So you’ve been publicly fat-shamed
How awful a week it must have been for Sarah Hoffman, Alberta’s new minister of health and seniors, former chair of the Edmonton School Board and also (though we sometimes forget when talking about politicians) a sentient being. Last week, the story was Hoffman’s announcement that Alberta would ban menthol tobacco products in the fall. This week, the story has been that Hoffman is fat; a Progressive Conservative party executive called her fat. Can a minister of health be fat? Is it misogynistic to call her fat? We should shame the guy who called her fat. Fat, fat, fat. A weaker person might have packed up her car, given the finger to the legislature and succumbed to the draw of the disconnected life somewhere deep in Alberta’s woodlands.
Instead, Hoffman has said nothing and seems to just be riding it out, which is probably the best re- sponse she could have had. The whole thing started when Jordan Lien, southern Alberta vice president for the PC party, published a Facebook post criticizing the government’s new stance on menthol cigarettes. “Our morbidly obese Health Minister Sarah Hoffman is going to ban the sale of menthol tobacco products in Alberta as of September,” he wrote. “I would assume then that if health is the chief concern, that all sodas, candy, processed sugar products … and fast foods … should then follow?”
The post, naturally, spread like mad, soliciting both condemnation from people accusing Lien of “fat shaming,” as well as emboldened choruses of “hear, hear.” Lien, perhaps realizing that his comment was not exactly the plunger the PCs need to rescue their reputation in Alberta, posted an apology to his Twitter account Monday afternoon, calling his remark “dumb” and “insensitive.”
His remark was dumb and insensitive, though his observation was also valid: some people will think Hoffman’s weight undermines her credibility as health minister. This is, unfortunately, the laziest form of identity politics, wherein male politicians cannot talk about abortion because they don’t have fallopian tubes, and Barack Obama has no authority to lecture Americans about health insurance because he’s a smoker, and Justin Trudeau should not talk about the struggles of the middle class because he was born with a silver spoon. It’s a familiar type of ad hominem attack, one espoused both in the political arena and out, though it’s rarely as viscerally mean as the one aired by Lien, especially coming from someone on the inside. When they are discussed, they’re whispered, not posted.
The suggestion, however, that this had something to do with the fact that Hoffman is a woman — which was the focus of a CBC report Tuesday — is utter nonsense. For one, there’s the parallel case of Quebec’s Minister of Health Gaétan Barrette, who is overweight and also a doctor, and who was the subject of an online petition last year that called on him to lose weight, which drew more than 9,500 signatures.
Then there’s former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, whose fat was a recurring theme in both print and media during his first election campaign and after, when the Globe and Mail ran a piece called, “Rob Ford’s not popular despite being fat. He’s popular because of it,” and Now magazine issued a cover with his head photoshopped onto a hairy, portly, naked form. In 2012, when he was supposed to be on a diet, Ford was caught on video entering a KFC, and the Toronto Star ran with the story as if Russian troops were just spotted for the first time in Ukraine. And the following month, when Ford got into a tousle with one of their reporters on his property, the paper ran an editorial cartoon with the caption, “Mayor Chases, Catches, And Eats Reporter.” If anything, there’s less of a taboo around talking about male politicians’ bodies, not more.
Still, the position of mayor is not the same as health minister, and it’s fair to say that physique matters more in the perception of the latter. That’s a defensible argument, if a lazy one. Indeed, it bears repeating that what a politician does is infinitely more important than what he or she looks like, and Sarah Hoffman is just coming out of the gate. That said, the way she has handled this storm — likely ignoring an onslaught of requests to respond — is a perhaps a good indication of her character as a politician, and what we might come to expect from her over the next four years. She hasn’t scampered off to the woods, as many of us might have done, nor has she succumbed to the temptation to respond in equal vitriol. I’d take a poised, fat politician over a cruel, thin one every time.
Cohen: ‘ Putin is probing to weaken the European Union and the West.’ Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman’s poised reaction to a stupid remark bodes well for her as a politician