on the sides and lower back) had already found their way into common usage.

Others are part of what researchers refer to as a ‘secret language’ among women. Laughing among themselves, it would seem, is fine, but letting men in on the joke is going too far.

By way of translation, ‘cankles’ are thick calves merging into undefined ankles, ‘bee stings’ are small breasts, and ‘saddle bags’ are fatty deposits on the outer thigh.

Particularly unlucky women may also be unhappy about ‘love cushions’, or fatty deposits on the inner thigh. A ‘bouncy castle’ is not a children’s party accessory, but a large, shapeless bottom, while a ‘rubber ring’ is not an inflatable swimming aid but a podgy midriff.

A survey of 1,000 women aged 16 and over conducted for Dove Body Wash found that 71 per cent of women found laughing with friends about their apparent defects helped them cope with their imperfections”.

In a context where women are encouraged to seek fulfilment from forming relationships with men and are expected to compete for scarce resources (affection and admiration from men as a primary component of self-esteem) the use of such “secret language” enables them to bond amongst themselves without inflicting the deep wounds that the meat-market appraisals of the casual male onlooker have the power to do, removing the shame and as much of the stigma as possible within a fat-hating culture. They attempt to acknowledge the rivalry whilst taking the sting out of it, subverting it, even if only momentarily, to promote solidarity and cohesion within the assembled group. The humour is the vehicle by which this effect is achieved, but its undertone is bitter nevertheless. Fat is still the enemy, but is depicted in a less vicious and loathing manner than in the assessments of an anonymous passer-by (the “lard-bucket” category of insult, which nobody likes to apply to themselves, unless they are prone to feelings of guilt after a tub of ice-cream or another similar “excess”). There is almost a hint of affection towards the “afflicted” body part.

This impression is corroborated further on in Wilkes’s piece: “Sociologist and humour expert Professor Christie Davies, who helped with the survey, said: ‘Today’s women are forced to compare themselves with the airbrushed images of magazines and movies so it is not surprising that they pick faults with their appearance.

‘But the comical terms they are using suggest a healthy and honest attitude towards the issue. It’s the female equivalent of bald men getting together and having a laugh about being egg-heads.

‘These phrases seem to have been developed by women and they are different to the kind of insulting words which men might use.

‘In fact, many men we asked did not even know what some of them meant. It’s almost as if it is a kind of private language among women’”.

Other phrases listed by Wilkes include: “spaniel’s ears” for saggy or drooping breasts; “corned beef legs” for mottled or blotchy skin on legs and “Buddha belly” for a protruding, pot-like stomach.

The cover of the August edition of Observer Woman bore the headline Thin! coupled with some statistics concerning the weights of certain celebrities, afforded a comparatively rare (when compared to the screeds of invective penned against the fat, although I admit that gossip or celebrity magazines do not form part of my reading matter) opportunity to examine the type of language deployed against those felt to transgress the norm of avoiding excess by being judged to be too emaciated. Inside, the article proper by Mimi Spencer, The shape we’re in, provides a mildly polemically-tinged but thoughtful exploration of the media’s (more specifically, the glossy press) response to skinniness and the motives behind it: “She’s far too thin. Everybody says so. In those shrunken hot pants and skinny red vest she looked positively ravenous, like an urchin from Oliver Twist – albeit one with this season’s Prada handbag and hair extensions.

But just how skinny is Victoria Beckham? How would it fell if she sat on your lap? Would she be heavier than a kitten? If you hugged her would she break? We do know that she wears jeans with a miniscule 23-inch waist – the size, apparently, of a seven-year-old child (it is also, as it happens, the precise circumference of my head).

VB is not alone, of course, but merely the leading exponent of a new look which has come to dominate our lives (…) [exemplified by] women relatively new on the celebrity radar who skitter across the pages of magazines, coat hangers furnished with tennis-ball boobs and expensive shoes, not a shred of fat to share among them. You might not give a tossed salad how much these bony birds weigh. You might even agree with Kate Hudson (who recently won a libel action against the UK National Enquirer magazine for implying she had an eating disorder) that it is none of our business. But it is. It matters because hyper-thin has somehow become today’s celebrity standard and, as a result – almost without us noticing – the goalposts have moved for us all.

With every image of Nicole Richie’s feeble wrists or Posh Spice’s concave thighs – which seem to shy away from each other as if they’ve never been properly introduced – with every shot, an inch or an ounce is shaved off the notional ideal female form which governs our relationship with our bodies and the rest of the world. Images of Lindsay Lohan’s chest bones, desperately reaching out to greet strangers, or Keira Knightley’s xylophone of vertebrae, countable at 30 paces, have burned themselves into our consciousness so that über-thin no longer looks odd. It no longer shocks. But it does make you look at your own soft, warm body in a hard new light. It’s almost as if, in the course of a generation, we’ve overturned the age-old feminine ideal – maternal, curvaceous, zaftig”.

The constant bombardment with photographs and TV and cinema footage has brainwashed us into accepting the pathological as the sublime, to be envied and emulated: “To achieve this mental switcheroo, something seismic has happened, enough to make a body mass index of 10 (the BMA recommends something in the region of 22) look nearly normal to our rewired brains. When you rub your eyes, though, and snap yourself out of the reverie, you realise that this isn’t glamorous. It’s cadaverously, dangerously thin.

I have seen this kind of thin before. It resided in the endocrinology department at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where a member of my own family was treated for anorexia throughout her teens. Little could I have known that, in the intervening two decades, the morbidly hungry body type I saw there would become celebrated, a glory to which women of all ages aspire.

