I was browsing the front page of The Atlantic and I noticed that it featured a “headless fattie.” This is the standard illustration of obese people in the American media which omits their heads, and tends to focus on their mid-section. You can read about them here. As obesity becomes normal in the United States it is interesting to see how the media is trying to grapple with the topic, and how it illustrates obese people. I found the tensions at the heart of the recent Village Voice piece, Guys Who Like Fat Chicks, fascinating.
If you’ve been to Manhattan you’ll note a distinct paucity of fat folk, let alone ‘fat chicks,’ so the whole piece tends to veer between explicit identity politics consciousness raising and implicit ‘freak show.’ On the one hand many New Yorkers are proud of the fact that because they walk everywhere there’s a norm of a relatively slim physique which would not be typical in much of the American “Heartland.” And yet the fat acceptance movement pretty clearly hooks into the natural sympathy of many in cosmopolitan Lefty circles for identity politics aimed …