Fat People Get Yelled At To Exercise And Then When We Do, We Get Made Fun Of

The internet is *pissed* at Dani Mathers.

The Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers who Snapchatted a photo of a not-thin woman changing at her gym with the caption, "If I can't unsee this then you can't either" ​— has been taken to task by a million commenters who find her comments insensitive, cruel, and straight-up evil.

I get it. She's a dumb-ass who is bad at Snapchat and even worse at basic human decency, but she's not the real problem. The problem is a culture that says it's OK to laugh at, mock, comment upon, openly discuss, and reign judgment down upon fat people's bodies. We get yelled at to exercise and then made fun of when we do it. Not to get all deep on you, but it is us fat people who can't unsee the hatred and disgust that we receive simply for living.

Every day there are crazed new articles and dubious studies targeting fat people — ones that are easily debunked if anyone even cared to do a modicum of research — telling us to lose weight. There's an onslaught of articles on how to prevent becoming fat, and even fat children are being targeted by anti-obesity campaigns. (As if being a fat child isn't hard enough already and as if skinny children don't also need exercise and good nutrition.)

But the thing is, when we're "good fatties" and comply; when we go to the gym in order to shrink our bodies down to a size that's not deserving of hatred from society, we're then subjected to people taking our photos and sending them to their friends. Or, as is Mathers' case, to her entire Snapchat list. It's easy to hate on Mathers but the truth is, she's vocalizing what a lot of people think when they see fat people working out: Ew.​

I've been on the other end of derision like Mathers's. I've been yelled at to "lose weight" while jogging — think about that. I was jogging. I was, in theory, doing something that might result in weight loss, and I was still targeted. Please let me know if you can wrap your head around that mind-fuck because I'm still trying. Help!

Even worse than that are the people who think of themselves as heroes for championing fat people working out. OMG, those people make my skin crawl. The other day in a dance class I've taken since forever, ​a woman who's come maybe two times congratulated me on "keeping up." The implication is, "Good for you, fatty! Lifting yourself out from under a giant pizza to try to work out with the rest of us normies! YOU GO, GIRL!"

Oh, girl. No, girl. Not today, Satan. ​

My friend had to restrain me until my blood pressure returned to that of a human and then I explained to that woman that not only was I in better shape than she was (which is irrelevant, but I was feeling petty), but also my body was none of her business and maybe she should pay more attention to her own sorry-ass moves. The mirror is that way, girl. Bye, girl.

And I'm not the only one who's had such a... clarifying experience. Most famously, there's the skinny white woman who was baffled by a fat black woman in her yoga class; so baffled in fact that she wrote a racist, fat-phobic essay that indulged her gross, inappropriate feelings about the situation.

Over on the Dances With Fat blog, Ragen Chastain​ writes about this meme that was popular on Reddit for quite some time. It shows a fat person exercising from behind with the caption, "Making fun of a fat person at the gym is like making fun of a homeless person at a job fair."​

Where to start with this bullshit? The genius who made the original meme on the left — Ragan's awesome response is on the right — honestly thought they were doing fat people a solid by telling other folks not to make fun of us at the gym. I'm actually screaming.

Ragan points out the issue with this sort of thinking:

This smacks of "Good Fatty/Bad Fatty" thinking – the massively misinformed idea that fat people who participate in behaviors that are judged as "good" or "healthy" (by the person who is operating under the delusion that they have the right to judge us,) deserve to be treated better than those who aren't doing the "good" or "healthy" thing.

As you can see, fat people are dammed if we do, dammed if we don't. We're scolded and shamed into exercising and then we're attacked when we do it. I don't want to go to a gym because I don't want my photo to end up on some cruel dummy's Snapchat, or worse, have a piece written with faux-compassion about how sad it was to have to work out next to me. I don't want to be singled out as a person who is unhealthy because she is fat — because 1. that's none of your business; and 2. I can run a 10-minute mile. I just want to be left the hell alone to do my thing — whether it's to swim laps or eat a cheesecake or silently scream in a corner while some idiot concern trolls me.

Here's an idea: Instead of busying yourself with another person's body, worry about your damn self. For Dani Mathers, that may mean contemplating her callous idiocy via jail time. For the rest of us, it may mean just being less shitty to anyone who has a different body than what you've been brainwashed to think is "right". As Ragan's brilliant response to that dumb meme above so beautifully puts it, "Making fun of a fat person... is a shitty thing to do no matter where they are. Don't be an asshole."​

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