Making the World Safe for the 3-Letter ‘F Word’

Fat, says Sally Smith, is a “three-letter F word,” that she and 2,500 allies are fighting to restore to polite conversation and claim for their cause.

Smith is the executive director of the National Assn. to Advance Fat Acceptance, which battles bone-thin fashion ideals, cruel jokes, a multibillion-dollar diet industry and skinny theater seats to promote an unpopular viewpoint.

Fat is OK.

“To us, it’s an adjective and we’re trying to own the word again,” she said. “Overweight implies an arbitrary standard. I’m not overweight. I’m fat. Obese sounds like a medical condition. I don’t consider myself having a disease.”

For Smith, the cause is a matter of civil rights. Fat people routinely encounter discrimination and harassment on the job, at school and on the street simply because of their weight, she said.

“We face blatant employment discrimination,” she said. “We’re not hired as much as thin people, or promoted as often. We’re often fired because of our weight.”

Smith said fat people, including one woman with multiple bone fractures, have been denied medical treatment by doctors who tell them their health problems would disappear if they would only lose weight.

Equally devastating, she said, are strangers’ hostile stares and snide comments that can make traveling on an airplane, dining at a restaurant or swimming at a public pool a fat person’s nightmare.

Yet scientific research suggests that the tendency toward fatness is inherited, just like height or eye color, she said. That’s why, Smith said, 95% to 98% of diets fail over three years, with the dieter often gaining even more weight than they lost.

“For most of us, the vast majority of us, we have no more choice about our weight than a person has a choice over the color of their skin,” she said.

The association was created in 1969 by Bill Fabrey, a New York man angered by the persecution his wife faced because of her weight. Smith said the organization’s mission is to help members “find a safe environment and self esteem in a basically hostile world.”

The group now has over 40 chapters nationwide, doubling its membership in the last two years to 2,500 people. “Of course our potential constituency is millions. Self-acceptance is a hard concept to sell.”

Two years ago, Smith became the first paid director in the association’s 21-year history. She previously worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and a California AIDS legislation advocacy group called the Lobby for Individual Freedom and Equality.

“I finally reached a point in my development where it was great working for the rights of other people, but I wanted to work for my own rights and my own people.”

The group, now based in Sacramento where Smith was raised, publishes a monthly newsletter, provides speakers for conventions and television talk shows, holds rallies and conducts letter-writing campaigns to fight “fat phobia.”

Ridiculing fat people is the last “safe” prejudice, Smith said. Even people who wouldn’t dream of telling racial jokes or making fun of the physically handicapped tell fat jokes, she said.

The association took offense, then took action over a series of greeting cards recently published by Hallmark Cards.

One card showed a fat man sitting next to a thin man on a bus. The text read: “There are worse things in life than birthdays. . . . Like you could be wearing shorts and riding on a bus on a hot day, and you’re all sweaty and then some fat guy gets on and insists on sharing your seat, for Pete’s sake!”

Another card had an old photo of a circus fat lady being pulled into a truck by ropes, with a group of men standing around her smiling. The caption: “Never did get her into the cake, but Happy Birthday anyway.”

The association conducted a yearlong letter-writing campaign and had press releases ready to announce a boycott when Hallmark told the group that it would no longer distribute the cards.