1C Lesson for “Fat and Happy?” on page 380

Part One. Hillel Schwartz’s essay has flummoxed and beguiled and confused me more than any essay I’ve ever taught in over 22 years of teaching. I thought it was a satire against the Fat Defender Movement. But then I discovered he was serious.

Mega Essays

New York Times Book Review

So I’m faced with two choices: Either his essay is intentional satire, which makes it one of the most brilliant essays I’ve ever taught. Or it’s unintentional satire, which makes it one of the most egregiously lame and stupid essays I’ve ever come across. Whoa. 

One. Let’s begin by summarizing the egregiously flawed arguments of the Fat Defenders or Fat Enablers. These lame claims include the following:

1. Fat people aren’t to blame for their unhappiness. Rather, they are victims of persecution from the Slenderizing Fascist Movement, which McMahon has coined as PIGWIP: People Impeding Gluttony Wherever It Persists.
2. The stigma (branded shame) of being fat makes fat people helpless to better their lives so they are inevitably failures, doomed to being demonized as “clowns and clodhoppers.”
3. Being fat is not dangerous. Rather, the yo-yo dieting imposed by PIGWIP is at the root of bad health, frustration, and mental anxiety.
4. The biological Set Point determines our bodyweight, not dieting.
5. Fat people are a persecuted group who suffer the same civil rights violations as do minorities. This explains, we see on page 382, why fat people do poorly in school, college, and the job market than the more “normal” population.
6. Doctors also gang up on fat people, admonishing, chastising, and scolding them to be skinnier.
7. If the PIGWIP movement were destroyed and the Fat Enablers won, we’d live in Fat Utopia; we’d be a bunch of happy well-fed chubsters. See page 384.
8. In this Fat Utopia, fat people would love their bodies, love their “relaxed” fashions, and miraculously be freed from shopping addictions, we read on page 385.
9. Fat Utopia would be more maternal and benevolent than the patriarchal PIGWIP society, we read on page 385. Unconditional love would spread through the land and all the world’s fatties would feel unconditionally loved through and through.
10. In Fat Utopia, every social ill, every self-destructive pathology from our PIGWIP past would be purged from our planet and we would roll around in our jolly flesh forever and ever. See page 386. 

Options for Essay #4

Anti Schwartz:

In his gleeful portrait of a Fat Utopia, Hillel Schwartz has unwittingly mocked the very Fat Defenders he is intent to defend. In what is one of the most asinine essays ever written on the subject of “fat persecution,” Schwartz’s essay is heavy laden with _________________________, ________________________, ____________________, and ________________________________.

 

Pro Schwartz:

Hillel Schwartz brilliantly conflates the Fat Persecution Movement with all other social pathologies and as such convincingly shows freeing ourselves from our artificial Fat Complex is the catalyst or spark to creating a Paradise on Earth. This conflation of Fat Persecution with other social pathologies is evidenced by _________________________, _________________________, ______________________________, and __________________________.