#sorry for the uhhh borderline evopsych nonsense at the end

[vamptastic]

i"m reading the mismeasure of man by stephen jay gould which talks about the history of scientific racism and a lot and i am seeing... parallels. we're presupposing being fat is bad for you, which i personally blame on the innate human disgust reaction to the unfamiliar. so when we do studies on fat people, it is almost always to figure out how to make them less fat. we find out that it may be wholly impossible to make 90% of people less fat and we continue to ignore it. we find that over half of people considered 'morbidly obese' have perfectly healthy bloodwork and we ignore it and keep referring to them as walking corpses. for fucks sake, we don't even know how to calculate calories correctly for most food in the modern age, we don't know what the ideal amount of calories is for a human to eat, and being at a certain BMI is still classified as 'morbidly obese due to excess calories' in the ICD-10.

it just doesn't seem to matter how many preconceived notions about fat people are disproven, because people are still thinking under the framework that fatness is bad. adipose fat is found to not have significant impact on heart disease? oh, well then let's lay in on people with lots of visceral fat harder. being fat can be caused by illnesses or medication side effects? oh, well, those people are fine but most fatties still must live a life of hedonistic indulgence.

to be optimistic though, i think the reason a lot of scientific racism is now considered ridiculous is because society is now much less racist than it was in the 1800s. the leading theories of scientific racism were reworked with the discovery of evolution, rather than being disproven. over and over in this book, data is collected correctly but misinterpreted to fit the presupposition that whites are superior. and when the evidence is beyond the point of ambiguity, the conclusion is simply rephrased to make it sound as if it isn't.

but in the modern day, phrenology and atavism are considered ridiculous- not because they are particularly difficult to make convincing scientific evidence for, but because most people no longer believe that whites are superior or that crimes are committed due to innate nature. (obviously scientific racism does still exist in new forms- that's what the other half of the book is about-but i think it's fair to say that it has become far, far less prevalent.)

so i think that if being fat is more accepted by society, better science will follow. it is, however, incredibly frustrating to recognize the obvious problems with the current rhetoric around fatness and have the majority of people genuinely believe their childish, stupid, immature disgust towards fat people is objectively intellectually justified. humans are prejudiced, we instinctually fear the unfamiliar, and we have instinctive disgust reactions when we think something may disease us. it is very easy to ignore these instincts when you know they are wrong and coming from an obsolete base instinct, but also very easy to come up with reason why they must be correct. be the better person and overcome whatever base reactions you have to other sorts of people, because history has shown time and time again that following those instincts is not productive.