By Tom Knighton
Colleges love to have various classes that study whatever victim group one wants to conjure up. Women’s studies, African-American studies, Hispanic studies, gay and lesbian studies, Mexican lesbian fruitbat studies — OK, I might have made that one up. If it’s a group that can claim victim status, there’s a class somewhere that “studies” it.
Oregon State University, however, may have found a niche that no other part of liberal academia has considered so far. According to Campus Reform, the school will have a “fat studies” class.
Oregon State University will offer a spring course on “fat studies” in order to teach students how “weight-based oppression” is a “social justice issue.”
According to a syllabus for the course obtained by Campus Reform, students will examine “body weight, shape, and size as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and ability.”
The course will be taught by Professor Patti Lou-Watkins, who has written extensively on “body image disorders, particularly as they relate to weight bias and physical activity” in academic journals and books.
Watkins is one who seems to believe that fat people aren’t responsible for their own lot and are just poor, horribly mistreated examples of humanity who are oh-so-oppressed because they’re freaking fat.
As someone who is overweight, allow me to simply offer my own thoughts on the topic of fat studies: SHUT UP!
Being fat is, ultimately, a choice. If you’re overweight, and you don’t like how you’re treated, you have two choices. You can either deal with the fact that literally everyone on the freaking earth gets mistreated from time to time, or you can lose some freaking weight. This fact alone makes you ineligible for victim status.
Seriously.
No, it may not be easy, but few things worth it in life are.
Yes, fat people may face poor treatment from time to time, but that’s hardly unusual. If that mistreatment constitutes oppression, then people with big noses or crooked teeth or weird names are also all oppressed. In this day and age, those folks might even be more oppressed.
Further, how is anyone oppressed when the majority of the population appears to be in the same category? Without actual laws keeping a majority of the population out of the democratic process on which our republic hinges, just how are fat people oppressed? Do they take body fat measurements before you can vote? Do they require an accurate BMI prior to registering to vote?
No? Then shut it. You’re not oppressed. You might deal with jerks, but so what? Do you have any idea the kinds of things I’ve been called because of what I’ve written? Even people who are ostensibly my allies have called me some crappy things, for crying out loud. If I can’t say I’m oppressed, then neither can the fat girl who has trouble finding clothes she likes in size “Dumbo.”
After all, my fat butt has had that same problem, and it wasn’t oppression then, either, so knock it off. You’re killing the whole “fat means jolly” stereotype all on your own, and at this rate, Santa is going to have to become an interior decorator in San Francisco to keep his jolly street cred thanks to you folks.