The Necropolitan Sentinel

What, it hasn't?

A lot of people are responding to this half-assed (or perhaps fat-assed) proposal to combat widespread obesity via public shaming as yet another of the elites scolding the hoi polloi, bullying over lifestyles, etc.

Let me let the guy have his say:

 

It will be no less necessary to fnd ways to bring strong social pressure to bear on individuals, going beyond anodyne education and low-key exhortation. It will be imperative, frst, to persuade them that they ought to want a good diet and exercise for themselves and for their neighbor and, second, that excessive weight and outright obesity are not socially acceptable any longer. They need as well to be mobilized as citizens to support a more invasive role for government. Obesity is in great part a refection of the kind of culture we have, one that is permissive about how people take care of their bodies and accepts many if not most of the features of our society that contribute to the problem. There has to be a popular uprising when so many aspects of our common lives, individually and institutionally, must be changed more or less simultaneously. Safe and slow incrementalism that strives never to stigmatize obesity has not and cannot do the necessary work.

Now, I will not say the guy is totally ignorant of the next items:

More than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7%) are obese.

….

Non-Hispanic blacks have the highest age-adjusted rates of obesity (49.5%) compared with Mexican Americans (40.4%), all Hispanics (39.1%) and non-Hispanic whites (34.3%)

….

The South had the highest prevalence of obesity (29.5%), followed by the Midwest (29.0%), the Northeast (25.3%) and the West (24.3%).

He does mention that yes, obesity is widespread, and yadda yadda yadda. That's over a third of adults, and in some groups about half are obese. Mind you, we're talking out-and-out fat, not merely overweight.  Over two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are at least overweight.

I'm not quite sure how he thinks fat-shaming is going to work when so many are overweight. He points to what has happened with smoking, but smokers were never a majority of the population. Being at least overweight is definitely a supermajority (woo hoo!) and being outright obese is more than a third of the adult U.S. population. We've got some heft on our side.

He talks about using fat-shaming to prevent kids from getting fat (and I've got all sorts of great ideas for that, such as instituting the old Dickensian workhouse treadmill system – green energy!) but the thing is, most of the fat adults I know now were normal weight as kids (that's certainly the case with me). It's fairly normal to get fat as you get older in this society.

So yes, let's prevent the kids from being so obese they get Type 2 diabetes at age 9. But there is plenty of fat-shaming going on in the schools, from the kids themselves. Unlike adults, most kids aren't even overweight. So yay, the fat-shaming is keeping the moral order there. Or perhaps the kids are actually active and growing, and it's once you're sitting behind a computer as a job the spread starts.

So good luck with that and your one-third of the population, trying to shame the gigantic mass of fatties. Let me know how that works out for you.

Because if it does, I have this whole program of math-shaming I'd like to try.  But I want to see if the strategy can work in the case of less depressing odds.

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