Sometimes, a hateful submission to DAS* will make me smile more than I ever could have expected.
When I first saw Secret 10445, my jaw hit the floor and my hackles snapped high. The text is red caps on a green background, and reads:
"I would never date a fat guy, because I don't respect fat people. They lack discipline."How could it be, I inwardly raged, that someone could ever say something like that? Well, unfortunately, I was able to answer that almost immediately: All this ST had to do was listen to popular culture. It's a widely accepted myth that fat people are fat because they eat like crap and lie around all day long instead of doing the morally correct thing by trying to lose the extra weight that they inflict upon civilized society. Fat people are a monolith, don'cha know? We have no variation in physiology. We are not human - we are fat, and our fat defines us.
By the time I read the secret, it had been up long enough to garner a good number of comments. I began reading them expecting to find the same fat-phobic tripe as expressed in the secret itself, only to be pleasantly surprised. With very few exceptions, every comment refuted the ideas expressed in the secret. Over and over again, people were taking the ST to task for hir bigotry. It was enough that I my initial anger melted away, and instead I found the ability to laugh dismissively at the small-mindedness of the ST's assertion. I was smiling.
And that, folks, is progress, both in a personal sense (six months ago, I would have internalized the message in that secret) and in a cultural sense. I take comfort in that people will at least fight against the more blatant examples of sizeism.
(As an aside, I'm aware that more comments have since been added to that secret, including a not-insignificant number of fat-hating sentiments, but I'm choosing to dwell on the positivity of the initial reaction instead of the hatred that followed.)
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