And they do. We do. If we are truthful, it’s not just anorexics who pedestal the thin; we all do, to one extent or another. After all, the mantra of our age is that thin gets you noticed. It gets you a contract as a TV presenter or a model or a singer in a girl band. Thin fast-tracks you with far more alacrity than a degree in history. More than that, as a society, we tend to cast a forgiving eye upon the very thin, while castigating the repugnantly fat”.

This constitutes a radical caesura with the past: “In this looking-glass world, a 100-pounder is a heavyweight. Size 00 – a logical impossibility when you pause to consider it – is now Hollywood’s dress-size of choice. True perspective can be gained when you consider that the pin-up of the 1890s was Lillian Russell, all 200 pounds of her. We don’t even have to mention Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren – none of whom would get the job today – to know that something’s up.

Studies have shown that, while 25 years ago the average model weighed eight per cent less than the average American woman (and, yes, Twiggy was abnormally petite in her day), today’s model weighs 23 per cent below the national average. This points up the fascinating paradox that, while we are desperate to keep up with our ever-shrinking celebrities, the average woman is actually getting bulkier. We’re round like melons and fat like sausages, despite obsessing about our lardy arses every day. Fat lot of good it does us. While our icons are running the distinct risk of slipping between the cracks in the pavement, we’re turning into bollards. Thirty-eight per cent of British women are now classified as overweight, and one in five is obese. If we resemble anyone, it’s not Posh Spice. It’s Elton John.

As long ago as 2000, the BMA, in its report ‘Eating Disorders, Body Image and the Media’, noted that the extreme thinness of celebrities was ‘both unachievable and biologically inappropriate,’ observing that the gap between the media ideal and the reality appeared to be making eating disorders worse. ‘At present, certain sections of the media provide images of extremely thin or underweight women in contexts which suggest that these weights are healthy or desirable,’ it stated, recommending that normal women in the upper reaches of a healthy weight should be ‘more in evidence on television as role models for young women’. Television producers and those in advertising should review their employment of very thin women, and the Independent Television Commission should review its advertising policy, the report recommended. Six years on, the converse has happened”.

Apart from the occasional bout of cathartic moral self-interrogation on the part of the sleek purveyors of these ethereal, air-brushed angels nothing interrupts the calculated business as usual cynicism: “For years now the dreaded ‘thin issue’ has plagued the fashion press, who stand accused of promoting a singular and unachievable body shape with every androgynous little sparrow to grace their glossy pages. Every now and then, we see a flutter of concern – when Omega pulled its ads from Vogue in a 1997 protest, for instance, or when the industry’s prime movers were called to a meeting at Downing Street in 2000 to grapple with the issue. What tends to emerge after the dust has died down is a whole lot of nothing. There are occasional forays into the fat zone – a 1997 Nick Knight shoot in Vogue called ‘Modern Curves’ featured plus size model Sara Morrison; in the same year, The Body Shop ran a series of ads with the tag line, ‘There are three billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only eight who do’. Set against the vast portfolio of ‘thimages’ which make up the wallpaper of our lives, these trifling efforts have about as much impact as a bubble on the wind”.

One of the merits of Spencer’s argument is that she does not engage in a simplistic and one-sided attribution of blame, but recognises that we are all caught up in the quest for “self-improvement” with our voracious and insatiable appetite for these noxious products that so corrode our confidence: “Following the Downing Street initiative, Premier, a top model agency, argued convincingly that women who bought fashion magazines were as much to blame as the editors and advertisers who used them. ‘It’s a supply-and-demand thing – advertisers, magazines and agencies supply the image that consumers want to see. Statistics show that if you stick a beautiful skinny girl on the cover of a magazine you sell more copies’”.

Although the camera might flatter more bounteous bodies when bared, when enveloped in folds of cloth the lens is less forgiving (at least our eyes have been rigorously and unrelentingly trained to interpret the images thus) and Spencer reminds us of the fashion magazines’ mission statement, shifting expensive glad rags off the racks and raking in advertising revenues in return: “Boom. The bottom line. Clothes. Put bluntly, clothes look better on a slim frame. ‘Being skinny doesn’t mean you’ve automatically got a good body, not at all,’ confides one wafer-thin friend. ‘Thin definitely doesn’t give you good legs, just thinner legs. But it does, by and large, mean you’ll look alright in clothes’.

And don’t we all of us want that? In my experience, there’s a constant jockeying for position on the weight front among women, a competitive, low-grade bitchery (…) which reveres the dropping of a dress size and stigmatises the gaining of a kilo. Of course, if you’re bright and grown-up and plugged into the issues of the day, you tend not to let on that you’re fascinated by other women’s bottoms. But you are. We are. We look. We compare. In our image-saturated, overweight universe, we’re hypercritical of our peers and our paragons. It’s nothing to do with men (…) and everything to do with competition between females.

‘Women are duplicitous on this issue,’ says Leeds Medical School psychologist Dr Andrew Hill. ‘Much of the pressure about appearance and weight is applied by other women. In the face of nutritional abundance, women are showing their status by eating poorly – much as corpulent belly historically indicated status in times of privation. It’s perverse, but a reverse snobbery now informs our relationship with weight; being thin in an overweight society is a sign of control. It takes enormous will to stay thin.

‘Nationally, we are getting fatter by a percentage point each year – so people who are trying to lose weight, which means most of us, are in awe of the high achievers in the field. We’re also intimately involved in celebrity lives in a way we never used to be. We’re encouraged to have an opinion by an invasive media’”.

