As you might know if you read my columns, see me a mile away, or talk to me for five seconds, I am a card-carrying lifelong member of the Fat Lesbian Club.
I wonder what sort of cards they carry…
However, ever since I first laid eyes on the television show Roseanne (very important to me) as a small child, the actor John Goodman has held a special place in my heart. It was confusing for me: did I want to be Dan Conner, or be with Dan Conner? I’m still not sure. He has always been so hot to me, from Dan on Roseanne to Fred Flintstone to Walter in The Big Lebowski. His body has now drawn attention in the last week or so, after a photo of him showing significant weight loss went viral.
He looked ill. Of course the media was rife with speculation.
It’s not Goodman’s 74-year-old body (his choice) I want to discuss, but instead the arguments that broke out about how he lost the weight. On one side there were many people congratulating him on his hard work. Then there were people claiming he had taken Ozempic so it wasn’t actually hard work, and then there were people defending that by saying he’d been losing weight for years, so he’d done it the “right way”, actually.
I don’t know the details and I don’t care, but none of this is good.
For someone who ‘doesn't care’ you’re rather dwelling on it.
I’m a fat person. We are constantly badgered and tortured by a society that tells us to lose weight, at all costs. If you’re fat, that’s a moral failing: you’re lazy and unhealthy.
Society has spent decades telling fat people that our value depends on our ability to control our weight. Now there is medicine that can make that control easier, and suddenly the problem is not the weight but whether the person has suffered sufficiently to “deserve” it. People resent us for being fat, and they resent us for getting thin.
My god, ‘Not The Nine O’clock News’ was spot on, wasn’t it?
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