Self-Hatred As a Social Skill

In many parts of the world, especially places that are predominantly English-speaking (United States, Australia, United Kingdom), the most common response to human fat is hostility.  This sometimes takes the guise of concern (“I’m worried about your health”), and is usually justified with the solid mass of research that states excess fat is dangerous, and the public policy that is based on it.  [By the way, if you read the news these days, you will notice that things are shifting: there are still many reports on the “dangers” of obesity, but there are more and more reports on how these dangers are overblown or totally incorrect, and how wrong it is to base your opinion about someone’s health on their physical appearance: thin doesn’t automatically mean healthy and fat does not automatically mean unhealthy.]

The times, they are a-changin’, but the majority opinion is still righteously anti-fat.  If you are fat at all, you must constantly face people who may or may not be silently judging you primarily on your weight.  In an earlier post [The White (Wo)man’s Burden], I wrote about how being white in a white-dominated society tends to make people blind or dismissive of the experiences of non-white people in the society.  It isn’t usually deliberate callousness or cruelty; it’s more about everyone living within their own bubble of experience and perception.  Very few people have the imagination or empathy to be willing and able to picture what someone else’s life might be like, especially if it is very unlike theirs.  For example, homeless people.  Few of them deliberately chose to be homeless; most of them would prefer not to be.  There are occasional stories in the news about how a respectable person with a job and a home lost first one than the other and could find no more work and no place safe to stay.  Reading these stories, the first impulse is to reject them as unrelatable to us: there’s no way we would lose our job and be unable to find employment; there’s no way we would live in our car or on the street.  The people we’re reading about must be different in some way; there must be something blameworthy about them, that is the real reason they are in these situations.

The same thing is true for fat, in places where fat isn’t admired.  Being fat, in the majority opinion, is as contemptible and preventable as being homeless.  Being fat is more contemptible to many than being a drug or alcohol addict, which is kind of funny when you stop to think about it.  I think two of the reasons for that are that people are still stuck simplemindedly associating fat with badness (moral weakness, poor health, ugliness), whereas drug addicts are more likely to be thin (which is always good), and there is danger and romance associated with drug and alcohol addiction: musicians like Keith Richards and Iggy Pop, with their wiry, sinewy bodies, their talent, their fame and their hard-living ways, and Ernest Hemmingway, with his robust, hyper-masculinity: his wartime experiences, his dangerous stints in journalism, his world traveling, his many wives and his terse, understated prose.  Whether you live or die due to drugs and alcohol, there is a darkness associated with the addiction that is generally considered interesting to outsiders; a badness that has nothing to do with the boring, despicable, squishy badness of perceived overindulgence in food.

This is where self-hatred becomes socially valuable.  Since more people draw negative conclusions about heavy people, based on their size alone, it helps the heavy person socially if they seem to agree with the majority opinion.  You know this is true under any circumstance: if you are a Republican in a crowd of Democrats or a Democrat in a crowd of Republicans and you just want to get along with these people on a social basis, you avoid stirring the pot with your opinions.  Most of us know we can’t convert the world by stating our opinion and most of us would prefer, in a low-stakes situation like a cocktail party, to avoid antagonizing other party-goers.  If you hate heavy metal or classical music, but someone you are interested in loves one or the other and invites you to go to a concert, chances are you will do it with a reasonable assumption of interest, because the person is more important to you than the event.

In both these cases you have opportunities to discover the opinion of others before acknowledging your own tastes and beliefs, and you can make choices about whether or not to admit to preferring something the people around you don’t like.  When you are fat, you don’t.  If you are fat at all, in fat-hating places, you know that some, maybe many people are looking down on your for your weight.  If you are comfortable with yourself as you are, if you don’t express hatred and despair over your own body and the fervent desire to change it, the contempt solidifies.  If, on the other hand, you complain about your weight, talk about the diet you’re on or plan to start, and other things that signify that you are not satisfied with yourself, the contempt abates (slightly).  The other person knows that you are aware you are terribly flawed and that you are trying to do something about it.  They may pity you for being so weak as to get fat in the first place, but they will approve of you for trying to conquer it.  This, by the way, is also where the food-watching comes in.  Whether you are with people you know or strangers, if you are heavy, some people will quietly monitor your food, making silent (or voiced) judgments about whether or not you are eating as you should.  If you have lost 100 pounds and maintained that loss for a year, but you’re still visibly fat and you eat something sweet in front of strangers, all they will see is a fat person eating something they shouldn’t.  This is a big reason that many heavy people eat delicious things in secret, with feelings of anxiety, sadness, deprivation and a sense of getting away with something.  Thin people (except celebrities) usually don’t have to deal with this: no one questions the thin person’s hamburger, fries, diet coke and hot fudge sundae.  Since it doesn’t show on their body, obviously they know what they’re doing with food.  Maybe they do: maybe they have naturally supercharged metabolic processes, or maybe they’ve undereaten recently and need more food—or maybe they’re exercise bulimics, spending four hours a day in the gym to work off the calories, or they’re food bulimics and frantically stuffing themselves with delicious things they know they won’t allow their body to keep.

The point is, self-hating fat people are conforming to the mores of the majority opinion.  Self-hatred doesn’t come out of nowhere.  As people we are taught to obey the rules of our society, no matter how bizarre, and we generally do it because it is much more comfortable to be accepted than to be ostracized.  We all want to be seen in a positive light and when we can’t be, for some perceived flaw, we either affiliate with other people who share that flaw, or we do whatever we can to minimize it with the majority (or both).  There is a saying: two wrongs don’t make a right.  In the case of social relationships, they often do.  Two wrongs seem to work like multiplying negative numbers in Algebra: -2 x -2 = 4 (not -4).  This sort of social mathematics is unfortunate, since it tends to force people into molds, rather than allowing for individuality. 

Taking it down to brass tacks: self-hatred is a defense mechanism designed to help people get along with those who hate them.  It works (sort of), but it also destroys.