Anyone who has paid close attention to the evolution of the Left over the past few decades will have noticed that it’s taken a decidedly therapeutic turn. This is the subject of books like Therapy Culture by Frank Furedi and One Nation Under Therapy by Christina Hoff Sommers, which charts the rising trend to treat feelings and emotions as things to be protected rather than challenged. On campuses, this instinct finds its expression in “trigger warnings,” demanded by SJWs to warn students in advance of content—lectures, books, films, or works of art—that might hurt (or “trigger”) them.
At the University of Oxford, law students demanded trigger warnings before lectures on sexual assault law, on the grounds that such subject matter is potentially distressing. The thought that law students should seek to toughen up on issues they’d have to defend in open court apparently never occurred to them.
The Left’s embrace of therapy culture has led damaged people to gravitate to the movement. And why wouldn’t they? Instead of encouraging people to change themselves, the Left tells vulnerable people that they should instead change the environment around them to protect themselves from having their feelings hurt. “It’s not your fault,” the Left soothingly coos. “It’s society.”
Obesity, a disorder that is as much mental as physical, gets the same treatment. More than a third of adults are obese in the United States, with nearly 70% classified as overweight in some way.100 Furthermore, health problems caused by obesity are one of the biggest causes of healthcare expenditure, with estimates of the annual cost ranging from $147 billion to $210 billion per year. Obese employees are also estimated to cost employers an extra $506 per obese worker per year.101 Being fat is damaging to society as well as to the individual.
And what does the Left do in the face of this crisis? Michelle Obama, at least, has campaigned for better diets and active lifestyles for children, even if the meals her campaign produced are disgusting, and systematically thrown away by children. But the radical Left, the intersectional feminist Left, the Left that dreams up new categories of oppression, has responded by declaring that the feelings of fat people are more important than their health.
I encountered the result of this during my college tour, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There I was confronted with a morbidly obese girl who interrupted a joint event featuring myself, radio host Steven Crowder, and Christina Hoff Sommers. Her interruption consisted of loudly screaming “KEEP YOUR HATE SPEECH OFF THIS CAMPUS!” while flailing her meaty arms over her head. The video of her outburst instantly went viral online, and she became known as “Trigglypuff.”
Later, the internet would discover that she gave presentations on “fat acceptance” and “body positivity,” two new concepts dreamed up by intersectional feminists. Their attitude is summed up in one dreadful slogan: “Healthy at Every Size.”
The internet was quick to mock, but I wasn’t. Trigglypuff had been sucked in by an ideology that promised her shelter from the hurtful realities of the world, where weight loss is a prerequisite of health, not to mention happiness and social acceptance. The Left received an eager foot soldier who proselytized its ideology and shouted down those who challenged it. In return, Trigglypuff received the misleading assurance that she could be seen as normal and healthy, a paper-thin shield that inevitably collapsed as soon as she came into contact with the world outside her bubble. I couldn’t mock Trigglypuff. Fat celebrities, who set an atrocious example for millions despite having the finest personal trainers in the world on their Hollywood doorsteps? Yes. But not Trigglypuff. Her entire predicament was and remains too horrible.
To avoid more Trigglypuffs, we have to tear down trigger warnings, safe spaces, “fat positivity workshops,” and other constructions the Left has created to entice vulnerable, hurting people to their cause. All these serve to do is encourage people to blame others and attack society for making them feel miserable, when in reality they will never be happy unless they fix whatever it is about them that triggers our gag reflexes.
When I call a celebrity fat, I’m not doing so merely to be cruel. I’m calling attention to an obvious fact that the Left seeks to suppress: that being fat is not a good thing. The same is true of being ugly, which is another thing the intersectional Left is trying to convert into a category of oppression, contrasting it with the privilege of being attractive. If you can fix it, you should, and if you can’t fix it, you can’t blame society for beauty standards, which change over time, but only slightly. Attempting to overturn them completely, something the intersectional Left promises is achievable, will only bring misery on the least fortunate in society.
Some feminists create a cult of ugliness that treats both beauty and happiness as enemies. The novelist Flannery O’Connor skewered this type of intellectual in her story, “Good Country People,” whose Ph.D. protagonist changed her name from “Joy” to “Hulga” because she could think of nothing uglier. In her thirties, she is “hulking,” never married, and friendless. “Constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face,” and her eyes had “the look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.”
Am I rationalizing my gay urge to raise up the aesthetically pleasing and tear down its opposite? Perhaps partly. But I am not joking when I say fat-shaming should be a social obligation. Daniel Callahan, president emeritus of America’s oldest bioethics research institute, agrees with me. “Safe and slow incrementalism that strives never to stigmatize obesity has not and cannot do the necessary work,” wrote Callahan. “The force of being shamed and beat upon socially was as persuasive for me to stop smoking as the threats to my health.”102
With a little effort, we can help fat people help themselves. But first we have to make sure that “fat acceptance,” perhaps the most alarming and irresponsible idea to come out of leftist victimhood and grievance politics, is given the heart attack it deserves.
Strange though it may sound, perhaps even those who fat-shame solely out of cruelty and spite are inadvertently doing good. Because the sooner fat people (and, indeed, ugly people) come face to face with the reality of human nature, the sooner they’ll decide that they have to make a change before it’s too late.
Or, if they can’t change, they will at least be able to develop a method of coping. One day perhaps, the fat acceptance movement will realize that forcing others to accept you only ends in repressed feelings and misery on both sides. And perhaps that’s the day they’ll realize that Michelle Obama—dare I say it—was on to something.
And before you say, “What can I do about being ugly?” You know perfectly well. If you’re a man, work out—a lot. Learn some jokes and get a good job. You’ll do fine. If you’re a woman, save up for surgery and stop fucking eating.
DO WE NEED FEMINISM?