“Fat Activist” Claims That Thin People Are “Privileged”

It’s no secret that people who are thin and attractive have certain social and physical advantages over the obese in our society. It’s also widely known that some people, usually due to genetics, have a harder time losing weight than the rest of us. As the old billiards saying goes, “them’s the breaks.”

However, some people who are overweight not only find society’s standards unfair, they view them as oppression. In the same tradition of the race based social justice movement that’s been spreading across college campuses, there are now “fat activists” like Virgie Tovar, who recently spoke at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

To mark International No Diet Day (all of this is sounding very ironic for a public health school), Tovar spoke about how our “white heteronormative society” is oppressing the obese with “fat phobia.” And apparently, our sexual preferences are bigoted if they don’t include the obese.  She compared this oppressive phobia with rape culture, and criticized the fit among us for their “thin privilege” (So if you bust your ass and starve yourself to lose weight, are you still privileged?).

At the crux of her argument is the idea that we shouldn’t push people to lose weight, health consequences be damned. Most people who are fat can’t help it, and exercise and diet regimens are a social construct.

Or maybe this social justice movement, like all that have preceded it, is nothing more than an attempt to shed individual responsibilities, and force everyone else in society to adapt to the whims of the few.