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February 18th, 2010 
This past Valentine’s Day, actor-comedian-director Kevin Smith did not receive any of the fatty gifts of grandeur traditionally associated with the holiday. Instead, after being forcibly removed from a Southwest Airlines flight, he was punished quite possibly for abusing them.
While many publications have laughed this off, few are asking the most important question: Should those who are overweight be shamed into being thinner?
Southwest Airlines’ policy is that any individual who cannot lower both armrests or compromises “any portion of adjacent seating” is required to purchase two seats. Smith says he usually purchases two seats, but since he was flying stand-by, he was unable to do so.
As reported by The Daily Beast, National Association Against Obesity president MeMe Roth has been all over the interwebs attacking Smith, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that what people like him are “expecting us to do is to subsidize the lifestyle choices of those who habitually eat improperly.”
In an interview with the Guardian last year, Roth compared overeating to rape. Like the victim of a sex crime, she says, there may be “pleasure on the part of the victim. The same is true with what we’re doing with food. We may abuse our bodies with food, but it’s incredibly pleasurable. From a food marketer’s point of view, when your quote unquote victim is so willing and enjoying of the process, who’s fighting back?”
But, in their criticism of Roth, many publications like The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and popular feminist blog the-fword.org seem to make Roth a social pariah. However, her provocations should not be treated in isolation, as she is only one of the more successful figures conveying popular disdain for overweight individuals.
The problem with this popular disdain is not it’s focus on the virtues of maintaining a healthy weight, but it’s aggressive, unquestioned proposition that overweight individuals are completely responsible for their weight and society has little responsibility to accommodate them. Nevermind the tricky fact that genes play a large role in a person’s weight, but childhood development, often in combination with genomic factors, plays a very important role in the future capabilities one’s metabolism, effectively confining them in many ways to their childhood eating habits.
In this sense, shaming those who are overweight by removing them from an airplane or comparing their condition to some sort of psychological depravity incorrectly places the impetus of action on fat people and fat people alone and dismisses their daily struggles with ridicule.
People like Roth consider this strategy to be most effective in changing the direction of a fast-food culture that encourages unhealthy eating, and while people should try to do their best to control their weight in order to lead more physically healthy lives, something tells me that shaming, scolding, and considering them depraved problematically undermines the likelihood that they will lead psychologically and socially healthy lives.
As primary responsibility for health is conveniently placed on the individual, policies that more strongly regulate the ingredients in our food and educate the public are made less justifiable in Congress. Society as a whole pursues practices – whether through thoughtless jest or corporate policy – of exclusion.
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