The very unattainability of the ideal spurs us to ever greater sacrifices or plunges us into a slough of despondency in which we are exasperated by the recalcitrance and intransigence of our corporeal matter, learning to despise our bodies rather than love them for defying our will (in a virulently unforgiving mind-body duality the most severe of the early Christian ascetics would have been proud of): “For all but the very disciplined – or very disturbed – the kind of hyper-thin portrayed by the stars is an impossible goal, which is why so many Western women are in a constant state of food anxiety. Four in 10 of us are on a permanent diet. Ninety-eight per cent of us hate our bodies. We nurse our own little rituals, weight-management tics that were once the preserve of the Hurleys and Paltrows of this world, carefully tailored to suit our needs. We know how much bread we ate for lunch and whether we can, therefore, have half a potato for supper. We’re living under a siege of our own making, bedevilled by a sickening guilt as we lick the last chocolate smear from a Magnum lolly”.

This mentality is encapsulated in an excerpt from my diary, virtually the only mention of the subject in my lengthy chronicle of adolescent Angst, dating all the way back to 31^st July 1983 when I was about to turn 18: “Now, I’m not trying to say that I have an image of myself which is totally unrealistic, but in the opposite direction than previously, i.e. I don’t think I’m the most gorgeous female in the universe. I know that I’m too fat to be really even my own image of perfect beauty, but I’m not all that worried. I still want to lose the weight so I can feel at peace with myself in a quiet, modestly self-confident fashion. I’m not out to attract men, , well, I’m only out to attract one man, CD, but now I don’t constantly worry about every millimetre of fat. I’m actually quite happy as I am, but I know I can be EVEN BETTER, so I’m striving to lose the weight, you see! I’ll get dressed, but I can say to myself and believe that it’s not because I’m an ugly, fat slob that CD doesn’t love me”. I do not believe it was a coincidence that I was a member of a fundamentalist sect at the time, a born-again Christian burning with zeal to convert the world. The message could hardly be clearer: accumulating fat disqualifies you as a sexual being.

Spencer intimates that the cultural climate is likely to turn even more harshly against those of us already dismissed as defective because of our weight: “So, why? Why, after emancipation, feminism, after – ha ha – Girl Power – should pouring yourself into a very small frock be such a stellar achievement? Isn’t it embarrassingly shallow and meaningless?

We persist, says Dr Hill, because weight has come to signify all that is desirable, because ‘judgement of character is increasingly based on superficial appearance. We objectify celebrities, inferring all sorts of things from their physical appearance. Image colours everything, simply because, in a world overloaded with information, we cling to what is most obvious: and that’s how things look’.

The recent influx of what Dr Hill calls ‘talentless self-seeking bimbettes’ into the fame game has only concentrated more fully on looks alone; that’s all that remains now that silly old talent appears to have been excised from the equation. In Victoria Beckham’s case, her ‘thimage’ has become a life raft for a sinking career”.

Mel Hudson (The Guardian, 29^th August 2006) spoke up in defence of those who have been spared the tongue-lashings traditionally reserved for the fat in Time to put an end to skinny-bashing: “Over the holiday weekend, the report outlining the ‘obesity timebomb’ [sic] has loomed large (sorry) in the headlines, but the week before it was business as usual as regards the routine vilification of thin women. Witness the Grazia scare-piece, ‘Horror of the Size 00 Girls’, which followed a special report (‘Thin!’) in the Observer, both accompanied by the usual snaps of celebrity women deemed to be dangerously influencing young girls by, er, having pictures of themselves in the papers.

I don’t want to come across like someone complaining about being too rich, but here’s the thing – I’m a very thin woman. Naturally, non-anorexically, without dieting, or doing any exercise. Hard for some people to swallow (sorry again), but there it is. It doesn’t make me beautiful – you could take pictures of me, with my big head and supersized hair, looking as weirdly lollipoppy as Posh, and my partner says my hands remind him of a 90-year-old chicken’s feet. But it doesn’t make me ill. Or morally repugnant. And I’m getting heartily (albeit metaphorically) sick of apparent concern over anorexia providing a sneaky excuse for a sneaky bit of thinny-bashing.

My first hint of this trend came at a parents’ do at my son’s school, when a couple of women launched into the following smalltalk: ‘We’re worried about you – you’re too thin’. Instead of expressing a corresponding anxiety over the likely blood-alcohol level of one, and unfortunate resemblance to Barry Took of the other, I proffered my usual apologies:

Me: Oh, I know! I don’t know why, I mean I eat properly and everything.

Them: Really? Three meals a day?

Me: Yes.

Them: And pudding as well?

Me: Absolutely.

Them: Sweets? Fizzy drinks? Crisps and chocolates between meals?

Me: Er…?
Next came Arabella Weir, in a TV documentary by Janet Street-Porter earlier this year, comparing ‘stick-women’ with ‘normal women like me’. Honestly! Just because you don’t want to be oppressed by somebody else’s idea of a norm doesn’t mean you have to set up a new norm, based on yourself, which might be equally impossible for other people to conform to.

And the thin-bashing continues with the current ‘size 00’ hysteria. Mimi Spencer’s Observer article quotes Nadine Coyle saying there is nothing she can do about her skinny legs, and generously ripostes: ‘Oh yes there is Nadine! Try chocolate fudge cake. Works for me every time’. [This passage, which I did not reproduce, is in parentheses in the original piece and is included as part of an analysis of a cover story of a magazine aimed at a teenage audience, which lists the exact weights of various celebrity women] In Grazia, the fascinated talk is of the possibility of Posh’s muscles being eaten from within. Woman-on-woman thinny-phobia is rampant: it’s got to the point where I hardly dare go out for fear of being strung up by my own skinny jeans and force-fed the products of other women’s liposuction.

Luckily, with the news of a massive projected increase in (especially female childhood) obesity, the thin panic has temporarily yoyo’d back into its counterpart, the fat panic.

Maybe I can relax for a while”.

