Confession: In all the years of covering bloated NGOs gorging and feasting themselves on the public purse, I never thought there’d be one especially for chunky fellows like me. And yet, here we are.
What a time to be alive.
And all funded by the Arts Council, naturally:
“The pieces included in this publication are by fat contributors living in and from Ireland. They are about their experiences with anything from body-image, romance, medical procedures, employment, partners, mental health, birth control, nationality, disability, gender, childhood, exercise, food, sex, art, celebrity, philosophy to simple day-to-day living, and how these things intersect with fatness and Irishness.”
I regret to announce that, as a “fat contributor living in, and from, Ireland”, I have yet to be asked to make a submission. Presumably they’re, eh, stuffed to the gills with content from others already.
It is worth wondering, though, whether the state’s right arm knows what its left is doing. After all, there are already endless bloated NGOs munching their way through taxpayer funding in order to warn us all of the dangers of fatness. You can barely turn on the radio or the television without being served up a hearty diet of health warnings about being careful about what goes in your gob, and the dangers of obesity. If one was to ever ask the HSE to trim its waistline, that spending would be a good place to start. Especially now that it’s being explicitly contradicted by the arts council.
Fat Eire, sadly, is off to a slow enough start in terms of readership. At the time of writing, the Instagram Account associated with the magazine had a relatively slim and trim 765 followers, suggesting that the public appetite for articles celebrating “fatness” may be somewhat anorexic. And that’s not really a surprise.
Most of us who carry a few extra pounds don’t really think about it, except when we go to the doctor and he feeds us the usual advice: “do a bit more exercise, watch what you eat, we’d want to get that weight down a bit more”. There are really two kinds of people who receive that advice: Those who take it very seriously and those like me who think we’re doing well if we’re two pounds lighter when we stand on the scales again in six months. And, if we’re two pounds heavier, well, we just tell ourselves that we probably didn’t keep our phone in our pocket the last time.
It must be a genuine disability, though, to think of “fatness” as a disability. There’s humour, to be sure, in the arts council paying people to write about being fat, but there’s also tragedy in the fact that some of these poor people have come to the conclusion that “being fat” is something worth writing about. That people really want to read about “fat sex” or “fat art” or “how fatness intersects with Irishness”. If there is a big audience for that stuff, then arts council funding won’t be needed: Just start your substack, and watch your plate fill up with donations.
The only reason this is getting arts council funding, paradoxically, is that nobody wants to read fat people complaining about being fat. You know why? Because being fat is, almost always, a choice. Yes, it’s hard to lose weight: That’s why I, for example, put very little effort into the process. But that lack of effort is also my choice: If I really wanted to get up at 6am and go for a 10 mile hike, and then come back to a breakfast of porridge with a side of lentils, I could. I choose not to, because frankly, food tastes better than skinny feels.
And this is the bigger problem with modern society: For all we talk about “diversity”, every single difference amongst us must be pathologised. When I was a kid, the line was that people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and nobody should be bullied. That’s a good line. The new line, apparently, is that fatness is some sort of disability, and fat people are to be pitied. Sorry now, but as a bit of a fatty myself, eff that.
Anyway, I’m tired now from all this typing, so it’s time for tea and a slice of cake. Maybe when I come back, there’ll be an invitation awaiting my in my inbox from the Arts council to write a piece about “fatness and being a right wing crank”. Ten grand, please, and you can have 10,000 words.