Apparently, the video, by virtue of its existence, mocks Ford for being fat. I disagree and think it’s just life in our city. Truthfully, fat is irrelevant. It ravages your health but it doesn’t change the way people regard you.
For Ford isn’t a thin mayor or a fat mayor, he’s a terrible mayor. He could forage for dandelion leaves on the city’s unkempt sidewalks, he could grow healthful beets in his own driveway à laPortlandia, he could grow thin as a paper clip, and he’d still be bad at his job.
Ford was simply being Ford — blocked on transit, unable to negotiate with anyone, at horns with the province, an alien force to women councillors, an embarrassment both international and local, and a walking warning against electing people out of spite. But whether he’s stalled at 312 lbs. on his “Cut the Waist” diet or withers to 162, it matters not.
The real problem with the video emerges when you watch it with the sound on. A hideous noise fills the room, the cackling laughter of the woman named “Cordella” who was filming him. She sounds like a tricoteuse beside the guillotine during the French Revolution, knitting as the aristocrats’ heads rolled away. Oh look, a fat man eating the same lardy KFC gunk she’s eating in her car with her two-year-old. Ha ha ha.
I know women like that. I have heard that laughter. I have seen that vicious look. I’m slender — let’s be honest and say “thin.” And people — let’s be honest and call them “of a certain age,” okay, middle-aged, okay, lardy — don’t like that. Men don’t seem to care. Men seem happy as long as they can still fit into their car but women are incensed by bodies, their own or someone else’s.
I’m not crazy about thinness myself. Under stress, I stop eating, partly because eating gets in the way of my catastrophizing full-time and partly because eating is the least interesting thing you can do to cope with the constant bad behaviour you encounter in daily life.
I don’t have a weigh scale. My doctor weighs me yearly and I’m about 105 lbs. All I notice, on feminist principle, is that is that my jeans get less or more tight. But many things keep me thin besides not having eaten a chocolate bar in 20 years.
Of course work is stressful. That’s why they call it work. But there’s waking at 3 and thinking about the vanishing things, like the Maldives and the publishing industry, there’s raccoons, there’s dreams.
This is basic stuff. But tell that to those who are both unforgiving and hefty . . . or plus-size, or portly. Okay, stout. For all that stout women complain of mistreatment, they can behave viciously to women who weigh less — there is a palpable generational hatred — and I accept this because it would be rude to do otherwise.
When my wedding ring slipped off, as it always does, I went out this week to buy my fourth — four rings, one marriage — as it seems to please my husband who never takes his off, which I think is weird. “I’m already married,” I told the woman in the jewelry store. “I lost weight and it fell off. So I need one that fits tightly.”
I looked up to see pure venom on her face. She was stout. Awkwardness and bitter remarks ensued. I froze, courteously, as per normal.
No wonder Ford can’t diet. He’s probably afraid of the female backlash.
Fat is a lobby. It complains constantly. Chairs are too narrow, dress sizes insulting, portions conspiratorial, sidewalks too narrow, Betty too fat on Mad Men.
Thin people are the last frontier. The Uncomplainers, I’ll call them.
I hear the manic laugh of Cordella, 29, child-care worker, later comically unrepentant on YouTube. I hear her screeching at the sight of Ford, a graceful fat man entering a junk food joint that will be unhelpful to him. I hear a split-screen version of the cruelty people direct at me.
And yet. I often think of a woman on a bicycle on the corner, looking at me beseechingly as I waited to turn the car right onto Avenue Rd. from a side street. She was extremely obese. She was wearing a pretty hat. She was making an effort. She was terrified.
“Omigod,” I said to my husband. “She thinks I’m going to mock her in public. She thinks I’m going to shout at her just like those guys in that car just did.”
I smiled at her manically, emitting friendliness rays, but I knew she couldn’t see me clearly. I know to this day she thought I was laughing at her from behind my windshield, just as in Cordella’s video of a man entering a shop. I felt so bad it hurt.
Move on, people, nothing to see. A thin woman, a fat man, the sound of laughter so piercing it sounds like screams.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Heather Mallick
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