I cannot help feeling that Hudson errs on the side of unfairness in her assessment of Spencer’s original, which, in spite of the infusion of humour throughout, is far more serious in intent than the outburst quoted suggests. In order to shore up her contention that a wave of skinny-bashing is currently in vogue, she overlooks the crucial and unpalatable fact that fat-bashing is the ever-present background radiation of our culture. There is no comparison between the sheer volume of pejorative synonyms for the fat and those for the thin (and I am not advocating that we “salad-dodgers” catch up through a concerted linguistic effort, on the contrary, I would welcome it if all such discriminatory words could be gradually eliminated from the language, although I recognise that this is probably Utopian). Moreover, the number of articles consolidating the pervasive fat-hating ideology vastly outstrips those directed against the thin.

Worship of the super-thin affects fat and thin alike, though not equally. It diverts our energies from more worthwhile pursuits and keeps us conveniently divided in mutual suspicion and hostility. I agree that retaliating for the injuries and injustices heaped upon us “fatties” with skinny-bashing is puerile. Yet school playground chants such as “skinny malincky long-legs with big banana feet” do not carry the devastating censure that even the simplest and most unadorned lexical item such as “fat” conveys. I am not condoning skinny-bashing or snap judgements made on the basis of any size or shape. However, skinniness matches the cultural ideal. Fat does not. For this reason alone, skinny-bashing, even at its most gratuitously nasty, can never resonate so hurtfully. Sniping at the skinny usually contains a component of envy, whereas sniping at the fat bolsters a sense of innate superiority (fostered by the culture). Like fatness, skinniness can result from a variety of factors, yet the fat are uniformly assumed (unless we have some medical condition and can wave the doctor’s certificate under the noses of our detractors) to be victims of our own greed and laziness. The courtesy of even remotely entertaining the notion that the fat person does not sit on the sofa in front of the TV set all day cramming in the cream doughnuts is not extended to us. Nobody wants to be like us. Our presence is banished except perhaps in comedy. We are not vaunted as role models, but lumbering warnings, our frames featuring only from behind and only in reports of impending doom and social collapse.

That we are not left in peace, but constantly chivvied to get a grip on ourselves is illustrated by a couple of contributions to the readers’ letter page in the Daily Mail, (10^th July 2006), It’s rude to stare: “Society seems to think it is its duty to alert obese people to their weight. Do these ignorant individuals think we don’t own a mirror or a set of scales?

I have been on the receiving end of these insensitive comments for years, even though most of the time I was only a 14 or 16 dress size, which isn’t enormous.

I was deeply hurt by them when I was younger, but now I think these people are only trying to boost their own flagging self-esteem. They need a lesson in manners.

I’ve made myself a T-shirt saying, ‘B[ollocks] to anybody who is offended by my size’.

I am happy in myself and am lucky to have two wonderful children to show for my big belly and bum. So what if I’m large? I’m not harming you, am I? Get a life, people”.

And, from 6^th July 2006, Big, fat lie: “Another anorexic complains that ‘fat people aren’t told they’re fat’. I beg to differ.

At the age of 15, I was told I was fat by my grandmother. I weighed 52kg (just over 8st), a healthy weight for my height, but my brothers teased me about it, leaving me resentful and angry.

I began to eat as a form of control. No one was to tell me not to eat.

Throughout my life, I have been told I am fat, overweight or anything else people think they can say to me. People feel they have the right to comment, whether you’re fat or thin.

However, in today’s fashion-conscious climate, people’s concern for those who are ‘too thin’ is tinged with envy, while they show nothing but disgust when they see someone overweight. Anorexia kills – so does obesity”.

Wendy Shanker, in her marvellous antidote to fat-hatred, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, mercilessly exposes the subtext of an example of grooming talk that has recently gained in popularity: “Why don’t people know how to give a compliment? I brace myself for the following example, which I hear with some regularity:

‘You look great. Have you lost weight?’

‘No, I haven’t. But you just made me feel like shit. Congratulations’.

‘Have you lost weight?’ is a slight. It implies that losing weight is what made you look good. It implies that you looked bad before you lost weight and were therefore not deserving of said compliment. It assumes that you are in a constant state of trying to lose weight, which you may not be. We need to disassociate positive compliments with weigh loss” (op. cit., p237).

She goes on to highlight a similar clanger (one of which I have personal experience. I have never worn a dress since): “NEVER EVER ask a woman if she is pregnant. Not until she starts pulling out sonograms and showing you her registry on babiesareus.com should you ever assume that a woman is with child. When you’re not preggers – just a tub of flub – it’s mortifying. After half a dozen embarrassing encounters that began with ‘When are you due?’ I started giving it right back. Now I almost yearn for someone to ask me about my due date. My standard response is as follows:

‘When are you due?’

‘I’m not pregnant. I’m just fat’.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean…uh…’

Let the other person be embarrassed. It’s not your problem.

My body is not your conversation piece. Sometimes when someone invades my body space by saying something rude to me about my weight, I tell them that fat is contagious – that I used to be a lovely slender girl, then I mocked some chubby chick and woke up fat the next day. Like something out of a Stephen King novel. That shuts ‘em up real quick” (op. cit., pp238-9).

Armando Iannucci’s caustically satirical lambasting of flight passengers’ intolerance to would-be fellow-boarders in the wake of the alleged bomb plot (The Observer, 27^th August 2006) Come fly with me – unless you’ve eaten all the pies, that is offers a wonderful illustration of fat-denigration: “An eyewitness writes

We were coming back from our holidays in Spain and it was 3am when the flight was scheduled to depart, so we were all pretty tired, but I still had my wits about me. There were these two strange-looking men who came on the flight at the very last minute, and they were both clinically obese. That’s when me and all the other passengers told the cabin crew we weren’t happy and asked for them to be removed. I think we were right. One of them was so fat that he looked like he might explode at any minute.

