As you might know if you read my columns, see me a mile away, or talk to me for five seconds, I am a card-carrying lifelong member of the Fat Lesbian Club. However, ever since I first laid eyes on the television show Roseanne (very important to me) as a small child, the actor John Goodman has held a special place in my heart. It was confusing for me: did I want to be Dan Conner, or be with Dan Conner? I’m still not sure. He has always been so hot to me, from Dan on Roseanne to Fred Flintstone to Walter in The Big Lebowski. His body has now drawn attention in the last week or so, after a photo of him showing significant weight loss went viral.
It’s not Goodman’s 74-year-old body (his choice) I want to discuss, but instead the arguments that broke out about howhe lost the weight. On one side there were many people congratulating him on his hard work. Then there were people claiming he had taken Ozempic so it wasn’t actually hard work, and then there were people defending that by saying he’d been losing weight for years, so he’d done it the “right way”, actually.
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I don’t know the details and I don’t care, but none of this is good. This is a common sentiment, but now it seems to be snowballing. There’s this idea that fat people who use weight loss drugs are “cheating” or “taking the easy way”. What it means, as usual, is that fat people cannot win, regardless of what we do. And I’ve had enough.
I’m a fat person. We are constantlybadgered and tortured by a society that tells us to lose weight, at all costs. If you’re fat, that’s a moral failing: you’re lazy and unhealthy. If you’re fat at the gym, or jogging down the street, you’re an object of ridicule. If you lose weight with drugs, you didn’t earn it. If you’re fat and not self-flagellating at every moment, you’re glorifying obesity. If you lose weight for any reason, it then proves you were never really happy with yourself; it proves that fat is bad, that thinness was always the real goal. If you stay fat, we want you to admit you’re unhealthy. If you say you’re happy, we want to diagnose you with denial. So much of the condescension as well as plain cruelty towards fat people is packaged as “we just want you to be healthy”. If this were true (and if being skinny were the only marker of health, which it isn’t), nobody would be criticising John Goodman or other fat people for using medication, by saying it’s cheating.
“Cheating” implies you’re competing against someone. Who is being cheated if a fat person changes their body? What game are we playing? Why does it matter how a person changes their body – and why does any of it matter at all to non-fat people anyway? Just like basically every other human condition, there are a million reasons people’s bodies are different sizes and respond differently to different things. When someone quits smoking with medication, we don’t say they’ve cheated. We know that medication can be a tool. We don’t insist they go cold turkey to prove that theyreally wanted to quit. We understand in all other cases that making something easier, with less suffering, doesn’t make the outcome less legitimate. But when the body in question is fat, suddenly we become moral arbiters. Suddenly it matters howthey do what we have savagely demanded they do.
Society has spent decades telling fat people that our value depends on our ability to control our weight. Now there is medicine that can make that control easier, and suddenly the problem is not the weight but whether the person has suffered sufficiently to “deserve” it. People resent us for being fat, and they resent us for getting thin. They just want us to suffer. All of this, as ever, is only about punishing fat people. People just hate us and our bodies, and they feel no shame about demonstrating that hatred, largely (no pun intended) because they are safe from being called out. It is perfectly socially acceptable to hate fat people.
This is not even about weight loss drugs – I don’t think everyone should take Ozempic, and I certainly worry about all the relatively thin people who seem to be taking it purely to get even thinner. I also don’t think being fat is inherently bad or good. I just think we should be treated like human beings. Is that really so much to ask? Apparently it is.
We should be allowed to lose weight without having to provide you with a moral explanation for how we did it. We should be allowed to remain fat without having to convince you that we are sufficiently miserable about it. We should be allowed to exercise, eat, dress, date, and just go about our lives without our bodies becoming public property. Fat people should not have to audition for your approval. We are human beings, our bodies are none of your business, and you need to keep your big fat noses out of our lives.
