So in a cheap ploy to get a bunch of people to read my happy little story about that lovely woman at starbucks the other day I posted links to a few message boards [-sg-wwdn-gr-]. Pretty much on par with everything I've ever written, posted, said, thought or thought about thinking this was met with mixed results. (Not here though, seems the comments on my site were all in favor which is a credit to my audience, thanks!)

I thought I did a pretty decent job of pointing out how wretched this lady was but I guess not judging by the amount of people that jumped to her defense. That's not the most intersting thing as far as I'm concerned though. What I think is note worty, is that of everything I said about her, pretty much the biggest complain I got was that I called her fat. I'm not going to try and justify that here as I think I did it enough on those boards, but I do want to talk about it a little bit.

I used a pretty wide variety if insults, many of them generalizations and most of them pretty wide sweeping in that story. All of which I think were acurate by the way. But no one complained that by calling her a "whore" I was putting a negative spin on prostitution and there by casting a blanket insult at all the women who have been victimized or whatever. No one said that by calling her a "witch" I was associating something negative with non-christian religions or pagans. No complaints that by calling her a "bitch" I was taking a stab at... you get the idea.

Why is Fat the magic word that sent people into an uproar? She was in fact fat. That isn't an opinion. What's even more interesting is that I don't think I said anything negative about being fat in general, my comment was about the choice of clothing and how that hightlited and drew attention to things that probably shouldn't have been in the spotlight. As I said on those boards, I'm probably just as overweight as she is, but I don't wear halfshirts to point that out.

Going back to the initial point, how could someone read that whole story, see how horrid of a person she was, and then still jump to her defense because I called her fat? Anyone?