Weight jokes in quarantine just aren’t funny
We’re having a health crisis, not a weight crisis for goodness sake, argues
You must have noticed the weight jokes? OMG, like the one about summer bodies being postponed until 2021 due to coronavirus? Or, ‘‘I tested positive for having a fat ass’’. Talk about timing! And this: ‘‘I’m not going to be able to get out of the house after CoronaCation!’’ Badaboom!
They’re just jokes, right? Harmless jokes, just like the quips about bingeing on Netflix. It’s how we bond from one bubble to the next, meme to meme. I mean, if we can’t joke in quarantine from my feed to your feed, then how do we get through it? Besides, it’s what everyone is doing.
Well, yeah, nah. It’s not as harmless as it looks. The problem with fat jokes is that there’s no good evidence that it makes anyone feel better and it makes people feel worse, whether they’re doing the talking or the listening.
It turns your attention to what your body looks like, not what it does for you. And right now, we’re in a health crisis. We don’t want to come out of this with millions more people turning on their own bodies, suffering from body shame. Because we’ve been down this path before.
Let me take you back to the 80s where everyone was baking, exercise was something you did in front of the TV with a VHS tape of Jane Fonda in a ridiculous amount of spandex, teenage bedrooms had Raquel Welch in that bikini, or Olivia Newton John in tights and leg warmers – and fad dieting was as popular as hair product.
The diet industry flourished and everyone lined the wallets of those who came up with the latest craze. What, no bacon, only bran muffins? OK, let’s go! We forgot how to listen to our bodies. We forgot how to trust them. We put all our faith in health and fitness gurus and we started to fear our bodies for not behaving and looking like we thought they were meant to look.
We were brainwashed. Diets have a 95 per cent failure rate and they rely on that failure to keep people coming back. And back they do.
Then, we headed into the 90s, where heroin chic became the desired look and guess what percentage of the population have bodies like that? It’s less than 5 per cent, more like 2. That didn’t turn out well. Eating disorders exploded alongside the ever-growing diet industry and not just in the Western world.
So we strode into a new century, where body glitter was everywhere, as were iPods, CD Walkmans and people on the Atkins diet. Poke wars on Facebook took up our time and we saw the rise of the social influencer, like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
The body positivity movement hit in the noughties, because that’s when we started to notice it. Dove’s Real Beauty campaign came out. Activists raised their fists against Photoshop and diets and narrow standards of beauty ideals.
By 2012, #bopo (body positivity) was all over Instagram. Amy Schumer was making us snort at our body fixations and ridiculousness. We were getting somewhere.
Advertisers were listening and, by the beginning of last year, diversity was the word of the year. We demanded to see diversity on our screens and on our phones and in our workplaces and things were changing.
Brands as big as Nike were using mannequins and models of different shapes, shades and sizes. Fat activist and model Tess Holliday, who started @effyourbeautystandards, graced the cover of Cosmopolitan and it won Magazine Cover of the Year! Plus we had Lizzo!
We were racing towards being more accepting of different body types, with everyone feeling more comfortable in their own shells, right? If you are expecting a happy ending you might be disappointed.
Yes, in the media, but hidden underneath the love-your-body memes and thousands of #bopo images was still a great fear of fat because something more powerful was trying to convince us we were all meant to have the same body – you know the one: it’s slim, it’s fit, it’s toned, it’s ageless – the diet industry, worth US$72 billion!
We might share body acceptance posts on social media but, collectively, we keep feeding the fear of fat, with endless concerns and comments about putting on and losing weight and, tragically, we have passed the fear on to children.
More than one-third of 5-year-olds apparently restrict their eating to stay thin. Studies show more than 80 per cent of 10-year-old girls say they are more afraid of getting fat than getting cancer, and two-thirds of 18- to 25-year-olds said they would rather be mean or stupid, than fat.
What? Children would prefer to get cancer than be fat? They would prefer their brains worked at less capacity than be fat? They would prefer to be the class bully than be fat?
Hold on. With everyone preaching diversity, then being in a fat body can’t be that bad, right? Sadly, the discrimination against fat bodies, in adults and children is horrific. A 2019 Harvard study of more than 4 million online tests, showed we are becoming less biased against race, skin tone and sexual orientation, but we have become more implicitly biased against weight. More biased against weight than race.
It explains why so many people are making quarantine fat jokes right now, albeit with clenched teeth, because this fear of rejection, teasing, and discrimination is real.
We fear fat so much it makes us turn on our own
bodies. It makes us say awful things to ourselves, and others. If ever there was a time to stop and listen to what our bodies want, it’s right now. More than ever before, our bodies need kindness.
Yes, eating well and exercising are important but if we’re saying hateful things to our bodies it’s not healthy for our minds or our self-esteem. And if we’re saying those things on social media – fearing turning into the size of the houses we’re isolated in, fearing our summer bodies won’t emerge – then everyone else is listening, including kids. And it makes everyone feel worse.
There’s enough fear and uncertainty without adding an old fear, one that we pretend we don’t have any more because we’re all woke and left it behind last century, but we secretly do.
‘‘Self-care’’ is a ubiquitous term right now but if you’re lucky enough to be safe from any real threat of Covid-19, then be a friend to your body. It’s going through something it’s never been through before.
If you need more sleep, you need more sleep. If you need to bake, you need to bake. If you need to cook three-course meals for your bubble people to give them something to look forward to then you need to cook three-course meals. If you need to sing or howl in the shower, you need to do that, too.
Our bodies are all doing the best they can to get us through this, safely. So please don’t belittle it, or make it fearful about its size. If we keep joking about the size of our quarantine asses, we are sweeping the path for the diet industry to undertake its biggest gaslighting project ever, and convince us that the only outcome from this worldwide pandemic is that we need to lose some pounds, using this new app. Then we end up right back where we were in the 80s.
We have to come out of this feeling proud of our bodies that they got us through this. We have to come out of this accepting that all bodies are different, not fearful of not looking the same.
Not all bodies come out of this alive. Our bodies are doing the best they can, coping, struggling through and they need our kindness not our criticism.