When I was a kid and I helped with the laundry, I thought my mother’s clothes seemed like doll clothes. My mother has always been a tiny little slip of a lady. Now that she’s in her seventies, I have tried to come up with strategies for boosting the nutritional content of the food she’s …
Category: weight bias in the media
America’s Culture Wars: What Fat Shaming Shares with Poverty Shaming
I’ve just read a Facebook thread that has me feeling pretty down and rather sad. The question was posed, “Should welfare applicants be drug tested?” Overwhelmingly, the thread was filled with indignantly affirmative posts. One woman even asserted that welfare drug testing wasn’t about money or politics at all—it was about “safety,” protecting the public …
Bioethicist Quack Promotes “Fat Shaming” to End Obesity
It’s pretty shocking to believe the source of this proposal. The co-founder of a non-profit center dedicated to bioethics research and public policy is promoting “fat shaming” as a solution to the obesity problem. And yes, he actually calls his proposal “Stigmatization.” In his paper “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic” Daniel Callahan PhD, co-founder of …
The Scourge that is “Biggest Loser”
Why mince words? “Biggest Loser” is one of the most offensive television shows of all time. It perpetuates truly hateful paradigms in the guise of a sickening insistence that the show “is changing lives.” I could say that the most disgusting scenes are when the trainers are humiliating the contestants and they do that in so many …