From the Fauxgressives' Guide to Being a Progressive, the Huffington Post, I present: Girlfriends' Guide: FAT Is The New 'N' Word.
I've got one word for you: Bingo!
And, no: Fat is not "the new 'N' word." The suggestion that any word is "the new 'N' word" is totally fucking ignorant, necessarily implying that the N-word itself is somehow the "old" N-word, but there's a new worst slur evah in town! It's an absurd bit of hyperbole, predicated on playing yet another tiresome round of the Oppression Olympics. And, apart from this bullshit being rhetorically and logically lazy as hell, the N-word is frankly never as out-of-fashion as people who never have it used against them would like to think it is.
So there's that. And there's also that fat is a value-neutral descriptor, a fact, like many other facts about a person. I am fat, I am short, I am brunette, I am blue-eyed, I am 35 years old. Sure, there are people who wield the word with vitriol, but there are people who spew the word "woman" with venom. That doesn't make "woman" a slur. There is a distinction between the word fat, and genuine slurs like "fatass" or "pig," just as there is a distinction between the word woman and slurs like "bitch" and "cunt." And the N-word.
Well. That takes care of the headline.
The article...well, fuck. That begins with the opening salvo: "People used to be afraid to be fat; now they're afraid to say 'fat.' Oh, we can talk about diets and exercise and the paucity of plus-size fashions—CONSTANTLY—but we can't really use the word 'fat' as an adjective anymore."
Except, of course, for all the people who do. Like, y'know, everyone in the fat acceptance movement. Suffice it to say, I don't think our intrepid reporter is familiar with fat acceptance, nor would she care to be, since her main complaint really seems to be that people can't comfortably shame fat people merely by calling them fat anymore.
In the middle of the piece, she comes to that delightful chestnut about how "we" don't talk to fat people about being fat: "Not talking about it is cowardly and patronizing and, ultimately cruel because behind almost every fat child is a fat parent who can't demonstrate the behavior necessary to rescue them from this life sentence."
Oh Maude's visage on a potato chip! Tell me again how fat people just don't know they're fat, and the solution is everyone just telling fat people MORE how fat they are! Because we! just! don't! know!
(And her premise is that society's silence is patronizing? LULZ.)
I'll leave you to dissect everything in between in comments and jump right to her final shot 'cross the bow: "Let's call fat by its proper name: Murderer." Ahhh. I love the smell of eliminationist rhetoric in the morning.
But I'm confused: Is my fat itself an anthropomorphic murderer in this equation, or am I the murderer because I'm fat? It's so confusing.
In any case, you'll pardon me while I finish drafting the proposal for my upcoming book: "DEATHFAT vs. MURDERFAT!!! WHICH WILL KILL U FIRST, BITCHEZ?!"
[H/T to Shaker Goober Peas.]