When we arrived back in Britain, there was stuff in the paper saying we were over-reacting. But I say, what if one of those clinically obese men had sat next to me? His extreme body weight could either have crushed me to death against the side of the plane or, and this is the nightmare scenario, have heaved me at such pressure against the window that it burst open in mid-flight, sucking me out.

Now, some of you might argue, well, that’s OK, because the fat guy would have got sucked out with you and, as you plummeted to the ground, you could manoeuvre him round so that, when you hit the ground, his thick flesh cushioned your fall. But what you guys don’t seem to consider is the possibility he might have tried to do the same, ending up on top of me so that, even if I’d survived the 30,000ft plunge, I would have been crushed to death by a fatso. A lot of them get trained in things like this when they go off to fat camps”.

Contrast these sentiments with the contents of another genuine reader’s letter from the Daily Mail (19^th July 2006), Fat’s entertainment?: “If large people want to be fat and happy, that’s fine by me, as long as they don’t do it in space that I’ve paid for.

A performance at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon was completely ruined for me because I was sitting in seats with no dividing armrests.

A hugely obese lady sat on my left and a grossly overweight man sat on my right. They took up all of their own space and they each took up a third of mine. However much I shuffled, they would not budge.

Because of the discomfort, I could not enjoy the play. I couldn’t sleep that night and the next day I could hardly walk because of the pain in my back.

Perhaps I should have asked them to contribute to the cost of my seat”.

Ianucci then regales us with a veritable lexicon of anti-fat terminology: “A fourth eyewitness writes

We saw a fat man come into our bus. A real lardy. We’re talking Mississippi mud pie on legs. A starch storer. A bingey bugger. Arms like Parma hams. Buttocks that waterfalled down the back of his trousers. Tits like ripe mangoes. Flaps of midriff bigger than furniture. A walking eclipse. Enough body fat to power Chad for six years”.

Although I bow to his linguistic prowess, it evinces a little too much relish to be considered as entirely parodic in intent, methinks.

In Fat Politics, Laurie Ann Lepoff confirms the pressures to which the fat are subject: “Even those closest to me, who loved me and thought they were doing so for my own good, tried to shame me into losing weight. It is as if fat women are under an obligation to be ashamed and disgusted with ourselves, to be constantly at war with food, to be always on a diet or promising to start one next week. We are made to feel that we don’t have the right to nurture ourselves, we are embarrassed to be caught eating! Who does she think she is anyway, eating? She’s fat. She should be eating cottage cheese and celery. Is it not our right to eat? Who the hell are you to be even thinking that you know what I should be doing for my own body and mind’s health, that self-deprivation is for my own good?” (in Lisa Schoenfelder and Barb Wieser (eds.), Shadow on a Tightrope, Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, Glasgow, Rotunda Press, 1983, p204).

As Lepoff indicates there is far more to our predicament than being showered with unsolicited advice by strangers: “There is little validation anywhere for our struggle. We are rarely encouraged to love ourselves (even by our ‘liberated’ feminist sisters), to consider ourselves beautiful, to nurture ourselves. We are expected to hate ourselves, deprive ourselves, and consider ourselves ugly. We maintain a shred of dignity by convincing ourselves that we are working on getting thin and that eventually we will be OK (thin). We desperately need each other’s support to feel strong, powerful, beautiful, and – most importantly – angry. Yet we are so accustomed to despising our own bodies that we despise the fat bodies of our sisters. We oppress each other outrageously. We get together and talk about diets. We don’t take our pain seriously. We don’t validate each other’s experience in this bitter, bigoted world. We skim over the agony of our lives under the assumption that everything that happens to us is really our fault and we deserve it for being fat. We don’t stand up against outrageous bigotry because we accept that it is somehow justified” (op. cit., p205).

Hadley Freeman returns to the issue of thinness in itself constituting sufficient grounds for being thrust into the public spotlight in The six-stone cover stars (The Guardian, 31^st August 2006), once again highlighting the hypocrisy inherent in gobbling up the accompanying contrived and strategic denunciations of their insubstantialness (both literal and metaphorical): “Golly, look at all the lovely bones! Nicole Richie, Amy Winehouse, Kate Bosworth: it’s hard to open a magazine without their hip bones jamming up your nose.

As happy chance would have it, I have spent enough time around dangerously ill anorexics to be more au fait with the subject that I’d like. Certainly, most of the above celebrities look like they are suffering from what is euphemistically called ‘issues with food’. But things are a little more complex than that.

In the main, these are women who palpably long to be famous. Becoming thin has brought them the front-cover status that previously eluded them.

Before her weight fell below six-and-a-half stone Nicole Richie was known, if at all, as Paris Hilton’s companion on an American reality TV programme. By the time I interviewed her last winter, so frail she could hardly walk across the restaurant, she was followed by four paparazzi. This week she is on the front covers of at least three glossies. Celebrity magazines might cloak themselves in moral rectitude by pointing out the medical risks these women are incurring by not eating, but the fact that they consistently put them on their covers confirms the celebrities’ belief. No longer does one have to get thin when one becomes famous – simply being skinny makes you famous, which is certainly an intriguing message to send out.

For these women, skinniness has brought them the desired fame. In many ways, their reasoning is more logical than that of your garden-variety anorexic because their justification for not eating is undeniably accurate – if they don’t eat they remain cover material. That these women flaunt their skinniness also proves that they are aware of their shape and want to put it on show, whereas one of the defining symptoms of traditional anorexia is hiding the imagined girth beneath loose, disguising clothes.

When Karen Carpenter died from a heart attack brought on by anorexia the shock felt was partly that she had been so ill. Sure, there were the occasional photos of Carpenter clutching her microphone with a bony wrist, but there was nothing like the weekly updates we get today about Richie’s ribs – we simply did not fetishise skinniness back then. Now we love to look at these women, and the reasons are complex and disgusting. There is an undoubted touch of envy at their willpower. In a newspaper column last week, the writer admitted, ‘I’d love to be as skinny as [them]…I can’t pretend I wouldn’t love to control my weight like [celebrities] can’. But there is also relief at seeing how being skinny can go wrong. It’s like watching a school friend get told off for relying too much on the source material when you couldn’t be bothered to write the essay at all.

