By Andrea Widburg
For some time, leftists have been going after fitness, including health weights. However, when you look at other leftist trends, it becomes apparent that the hostility to health bodies is part of a larger war on human existence.
I raised my kids in an upper-middle-class affluent world. The people in my neighborhood exercised obsessively. Their kids were skinny, too, thanks to soccer, swimming, lacrosse, basketball, martial arts, and playground dates. Parents who didn’t provide healthy foods for playdates got a reputation. No wonder that, in recent years, we were told that fitness and anti-obesity are racist and classist. However, the pro-obesity trend has a more sinister quality when you factor in other recent leftist cultural trends.
According to an MSNBC commentator, being fit is tantamount to being a fascist. Cynthia Miller-Idriss bases her argument on the fact that being fit is a guy thing that’s tied to testosterone and warfare. Well, maybe, but as I said above, I still think it was largely a class thing.
Think about it from the historic perspective: Once upon a time, poor people labored in the fields while rich people remained pampered indoors. Poor people were browned from the sun and skinny from labor and malnutrition. Rich people had white skin and were plump. That was true all the way through the mid-19th century.
Then, factory work came into the world. By the first half of the 20th century, poor people were white from indoor factory labor, while rich people suddenly sported tans from their vacations at Palm Beach and Cannes.
As poor people became more sedentary—especially women, who went from physical labor to secretarial pools and the like—it was the active rich (tennis, alpine hikes) who started to be lithe and toned. I love this wacky 1931 Busby Berkeley video singing the song of weight loss for beauty. (If you have a sharp eye, you’ll spot Betty Grable as the lead stick wielder):
In America, the pressure for thinness was strengthened by the fact that two disfavored classes ate food that led to weight gain: blacks and Southerners, both of whom dined on high-calorie southern food. After WWII, with the rise of processed and fast foods, the class implications of weight gain were even stronger. Educated, affluent people ate healthy diets; poor and uneducated people did not. And always, there was that subtext of safe neighborhoods, time, and money allowing for after-school activities, safe streets on which to play, gym memberships, personal trainers, etc., all of which keep people thin.
For a long time, altruistic white, upper-middle-class people tried to encourage those outside of their class to lose weight. For most of my life, doctors, women’s magazines, and newspapers insisted relentlessly (and accurately) that excessive weight is associated with a host of life-shortening illnesses: heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, some cancers, fertility, etc.
It was inevitable, though, as these words failed to make an impression on “oppressed classes,” especially in minority communities, that the left would eventually decide that, if you can’t beat them (into losing weight), it was time to celebrate their weight as a minority virtue that America’s white supremacists were trying to destroy. So, fitness is fascist and, as we’re learning, trying to convince people that their health depends on weight loss is racist and hateful:
Of course, as always, to the extent there’s still capitalism in America, opportunists have picked up on the trend:
New Tours Mean No More FOMO for Plus-Size Travelers
Five companies dedicated to size-inclusive travel aim to bring community and reassurance to people in bigger bodies.
Vacation is meant to be relaxing, exhilarating and insert all the other positive adjectives you like, but it is often stressful and disappointing. Traveling while fat can be both of those things, as well as dehumanizing and FOMO-inducing.
Actually, plus-size travelers don’t just have the fear of missing out; they’ve historically had the near guarantee that they will miss out, thanks to fat bias and societal structures that say we are simply too big to have fun. There are the obvious challenges — too-small airline seats, intimidating pools and beaches — but other worries as well: What if the spa bathrobes don’t fit? What if the rides at an amusement park cannot accommodate bigger bodies and the only way to find that out is by waiting in line for an hour and then unsuccessfully trying to board? What if the airline loses your bag and there are no stores at your destination with clothes that fit? (Trevor Kezon, a board member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, said he purposely packs two suitcases on trips because of that distinct possibility.)
Now a small but growing market catering to size-inclusive travel (often aimed exclusively at women) is seeking to bring joy, community and reassurance to people in bigger bodies at price points on par with standard group trips.
I don’t judge people who are overweight, although I do worry about them. Also, as someone with a serious sweet tooth, I understand all too well the temptations that surround us today. But to celebrate obesity when we know its dangers strikes me as yet another inversion of normalcy that the left pushes.
More than that, it’s part of the left’s antihumanism. Think of what the left is doing: For the first time in history, a society is deliberately choosing suicidal behaviors, not at the individual level, but at the societal level. Climate change says we’re parasites, and we’re being treated as such: Mutilate your bodies to the point of sterility, embrace non-procreative same-sex relationships, don’t have children at all, abandon the nitrogen used for food production…
Every single thing the left advocates is meant to kill us or stop us from reproducing. Viewed that way, it’s no wonder that fat is in and fitness is out.