Larger seats, and the people who hate them
They say that out of the mouths of babes come the damnedest things. Well, as he’s a third year psychology student at the University of California, i imagine it’s safe to say that Kevin Pease no longer qualifies as a wee bairn.
In his article The ‘Flob’: It’s a Not-So-Small World After All, Kevin puts forth some pretty damning evidence that student loans are not being put to good use. Seems he’s upset that Disneyland is revamping one of their rides to accomodate larger folks.
Now, from a commercial standpoint, it just makes sense to have larger seats. Regardless of size, having extra room very likely means you’ll have extra comfort - fatter or thinner, sitting in larger seats means that you have more personal space. It should be a win-win situation, right? The more comfortable an experience you have, the more likely you are to want to repeat that experience. Thus, larger seats should ideally lead to more repeat business (i.e., cha-ching) from people of all sizes.
It seems to me that this “oh teh noes they’re changing my favoritest ride at Didneh-land” rant is just an excuse to rail on fat people. Let’s take a look at this paragraph:
Obese Americans are not treated like their skinny counterparts. They are stereotyped as lazy people with poor self-control. Obese people tend to have lower self-esteem and are at a higher risk for suicide, especially in the teen years. However, obesity is not comparable to racial identity. It is a health problem, one that is fixable with lots of hard work. People who protest every time celebrities put on a fat suit or when an obese person is forced to buy two tickets on a plane make you think that fatness shapes identity.
This is the part that really makes me wonder how many of his psych classes he’s slept through. On one hand, he admits that fat people are not treated the same as thin people and that we face negative stereotyping. He states that fat people have lower self-esteem, but does not seem to come out and say just how much these things are related. Gee, i wonder if the effect of fat stigmatization on self-esteem is worth writing, oh, i don’t know, a whole blog’s worth of material on the subject? Nah. Let’s just skip that bit, shall we? Because after all, us fat folks brought it upon ourselves, right?
The last sentence seems to imply that the notion that “fatness shapes identity” is a false one. He’s half wrong (or half right, depending how you view the proverbial glass): fatness in and of itself does not, IMHO, shape identity. Rather, i would go so far as to say that the way fat people are (mis)treated, stereotyped and otherwise abused can be one hell of an identity-shaper.
What really bugs me about this? This psych student doesn’t seem to be aware of just how much he’s contributing to that identity-shaping when he says that Disney should remain exclusively comfortable to the thinner folks of the world.
He states that it’s “a well-known fact that America has been getting fatter for some time now; over half the nation is overweight, while almost a third is obese”. I don’t have any actual statistics in front of me, so let’s pretend his math is correct. If half of the nation is overweight, and further third of the nation is obese, then that leaves a whopping one-sixth of the population that remains non-fat. What’s so special about asking companies to at least partially cater to the remaining five-sixths of the population?
Using this assumption, the obese community wants us all to believe that if someone is obese, we should treat it as a disability. Take blind people. They are given special accommodations whenever possible in order to make their lives easier. Obese men and women want to be treated the same way.
Okay, so this paragraph comes directly after the previous bit i quoted. So the assumption is… what, again? That fatness shapes identity and therefore… should be treated as a disability…? Buh?
Oh, and let me just say: wow. Making special accommodations for blind people is not for the purpose of making their lives easier, it’s for making their lives possible. Text-to-speech engines don’t make it easier for blind people to surf the ‘net, they make it possible. Braille keypads don’t make it easier for blind people to use ATMs, they make it possible. Beepy crosswalk signs (that give audible indication of when it’s safe to cross a busy intersection) don’t make it easier for blind people to know when they can safely cross the street, they make it possible. Need i go on?
Also: his logic seems to imply that if something is a fixable health problem, it doesn’t deserve special treatment. So if you are in a car accident and find yourself with two broken legs? No wheelchair access for you! Hell, if you were at fault in that car accident, then you shouldn’t even get a wheelchair, because you brought it upon yourself.
As far as larger seats go: for some fat people, it’s a matter of comfort and ease; for others it’s a matter of possibility. This chap’s opinion is that fat is a result of overeating and unhealthy eating (meaning a failure on our parts), and therefore, fatter people should be denied the privileges - ease and possibility - reserved for thinner people.
That being said: i don’t want to see fat people being treated as if we were all disabled. No sane person who’s seen how badly disabled people are treated would want that for themselves. For fuck’s sake, the entire thing behind this whole fat acceptance thing is that we’re not special, not exotic, not alien, not inhuman. We want to be treated with some modicum of decency and respect. If fat folks are, as he says, the majority of the population, is he then going on to imply that humanity and humane treatment should only be reserved for a select few?