Last week’s issue of Grazia, a magazine that has made more hay out of skinny celebrities than a racehorse devours in its lifetime, splashed on its cover photo of Richie. Every separate tendon and ligament was visible. This woman is visibly dying in front of us and we are gawpishly standing around like onlookers at a public beheading.

If any of these magazines – or any of us – really cared about Richie et al’s health as much as all the finger-wagging health warnings suggest, then we would leave them alone and stop looking at photos of them altogether. Then these women would no longer be able to cling on to the well-founded belief that their skinniness brings them fame. And think of it this way: if we all resent their willpower so much, coupled with a pious concern for their health, not looking at photos of them at all would be simultaneously the harshest revenge and the kindest solution”.

An article by Kira Cochrane deals with the implications of Kate Hudson’s triumph in a libel suit against the UK edition of National Enquirer, entitled New trend alert: starlets bite back! (The Guardian, 24^th July 2006): “And it is a victory that should, in theory, send a massive warning shot across the bows of the celeb press. After all, treating female celebrities’ bodies as public property, to be pored over and scrutinised to an obsessive degree – their weight fluctuations discussed in minute detail, the state of their fake tans, manicures, depilation and hair extensions rigorously unpicked – has become their main stock in trade. If stars can sue them for suggesting that they have an eating disorder, then, boy, are those guys in trouble!

While female stars’ bodies have always attracted attention (I’m sure that the first Hollywood vamp, Theda Bara, for instance, got occasional stick for her unapologetic plumpness), never has there been such open season on these women’s appearances”.

Like Mimi Spencer, Cochrane touches upon the underlying cultural shift: “There was a time when a female star’s biggest worry was that she would be pictured looking a few pounds overweight in, say, the Daily Mail, and systematically eviscerated for being undisciplined and allowing unsightly dimples to besmirch her once-unblemished skin. Now, though, that concern has been joined by the worry that she will be pictured looking a few pounds, or more, underweight, and accused of being ill, stupid, irresponsible, a bad role model and neurotic. Female celebrities have, I guess, a window of about three pounds within which their weight is allowed to fluctuate. Breach that and it’s knives out.

Not that this is how the stories are generally presented. Instead they’re often drenched in faux-concern for the women involved, whether it’s a bikinied Fern Britton (accused last year of risking her life, and therefore her children’s’ future happiness, by being overweight) or a hot-panted Victoria Beckham (also accused of risking her life and again, her children’s’ future happiness, by being underweight). This tone seeks to justify the stories by implying that they are being written out of concern for the celebrity’s health.

Which, of course, is ridiculous.

Because the real reason that women love these pictures is the intense schadenfreude they provoke. This impulse used to be sated by pictures of celebrities-gone-fat, but, as the population at large has got, uh, ever larger, the enjoyment of looking at such photos has been trumped by looking at ‘skinny-pics’. While photographs of fat stars remind us that the cake habit we’re fostering may be a problem, those of women who seem to disappear when side on (accompanied by captions that emphasise how silly/ill/self-obsessed they must be), make that second Crunchie bar of the day slip down all the better. Ha, readers can think, she’s been depriving herself all that time and – instead of having the desired effect of looking hot, hot, hot – everyone thinks she looks like crap!

The problem being that such enjoyment is, inevitably, fleeting. Because what this scrutiny of female celeb bodies actually adds up to is a constant reminder to women that our own looks are a source of scrutiny; that our bodies, too, are public property, to be discussed and criticised by friends and family. And, indeed, that they will often be the main thing that we are judged upon. This last point is rammed home by the current raft of female stars who seem to feature in the British press for no other reason than their weight loss”.

Schadenfreude, basking in the pleasure of witnessing someone else’s misery, is not pretty. It compensates us for our feelings of inadequacy. These celebrity women act as projections of our own longings and discontents; we spit our ire at them before throwing the mags into the recycling bin with barely a thought. The texts with their phantoms and fantasies are an emotional purgative, a temporary release. And, yes, we “fatties”, the reviled pariahs who are never permitted to rest easy in ourselves, to inhabit our bodies with ease, might want to take secret delight in the spectacle of the adored being given a taste of the medicine we are constantly forced to swallow. This is a side-effect of being forever pitted against each other. I do not look down on the slim, though I might feel excluded when they engage in social bonding chat, lamenting moving up from a size 10 to a size 12. I do not ask them to apologise for their shape. All I desire is to be accorded the same respect.

Cochrane pinpoints another unfortunate aspect of the phenomenon: “And the overall effect of these stories is to infantilise women. Their tone carries the suggestion that women need to be told how to take care of themselves and that we can’t make up our own minds about how to treat our bodies. This is emphasised by the fact that celebrities (…) are rarely granted any achievements, history or significance, except as physical beings”.

In her brilliant deconstruction of the contemporary consumerist surroundings in which we live, Sandra Lee Bartky (Femininity and Domination, New York and London, Routledge, 1990) launches a similar critique: “But the extent to which the identification of women with their bodies feeds an essentially infantile narcissism – an attitude of mind in keeping with our forced infantilisation in other areas of life – is, at least for me, an open question. Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best. Our identities can no more be kept separate from the appearance of our bodies than they can be kept separate from the shadow-selves of the female stereotype (…) There is something obsessional in the preoccupation of many women with their bodies, although the magnitude of the obsession will vary somewhat with the presence or absence in a woman’s life of other sources of self-esteem and with her capacity to gain a living independent of her looks. Surrounded on all sides by images of perfect female beauty – for, in modern advertising, the needs of capitalism and the traditional values of patriarchy are happily married – of course we fall short. The narcissism encouraged by our identification with the body is shattered by these images” (p28).

