I am reading a novel right now written by a friend and cringing as every fat person in the story is represented as either fooolish or evil. What an easy target we person of planetary proportions make. It's not that there aren't plenty of skinny bad guys, but their skinniness is generally not included in the perjorative descriptions of these characters.
I noticed years ago how often the "bad kid" in a movie or TV show is a fat kid. Then researchers wonder why, when presented with a selection of photos of children most kids identify the fat ones as the losers. In the nuclear war classic Testament
, for example, the kid who steals from the swap meet is a fat kid. Auugustus Gloop is the first kid to go in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. About the only characters allowed to be both fat and good are old men, like Santa Claus, and old women like, well, Mrs. Santa. How nice to run across someone like Hercule Poirot
!"The media's portrayal of fat people is often inappropriately negative, and that the media promotes people's fear of fat and obsession with thinness. " Council of Size and Weight DiscrimimationI would hope in these enlightened times we would know better than to stereotype anyone, including people who are fat. Many of the other "minority groups" are no longer confined to the negative in characterization. I have written before about the tendency of novelists to make sinister characters people with disabilities.
This is not a call for "political correctness" but for authors, who after all both are subject to and convey in literature the biases of a culture, to look into your hearts and decide whether you really believe fat people are bumbling greedy oafs or nasty rapacious dictators, like the two characters in the book I am reading now. Do you want to be part of that chain of bigotry reinforced with every generation of readers?
Let's start rethinking how we perceive and portry fat people too, OK?
Another good post, Nan. I have noticed this too. Generally if the weight of a character is mentioned in a story, the person is fat; and usually either a figure of fun, or evil.
ReplyDeleteI first got into historical fiction because of the works of John Jakes, but I have to say, as much as I will always love Jakes, he was guilty of this. The villains were often fat, repulsive, and possessed by homosexual designs on the hero. And Jakes didn't counterbalance these portrayals with positive portrayals of fat people, or gays for that matter.
It's one thing if you are writing about a historical character, and he or she simply *was* fat, or had an acne-scarred face or dandruff, or was gay. It's another thing to use these traits as a shorthand for a bad person, when we all know otherwise.
It's lazy writing too. Why not surprise your readers a bit more by having a fat person who is noble or a greasy-haired teenager who is kind and intelligent. How about a gay person contributing to the cause, or even a black person who is not possessed by any particular spiritual wisdom that needs to be imparted to the white hero. The real world is so much more complex than tired old stereotypes.