Today in Fat Hatred

[Content Note: Fat hatred; injury; death; eliminationism.]

Fat crash test dummies—or the lack thereof—have been in the news lately, and here's the latest: "As drivers get fatter, so do crash dummies." Here are just two juxtaposed snippets from the piece:

A University of California-Berkeley study, published in 2013, found that obese drivers are up to 78% more likely to die in car crashes.

...However, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has no plans to incorporate the obese dummy into its testing program.

"It's not clear what would we learn that's different by using a heavy crash test dummy. When the structure (of the vehicle) holds up, that helps protect people of all shapes and sizes," IIHS spokesman Russ Rader said. "When there is structural collapse, the risk of injury is higher, but it's not clear that's different for small people as compared to heavy people. ... Obese people are at higher risk in crashes, but it's not clear using heavier crash test dummies would reduce those risks."

"It's not clear what we would learn." Well, you might learn how to save fat people's lives. But who the fuck cares, right?

This is what I mean when I say, over and over, that fat hatred kills.

Especially fat women: "Researchers also concluded that obese women had a greater chance of dying in car crashes than obese men." Fat women are much more likely to die in a car crash. And the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety doesn't see the point of using fat crash test dummies.

This is one of the many ways in which it is conveyed to me every day that my life is literally worthless to people, because I am a fat woman.

This is also why fat is a feminist issue.

What I love, ahem, most about this shit is that, on the one hand, fat is epidemic and fat people are going to destroy America and eventually the entire world! And yet, on the other hand, we are too "fringe" for our bodies to be considered worth studying.

Anyone who has been paying attention might reasonably draw the conclusion that not studying our bodies to save us, while instead using science to shame, scapegoat, and pathologize us, is by design. The solution to our "epidemic" destruction of not-fat people is simply to let us fucking die.