Was That Really Necessary?

[trigger warning: weight in general, fat shaming. please enjoy this utterly trigger-free otter instead.]

Look, I love a good adjective. (I love a good adverb even more. Actually.) Language would be boring and grey without them. However, there is a point at which you need to put down the thesaurus and think about what you're saying, how you're saying it and whom your saying it to.

Given the First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity, this could have been an interesting article about how parents need to be educated, considering that parents are apparently unable to objectively view their childrens' weight. (Hardly surprising, but important to the discussion.)

Instead, the article becomes an interesting view of someone's thesaurus.

Let me preface this by saying that we have fairly nonjudgmental words for what is being discussed here: overweight, meaning "having a a BMI of 25.0 to 29.9", and obese, meaning "having a BMI of 30 or higher". Those are medical terms, people. We should strive to use them when appropriate.

What we should not strive to use are:

82 percent of the mammoth mommies underestimated their weight when looking at the silhouettes; 42.5 percent of overweight women did the same. About 13 percent of normal-weight women thought of themselves as thinner than they were.

• 86 percent of the corpulent kiddies underestimated their weight, compared with 15 percent of normal-weight kids.

"Mammoth mommies"? "Corpulent kiddies"? I understand it's alliterative, but really? That was fucking necessary? You asshat.

• 47.5 percents of moms with fat kids thought their children were at a healthy weight.

• 41 percent of the children thought their moms could lay off the donuts and lose weight.

"Fat kids"? Was "obese" taken? "Lay off the donuts"? Really, that's how it was phrased in the survey?

Fuck you. That was unnecessary, unkind and unprofessional.

As America gets fatter, people could get a warped attitude toward their fattitude, lead researcher Nicole Dumas, an internal medicine resident at Columbia, tells USA Today.

Fattitude? FattiFUCKINGtude?

Maybe next, Tom Henderson* can do an article on why he's so stupid, because 100% of me agrees he should be dropped in a box with 1,000 irritated scorpions- and a bird spider.

*When I went to add the Tom Henderson tag, I found I already had one. For good reason. He's the idjit who thought 9 year old girls might be having consensual sex with adults.

The Word You're Looking For Is "Victim"

The last line. I got all the way through to the last line of this article about tween pregnancy ("not uncommon", yet the author could only find 4 examples- worldwide) before I exploded.

After listing the health risks of young pregnancy, Tom Henderson has this to say about young girls and pregnacy:

The moral of the story? If you want to start a family, wait until you graduate from elementary school.

And maybe -- at least -- a good 12 years after that.

Yes, Mr. Henderson, a pregnant 6-year-old*, 9-year-old** or 10 year-old child was surely the agent of their own sexuality, carelessly seducing the grown men who impregnated them. I'm just going to have to assume that Mr. Henderson is a pedophile, because I can't think of any reason a person would think that. Ever. Except in the case of the 10-year-old Roma girl, who was impregnated by a 13-year-old iirc, all the other cases mentioned were cases of rape- the rape of children by grown men, all of them family members.

Yeah.

So, can we stop with the slut shaming of children now?

*Not a tween.

**Also not a tween.