According to Bartky none of us, fat or thin (though again the fat, identified as the negative against which the full glory of the thin becomes apparent, bear the brunt of censure and ridicule) are exempt from the wearying pursuit of “self-improvement”: “It is a fact that women in our society are regarded as having a virtual duty ‘to make the most of what we have’. But the imperative not to neglect our appearance suggests that we can neglect it, that it is within our power to make ourselves look better – not just neater and cleaner, but prettier, and more attractive. What is presupposed by this is that we don’t look good enough already, that attention to the ordinary standards of hygiene would be insufficient, that there is something wrong with us as we are. Here the ‘intimations of inferiority’ are clear: Not only must we continue to produce ourselves as beautiful bodies, but the bodies we have to work with are deficient to begin with. Even within an already inferiorised identity (i.e., the identity of one who is principally and most importantly a body), I turn out once more to be inferior, for the body I am to be, never sufficient unto itself, stands forever in need of plucking or painting, of slimming down or fattening up, of firming or flattening” (op. cit., p29).

Cochrane does not condemn us outright for our all too human frailty: “Of course, people are always going to look at other people; we are always going to compare and contrast ourselves, and that fascination is natural. The sheer intensity and misogyny of the current focus on women’s looks seems corrosive, though. It would be nice to think that Hudson’s libel win might at least stem this trend for a while, but that’s naïve. While pictures of ‘flawed’ celebrities continue to sell gossip mags, the cycle of female schadenfreude and resulting self hatred will keep whirring on. The fact is that in terms of magazine sales (it does, after all, take quite a glut of products to even attempt to live up to the ideal that’s being sold) these photographs really are worth their weight. And whether the celebrities they feature will ever be valued for anything other than their weight seems unlikely”.

Again, the passage above is worth contrasting with Bartky: “Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours a woman’s body takes on as she matures – the fuller breasts and rounder hips – have become distasteful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh and substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilised face must accompany her infantilised body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.

To succeed in the provision of a beautiful or sexy body gains a woman attention and some admiration but little real respect and rarely any social power. A woman’s effort to master feminine body discipline will lack importance just because she does it: Her activity partakes of the general depreciation of everything female. In spite of unrelenting pressure to ‘make the most of what they have’, women are ridiculed and dismissed for the triviality of their interest in such ‘trivial’ things as clothes and make-up. Furthermore, the narrow identification of woman with sexuality and the body in a society that has for centuries displayed profound suspicion toward both does little to raise her status. Even the most adored female bodies complain routinely of their situation in ways that reveal an implicit understanding that there is something demeaning in the kind of attention they receive” (op. cit., p73).

Just how harmful the proffering of skinny celebrities can be is shown by Maxine Frith’s Most women would rather have a small waist than a big brain (The Independent, 9^th January, 2006): “The majority of women would prefer to be slimmer than have a higher IQ, instant wealth or a date with the celebrity of their dreams.

Nineteen out of 20 of the female population say that they place a higher priority on having a smaller waist than on their intelligence.

From a wish list that included never having money worries again, dating the A-list star of their choice or a genius-level IQ score, 51 per cent of women still plumped for a slimmer figure, according to a survey at tescodiets.com.

At a time when one in three women is overweight and a further one in five is obese, exerts said that there was still too much pressure on the female population to be slim.

Barbara Wilson, head of nutrition at tescodiets.com, said: ‘Women’s role models tend to be models and actresses, so there is more emphasis than ever placed upon physical perfection.

‘These statistics reveal just how much pressure women feel there is to be slim in today’s society’”.

Frith shed light on the absurdities of enforced adherence to the “battle of the bulge”: “One in three women admitted that they spend more time worrying about their weight than their finances, jobs or families. And while 29 per cent said their biggest dread was going to the dentist and 16 per cent cited looking for a new job, a massive 40 per cent admitted their worst fear was having to try on clothes in a shop’s communal fitting rooms.

One in three had lied to their friends about how much they weigh and one in four had tried to deceive their partner about their size.

Separate research by the magazine Lighter Life has found that nearly half of women give up their diet within just a week of starting it. One in five female dieters admit that they have hidden food and eaten it in secret while pretending to maintain their new regime.

Bar Hewlett, founder of the Lighter Life company, said: ‘Our survey reveals the extent of women’s desperation.

‘There have been women who hide food in the washing machine, under the plastic bag inside a cereal packet and even up their sleeves’”.

The Daily Mail’s take on the story (unattributed, 10^th January 2006) added little of substance, but did consult two women on whether the findings possessed any merit: “Two British businesswomen known for their brainpower dismissed the survey findings.

Nicola Horlick, the investment banker named Superwoman for juggling a City career with a large family, was appalled.

‘It has not been my experience that women aspire to minimise their brains,’ she said.

Jacqueline Gold, chief executive of the lingerie chain Ann Summers, was scathing: ‘This survey is dumbing down women,’ she said. ‘But women can afford to have smaller brains as they are so much bigger then men’s anyway’”.

I have to agree with the interviewees. I have never been apologetic about my academic achievements. They have been the standard according to which I have defined myself (which is one of the reasons why I so deeply resent being written off as nothing more than a stupid, indolent “lardball loser” before I have even opened my mouth).

In case it should be forgotten that the fat in our society are under siege (whereas the thin are not), I would just like to draw attention to a depressing recommendation made in the health care sector as catalogued by Julie Wheldon in NHS should deny obese women IVF, say doctors (Daily Mail, 31^st August 2006): “Doctors have called for obese women to be denied free IVF treatment on the Health Service.