It comes back to exclusivity: special privileges should be reserved for people who have “earned” them… just by being thin. (Or was it by being unfixably blind? i can’t recall…) Certainly, it’s never openly expressed in such terms. We’re to believe that oh, it’s not that they want special privileges, it’s that they don’t think we should have any.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
It’s crazymaking, I tell you.
“But I DO exercise 4 or more times a week and eat plenty of fruits and veggies.”
“No, you don’t, fatass, you’re lying.”
“It’s true that I eat other things besides fruits and veggies, but you know, I kind of HAVE to to stay alive.”
“No, you don’t. All the nutrition you ever will need in your life is stored in your fat ass. You don’t need anything but veggies until you’re thin, and that’s just to fill your greedy stomach.”
“Besides, if a blind person had to go on a radical diet for the rest of his/her life trying not to be blind, the way I’d have to in order to stop being fat at you — i.e. go WAY beyond moderate healthy changes in diet and exercise habits into being CONSTANTLY hungry and exhausted, working out 4 hours a day on 800 calories or less, every single day — you wouldn’t tell them they were obligated to do that in order to be accepted, would you?”
“Yes, I would, if blind people were half the population.”
“Oh, I get it. People who are ‘different’ are cute little accessories as long as there aren’t too many of them. But if they outnumber the likes of you, then they suck. Right?”
“You’re just pissed because nobody wants to fuck you, you ugly fat bitch.”
Ayup.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
OMG, Meowser. That totally just made my face hurt. Nail, meet head.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:19 am
The fat majority, huh? What would it be like to live in a world where special accomodations needed to be made for slim people, eg. seatbelt shorteners?
April 8th, 2008 at 2:19 am
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April 8th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Yeah but that’s when they tell the truth, like the little lad who was the only one to state the emperor had no clothes on.
April 8th, 2008 at 5:47 am
I have been pondering this, since I first read about this issue some time ago. My theory is that the thin people feel they’re loosing some of that thin privelage of theirs. I mean in the sense let’s say, you have all kind of people waiting in line for a ride. I think the people posting there, are whining like “Now I have to wait longer cause a fat person thinks they have a right to go on the same ride I do! Waaah! I don’t want to wait longer in line! waaah!”
April 8th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Nice writeup - you were a little more, ah, civil? than I was.
April 8th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Jackie:”My theory is that the thin people feel they’re loosing some of that thin privelage of theirs.”
Not ALL the thin people, Jackie. Just the ones with egos too big to fit through doors and the ones with entitlement issues. I’m a thin person, and I say bring on the bigger seats. They’ll make more people comfortable and they’re not going to adversely affect anyone. I don’t get why jackholes such as the newspaper “writer” even feel a need to raise a stink about availability of bigger seats, other than that it allows them to be bullies and get away with it.
This gem of logic kills me: “The famous “It’s a Small World” ride is practically an American institution that has remained unchanged for over 40 years.” Yeah, and just over 40 years ago, we still had segregated lunch counters. Things change. Deal with it.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
“Beepy crosswalk signs (that give audible indication of when it’s safe to cross a busy intersection) don’t make it easier for blind people to know when they can safely cross the street, they make it possible.”
As a blind person, I must respectfuly disagree with this statement. Blind people (unless they have additional disabilities that affect sensory perception or processing) are able to learn how to cross streets safely without the use of audible pedestrian signals. In fact, many people believe that audible pedestrian signals are a detriment to safe travel by blind people, because they create a feeling of false security (they only indicate what the traffic is *supposed* to be doing, not what it is actually doing) and they interfere with the blind person’s ability to hear what the traffic is actually doing. As a partially sighted but legally blind person, I can affirm that sighted drivers regularly drive against traffic signals, endangering both blind and sighted pedestrians alike.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
The original article’s premise is wrong from the second sentence.
“Disneyland will soon revamp “It’s a Small World” so that its boats can accommodate more plump passengers.”
No, the flumes are being re-dug to add a couple of extra inches so the boats don’t “bottom out” in places. The official reason given for this is that over the years, the patching of the flumes has created areas of “buildup” that are now causing problems. A particularly vitriolic Disney watchdog website was the one who started this whole “it’s the fatties making the boats sink”, and the mainstream media has picked up that meme.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Yup, just another “Hey, we can turn this story into a fat hate article!” thing. It must be a pain to do all that digging though, :O oh wait I’m playing into the lazy fattie stereotype then aren’t I. Oh no, oh goodness!
April 14th, 2008 at 9:42 am
wait, wait wait. if only 1/6 of the population isn’t overweight (in some fashion or another) then isn’t demanding *small* seats an expectation of privilege?? ‘the seats should fit only me and the others of us in this exclusive portion of the population’. bogus!
if, as you pointed out later, the facts of the article weren’t dissected to reveal that it wasn’t about accommodations at all, but about repair.
hay-zoos, help me!