Randomly Targeted

One of the best books that I have read for professional purposes is Aubrey Gordon’s “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.” Although I have listened to countless patients detail what it is like to have a large body in our fatphobic society, Aubrey’s book helped me to grasp more deeply the contrast between weight stigma and thin privilege.

Some of Aubrey’s stories are wild enough to strain credulity, such as a stranger approaching her in a grocery store and taking food out of her shopping cart without permission due to supposed concern for the author’s health, yet I believe her. A couple of years ago, a Black friend of mine explained to me that Blacks have been complaining about police brutality for decades, but it took the widespread prevalence of cellphone cameras and their resulting videos to convince white folks that the problem is real. His words hit me hard, I learned from them, and I do not need to see video of someone stealing fruit from Aubrey’s cart to believe that this happened to her.

The crux of the book’s fourth chapter, “On Concern and Choice,” is that some people express concern about someone’s weight for supposed health reasons, in part because they believe body size to be a choice – which, for the most part, it is not – something that one can manipulate if convinced that their current size is a problem. Furthermore, their expressed concern is really not about the person to whom they are talking, but rather an indication of the fears they have about their own bodies. In other words, if we acknowledge that body size is largely out of our control, then we also have to face the reality that our own bodies might change in ways that we do not want them to despite our best efforts to keep them the same. That prospect scares the crap out of many people, who find it easier to pretend we have more control than we really do.

This chapter resonated because it hearkened back to the allegations people have directed at me upon learning that I used to have a spinal tumor. Surely you have a family history of such issues, they insist. No. You grew up under high-voltage transmission lines. Wrong again. You overdid it in the weight room. Eye roll. The list goes on. As each assertion is met with a negative response, the concern on their face grows. It took me a long time to figure out what that expression is about, but now I understand that when the ideas that the tumor’s cause was my own doing or something unique to my circumstances are struck down, people then realize that the condition can develop in anyone’s body – most notably their own.

Humans, we are a funny bunch. Our antennae go up a bit higher when we feel like something might affect us rather than just other people, do they not? Think about horrible stories we read about violent home invasions in our community. While the crimes and our thoughts for the victims may be similar either way, contrast how you feel when an article concludes, “The police say the parties were known to each other,” versus, “The police believe the victims were randomly targeted.”