The British Fertility Society said they should not receive such treatment unless they had already tried to be slim.

Those who were severely obese should be sidelined from IVF until they had actually lost weight.

Yesterday critics branded the idea as ‘unjustified discrimination’ against fat women.

But others welcomed the guidance, pointing out that obesity can harm fertility and increases the risks of pregnancy.

Given the current cash crisis in the NHS, tough decisions had to be made about priorities, they said.

The society’s proposals will be sent to all primary care trusts responsible for paying for NHS fertility treatment, which are currently left to interpret official guidelines on their own”.

This is an assault on our dignity and access to equal treatment masquerading as rationality. Although I am not disputing that there is a potential for the problems the doctors quoted allude to, the likelihood of damage should be assessed on a case by case basis. Applied wholesale and indiscriminately it merely serves to filter out those who cannot afford to pay for IVF themselves (perhaps fat phobia has assumed such epidemic proportions that denying IVF to potential carriers of the fat gene is a means of extirpating undesirables before they are conceived). Being fat does not automatically mean being chronically unfit and suffering from high blood pressure and the host of other conditions trotted out at every available opportunity to deter us from putting on a few pounds: “And those with a body mass index of 36 should be denied IVF until they have lost weight.

To have a BMI of 36, a 5ft4in woman would need to weigh more than 15 stone.

The society also suggested women with a BMI of 30 should embark on a weight loss programme before starting treatment.

Chairman Dr Mark Hamilton said the recommendations were based on safety concerns for mother and baby.

‘If a woman is severely obese then there are real medical issues about the safety of her being pregnant,’ he said.

‘There are hazards for the mother and baby and problems can develop with complications such as miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, high blood pressure and diabetes.

‘If a woman is severely obese it would not be wise for her to get pregnant until she reduced her weight’”.

Wheldon endeavours to present both sides: “Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: ‘In the case of obesity it is a known and proven fact that it is difficult to get pregnant when you are overweight.

‘The very logical response to that is ‘lose weight’ and it therefore seems blindly obvious that any suggestions on those lines are in the interests of curing infertility without wasting money. We are talking about limited funding and how it is allocated’.

But Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat member of the Commons science and technology committee, said the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence had already set out guidance on this which did not suggest banning treatment for obese women.

‘This is unjustified discrimination as fat women are being singled out for exclusion from treatment altogether,’ he said.

‘NICE already looked at this in huge detail and concluded such a cut off was not justified’”.

An insert accompanying the article focuses on one particular case: “Debra Howarth, 39, was devastated when told she was too fat for fertility treatment on the NHS.

She admits she was about two stone overweight at the time, with a BMI above 30.

But she felt well and did not have any health problems linked to being overweight.

Luckily Mrs Howarth, an NHS kitchen supervisor from Barnsley, and her husband David won some money and were able to pay for IVF treatment themselves. To their delight she became pregnant first time and is due to give birth in October.

But she is adamant that weight guidelines for NHS fertility treatment are unfair.

‘I have worked all my life and paid my national insurance and never asked for anything. The only thing I wanted in life was a family and because of my weight they said no. I think it is really unfair. It is all wrong’”.

An editorial in The Independent (31^st August 2006) A rational approach attempted to deflect criticisms that the proposed restrictions represent overt discrimination: “The very suggestion that obese women could be denied IVF treatment on the NHS has prompted a predictable outcry. The reason is that many detect a whiff of moral censure, just as they did when it was proposed that smokers should not be considered for major heart surgery. Smoking and obesity are fast becoming the behavioural crimes of our age. It is all too tempting for those so afflicted that the health establishment is trying to penalise them still further.

As with smokers and heart operations, however, those who are now objecting to what they see as a new form of discrimination are very much barking up the wrong tree. The latest recommendation comes not from the NHS – which could be accused of looking for new ways of penny-pinching – but from the British Fertility Society. As such, it constitutes the combined wisdom of leading specialists in the field. And their rationale has nothing to do with obesity as such, but with the effect of being overweight on the likely success of treatment.

In an ideal world, the number of IVF clinics would exceed demand. Any woman who had difficulty in conceiving would be referred automatically and granted as many courses of NHS-funded treatment as she chose. But this is not an ideal world. Across the country, the NHS is nowhere near meeting the Government-decreed requirement to provide women with three courses of publicly funded treatment.

The intervention of the BFS is an effort to ensure IVF treatment on the NHS is provided to those most likely to benefit. Its research shows that women who are obese – a condition which it defines quite exactly as having a body mass index of 36 or more – are far less likely to conceive as a result of IVF. The same applies to women who are deemed to be greatly underweight or who are over 40. The BFS suggests these groups of women should also be excluded from free treatment.

The other purpose of its recommendations is to hasten the end of the so-called postcode lottery for IVF, which causes so much justified resentment. In many parts of the country, women who are obese, or even simply overweight, already find it difficult to be accepted for treatment. If there are measurable criteria for granting or denying a woman free treatment in future, this is about as fair as it can get.

Of course, there must be room for specialists to exercise discretion. And, of course, the wealthier will pay for treatment, just as they can at present. But where free treatment is concerned, there is an urgent need for a system, backed by clinical data, that makes the best possible use of public money”.

If this punitive decision had been an isolated manifestation of fat-loathing, I might have been more amenable to the author’s claim. There have already been calls to ration health care by excluding the lower income brackets who happen not to conform with the chart definitions of “normality” (the authoritativeness of which are increasingly disputed by members of the medical profession itself). When taken together with the fat being routinely turned down as candidates for adoption (fitness for parenting being a fundamental criterion of social acceptance) it assumes a more sinister aspect. Make no mistake: we will have to stop accepting the guilt imposed upon us and stand up for our liberties before it is too late.