You'd NEVER survive in the jungle!

Or the savanna. Or a zombie apocalypse. That, in addition to "But you're eating up all of the foooooooood!" is one of the biggest arguments against fatness. People seem to think that if your body isn't rigged so that you could move to the wilderness right now and survive easily, you're somehow failing at life.

To that I have to ask, "Why?"

I DON'T live in the wilderness. I live in a cushy society where my needs are supplied by people I've never even met. I live in a society with cars that take me farther than I could ever get on foot. Medical treatment far superior than what would otherwise be available. I don't NEED to be ready to hunt a mammoth, because my lifestyle simply doesn't call for it.

A lot of people would see that as a failure. Some see it as me succumbing to an artificial lifestyle that humanity was never meant to endure (remember, I'm an atheist, so in my book humanity was never MEANT to do anything). Alternatively, some would see it as my becoming overadapted, which could be bad if, say, the United States were to suddenly collapse.

And there's a point in that, but the argument is flawed.

See, humans have never been good at living on their own. We're social animals. Even if the entire country comes crumbling down, I'm guessing we'll be more likely to reach out to people around us for support than hole up in our homes with a bunch of canned beans, and for a reason: that's suicide. Strength is in numbers.

And a funny thing about social groups is that they work best when the members specialize.

The kind of people who would criticize my usefulness in a survival scenario are focusing on raw physical capability. If you can't run, fight or hunt, they say, you're useless. Dead weight, even. No one would keep you around; you'd be a burden.

Huh?

What about the people who mend your clothes? What about toolmakers, cooks, babysitters? (Who do you think is going to watch the fit people's kids while they're out hunting, exactly?) What about entertainers? (Storytellers have been an integral part of human society since before the dawn of civilization.) What about gardeners, sentries, scribes? Are you really saying that they all have to be physically fit?

Or are you saying you could do without them? Because I would love to see you try. I'd love to see a small group of physically fit people try to balance hunting, gathering, sewing, cooking, toilet maintenance, fishing, building, toolmaking, and whatever else you have to do, while still having enough time to rest so you can do it all again the next day. Sure, you can do task rotation, but all that means is that no one is going to get good enough at any one job to get as much out of it as you could be. A few fat specialists, to take up some of the easier but time-consuming jobs while the rest of you focus on keeping everyone fed and watered, could make a lot of difference in this situation.

And in case you're worried about us eating up all of the food: remember, people who are physically active eat a lot more than people who are sedentary. Our diets are going to look light compared to yours.

Suckers.

Fat Shaming: It Starts Young

I don't know how old I was. No older than three, maybe even two. (I have memories of being two. Some people will tell you that no one has memories under the age of four - this is not true; four is the average and the cutoff runs between two and five. So now you know.)

"You do not need more food," she said. "You have ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate."

That was when I first learned that it was wrong to eat too much. Even if you were hungry, there was a limit to the amount of food you could eat and still be considered a good person.

My mother would swear up and down that she NEVER gave me a reason to feel ashamed of being "round." That was how she used to describe me. "Round" or "chubby." "[William]'s a little chubby," she'd say, and while she will tell me that she didn't mean it in a bad way, at the tender age of three I understood her vaguely apologetic tone that meant that there was something about my chubbiness to be ashamed of. Even better, I understood what it meant to have "swinging arm fat," a "gross, bloated gut," and "love handles."

No, she never gave me a reason to feel ashamed.

She squeezed my sides when she told me I was growing "love handles." Grabbed my sides right on the fatty pockets and pinched them. Not hard. Just enough to communicate "Look, you've got those body parts that your aunt was just saying are disgusting and need to be fought with a vengeance, and while she has been dealing with them for the past couple of years, you're five years old! Better get on that diet!" (I didn't know that my aunt had been overweight her entire life.)

Now, she never tried to put me on a diet. She never told me I couldn't have a food item that everyone else was having. But I could tell - again, from the age of three or younger - that she was watching me. It was like she was just waiting for me to slip up, to reveal my secret gluttony that was so clearly the cause of my fatness. If I dared take more food than she thought I needed, she was right there to cut me off and let me know I had enough. She didn't have to do this to my sister, of course - she was normal weight, so there obviously wasn't a problem. It's no wonder that by the time I was six years old I felt like I was contributing to my problem every time I ate more than a certain, arbitrary amount that I considered "normal."

But she never gave me a reason to be ashamed.

From my perspective, it felt like I was being inducted prematurely into the world of adulthood. The world of "no, you can't eat that, you're already chubby." "Yeah, we have a hard time finding pants for my daughter because she's so round, so we get her boy pants." "Oh my GOSH, you're bigger around at five years old than your sister is at nine." She never, ever told me that there was anything wrong with it. She just made it out like I was violating the natural order of things by not fitting into my sister's hand-me-downs.

That was how I felt: unnatural. Maybe she didn't tell me directly that being fat made me inferior. But every time I turned around she was commenting on my fat body, feeling it, gossiping about it with everyone from my aunts to complete strangers (who, in the mind of a three-year-old, aren't that different). It didn't take a genius to figure out that there was something weird about being fat. She never talked about my sister that way. She didn't have to. My sister was growing up right. My mother never talked about the trouble she had finding clothes to fit her. She didn't even have a word for my sister's body type. She didn't have to, because she was normal. I was the aberrant one. I needed an extra label to explain why I wore a different size of pants than my sister had at my age. I needed my mother to apologize to everyone she met for the shape of my body.

There's a lot of comment in the feminist world about the way women are shamed for having inferior bodies. They are put under constant scrutiny to ensure that they're thin enough, pretty enough, busty enough, but not too busty. Going through the world it feels like their physical appearance is the business of everyone who might look at them, and if they don't match up then they've better have a good reason why. They put up with this from the moment they start puberty, it's said.

When you're a fat child, it doesn't start at puberty. It starts as soon as your body becomes different from the thin child your parents expected to have. For people like me, who were born "chunky," being content with your body is a privilege that we were never allowed.

But, of course, it's all in my head, because my mother never told me there was anything wrong with being fat.