{"id":5862,"date":"2011-05-07T18:30:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-07T18:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5862"},"modified":"2011-05-07T18:30:09","modified_gmt":"2011-05-07T18:30:09","slug":"too-much-of-a-good-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/too-much-of-a-good-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"Too much of a good thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There was a time when a modicum of corpulence was a signifier of a life relative leisure and comfort. Not so in our day and age. Rather, in the United States and many other nations corpulence is a signifier of low social status or the perception of sloth and lack of self control. Though more than half of Americans are defined as “overweight” as per the body-mass-index, of more genuine concern are the “obese,” who form about 1 out of 4 Americans. Their distribution varies by locality and social station, but they are not a peculiarity on the American scene.<\/p>\n

The interweaving of politics and obesity is particularly subtle and often confounding. Some conservatives in other domains who might point to the importance of personal responsibility and self-control (gluttony is a sin!) dismiss the the blandishments of cultural elites on the perils of obesity, albeit Leftish ones, as snobbery, classism, and nanny-stateism. But there’s another component of the ranks of those who man the battlements of the fat, a particular type of cultural Leftist who perceives the obese to be individual self-actualizers and part of a “victimized” class.<\/b> The “fat acceptance movement” has borrowed all the language of Left-wing identity politics movements.<\/p>\n

This particular strain of Lefty fat-acceptance is clear in this Village Voice<\/i> piece, Guys Who Like Fat Chicks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

His Facebook profile filled in some of the blanks. He wore black-rimmed glasses and uniformly tight band T-shirts. He had shaggy black hair that fell in wiry squiggles. He played guitar and studied English at William Paterson University. There were snapshots of him posed with a beautiful young woman<\/b> who appeared to be more than twice his size, wearing a French-maid Halloween costume. And there was a link to Ask a Guy Who Likes Fat Chicks, an unsigned advice-column blog \u201cfor your plumper-related stumpers.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As they say, “read the whole thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a time when a modicum of corpulence was a signifier of a life relative leisure and comfort. Not so in our day and age. Rather, in the United States and many other nations corpulence is a signifier of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[769],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5862"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5866,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5862\/revisions\/5866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}