#tumblr is having can action heroes be fat discourse

[megasilverfist]

Babe Ruth sliding while visibly overweight with the words "you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like" superimposed

[hasufin]

Pull the thread, and disappear...

There’s a recent minor kerfluffle about Nike having a plus-sized mannequin. (I wish I could give a good link but the discourse about it is distracting and I don’t want the original to get more clicks).

But, well, anyway. The gist of it is that Nike put a “fat” mannequin in one of their stores and a particular person with a platform had a stunningly bad take on it, complaining that it was making fat fashionable, and that fat people can’t exercise.

I’m not interested in taking down those claims. I’m thinking, though, about why someone would say things like that. I’ve got a bit of an idea, maybe wrong, granted, but maybe right...

Okay. So one of the first points is the saying “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story“.

This is variously attributed and has a few different contextual meanings. Here, I mean that everyone believes themselves the protagonist, the “good guy”. Not that they are infallible, but simply that they are good - that they are not the villain, that their actions are not evil. As one might note from some recent Tumblr memes, even people whose actions closely match those of villains in Disney movies, when presented with a clear “good” and “evil” nonetheless identify with the “good” no matter how closely they match the “evil” character.

Simply put, nobody gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says “I am going to be evil”. They may deny their own agency, they may say they have to do bad things for good results, they may even take a nihilistic view that none of it matters - but everyone will maintain at some level that they are not an evil person. (I’m cautious about this, a little, because I think there are counter-examples; I think closer examination of the counterexamples would find they still don’t think they are themselves evil)

Also, a few years ago I had the importance of original sin in Fundamentalist belief explained to me. In spite of seeming unrelated it suggests to me something I hadn’t really considered before - a load-bearing belief. The point of original sin in Fundamentalist belief is, everything else relies on it. If it’s not true, then the entire rest of the belief system is necessarily false.

What does this have to do with someone who is upset about a plus-size mannequin?

Well, to her the mannequin is saying “It’s okay to be fat! Fat people can wear fashionable clothing! Fat people shouldn’t be ashamed of her bodies!”

And that challenges a load-bearing belief for her.

Let’s imagine a child. Say, one who’s 7 or 8 years old. Old enough to communicate effectively, to have friends - and to have enemies. Teasing and bullying play a powerful role in socialization in our culture. They serve to signal who is part of the in-group, and who is not. And, in a general sense, children can be incredible sadistic shits - they don’t care if they hurt someone else, they haven’t quite accepted that other people are also human.

So for a child in certain circumstances, finding someone to verbally abuse is absolutely de rigeur. And among the first openings children find to attack others is based on appearance: clothing, skin color, hair... and weight.

As this child gets older, they learn that teasing on ethnic markers is considered unacceptable. They will get punished for such behavior. Not for the verbal abuse itself, which is complicated for adults to tackle, but simply for particularly objectionable content. And in this scenario the content is less important than the act - to maintain membership in an exclusive social circle someone else must be kept outside of it. So the content focuses on aspects which will not get punished. Tormenting someone for being fat will not get punished; it becomse a familiar and easy option.

As the bully grows older, they develop some sense of morality. Maybe they have on occasion themselves been the target of other bullies. But they’re different - they were attacked for their hair color or where they lived, things they cannot change.

Since they are not going to stop their own bullying, they develop a set of morals by which the bullying they do is good, but the bullying they receive is wrong.

In my experience this usually settles in to the notion that you can bully someone for things you perceive to be choices but not for things you perceive as intrinsic. You taunt someone for being poor, but not for being black. (Mind, many people never develop this kind of morality, and there are other options not to mention innumerable permutations of what does and does not constitute an acceptable target). The conceit is that this verbal abuse is a Good Thing; it is ostensibly meant to incentivize the target to change, to no longer be or do the thing for which they are being attacked.

As the bully approaches adulthood, they have reached the point where they are comfortable in saying they are a good person - they have developed a set of morals which matches their own actions - largely without changing the actions, and without making any acknowledgement of any poor judgment or harm in the past.

They don’t actively engage in the bullying they did in the past. They also have not acknowledged that it was bullying - to them it was maybe a little mean but not evil. It was well-intentioned, it definitely wasn’t what people mean when they talk about bullying and verbal abuse. After all, they just wanted the best for everyone. Is that so bad?

And then here comes Nike with their mannequin. The mannequin which says “It’s okay to be fat”. And this bully, who did in fact make a hobby of tormenting fat kids, who believes they are a good person and it’s fine to do that because being fat is a choice and being fat is bad and wrong has to deal with the possibility that the thing they spent much of their childhood doing was being a bad person.

But they’re a Good Person!

Which means the mannequin is Bad and Wrong. And the bully has to make sure that’s the consensus. Because they can’t deal with the idea that the people who said they were bad might be right.