The usual impulse for others has been to seek removal of the pressure of culpability by removing it altogether. Fatness has been deliberately excluded from this process of using "Not my fault" as a shield to relieve the pressure of burdens such as shame and self loathing.
Some people, seeing those accorded greater value by society-going down this route, presume fat people need to follow suit, to relieve the tremendous burden of blame pressing down on us. To equalize things. I say instead we should consider;
Detoxifying culpability
Just like we're doing with fat and fatness. We are clearing out a lot of the horseshit people dumped in on that by refusing to be ashamed, insulted or bowed by being tagged "FAT!!!!"
Thus stopping it from brutalizing our psyches, which effectively recruits you unwittingly into a form of self abuse. This has helped many who aren't fat too. Though even if that was just in our own minds it would still be an achievement.
After being terrorized by it for so much of our lives, we are slowly returning some of its original more varied tone and meaning. Rich, dense, fertile, sumptuous, energetic, comforting, truculent, ballast etc.,......... Instead of a one track of stupid scare pathology. A toxic blow to oneself, at times to the point of not being able to think or function.
Rather than seeking to join everyone else in the pursuit of innocence, sometimes hiding behind terms like victim blaming (because wouldn't it be awful if victims were ever human and culpable, in any way). We need to consider the fact that to be human is to be culpable for some wrongness of some kind some of the time. Allowing that to reach the point of being such a threat to ones ego and mental health that people need to run away from it needs to be dealt with.
If fat people are the ones to do that, lets take that on, rather than expending that energy chasing a retreat into what our status has made impossible, innocence. Let's surprise as we have before and devalue the currency of faux innocence by saying "Screw it!"
The burden of blame, false and real is of course likely to be in addition to the problem/dilemma/conundrum itself creating a vicious chain reaction of crisis which begets shame, which assaults the ego, which drains mental, emotional and physical energy, making it harder to come cope or come up with solutions, hence one entrenches and sinks lower into the mire.
Often it is this, rather than the original issue or trigger itself, that really stops a person from coming to terms and resolution. It's so powerful that all one has to do is create a "crisis" to set it off.
Which I'm sure you'll recognize as the the obesity crisis's primary strategy and why that has become more problematic for many than any problems they may actually have. iow, fat people are no different to people, we are people.
It's felt to make things easier for others, if fat people can be made artificially if necessary to be a singular class to turn our being into disease.
Fat people's way of trying to protect themselves from being called out as fat, was to develop an archetypal kiss arse mentality centred around neutralizing potential anger in those around us, lest the dreaded weapon of being called "FAT!!!" was triumphantly unleashed by anyone who felt like it.
I still remember how much fat people lived in permanent state of anxiety that anyone would find a reason to say it. Many still do.
Culpability is not quite the same as blame though they overlap. To be to blame is to be accountable usually to be the cause of something, in moral terms. To be culpable, is to have influence or input which may or may include a varying extent of moral burden.
If I deliberately decide to step on your toes, I am to blame for your hurt. If I do the same accidentally, I am responsible, or culpable, but not to the same way morally.
With fat people, the two have been deliberately fused to obscure the implications of that blame. Which is if fat people are to blame for creating disease in ourselves so is everyone else. Either human beings ultimately create their own health/ill health or they don't. By turning fatness into disease and that a choice they get round the implications that all people create their health/ill health by being too.
Fat means, no one else has to deal with the burden of this knowledge/assumption.
Fatness is a way of marking fat people as unique. This means a) no one has to do anything but us, indeed people can actively get in the way of the instructions they've given us without any responsibility for that and b) no one has to bear the burden of seeing themselves as the creators of their own health woes-which would of course ease that burden. It is a shabby and cynically vindictive thing to do. To not only burden with a damaging level of blame with little to relieve it, but to quarantine people in that state.
All can pretend we are unique amongst humankind, being an island each to ourselves and we can resolve issues we all should confront.
Yes, we need to question being blamed, but also whether it is so bad to be to "blame"/culpable really, for being fat. Whether, if we did choose to be fat, it wouldn't be for good reason and to see that as worthy of exploration as any other state of being that is seen in this light.
The answer would be to discuss those possibilities civilly and intelligently, rather than to stick us with the pervading uncivilized carry on of now.
Separate blame from culpability and toss it in the bin. Consider the latter head on. Culpability is oh so very human. Few adults are wholly above it for what is either bad decisions, situations, outcomes, real or perceived. Rather than allowing that to sink us, regardless of whether we're to blame or not- like we fatz used to allow "FAT!!!!!" to sink us.
Why can't we acknowledge this and learn instead to balance that with maintaining the kind of mindset we will need to make things better? To be honest fatz, like it or not, that is exactly what every has stuck us with, we are the one's who'll have to sort it out.
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