Fat people are fat because they won’t stop eating.
Fat people need to see psychotherapists because they’re emotionally unstable. That’s why they can’t stop eating.
Fat people are lying when they say they’re happy they way they are. They really have low self-esteem.
Fat people need to just stop eating so much instead of getting weight loss surgery, because they’ll just get fat again.
Etc, etc, etc…
If you’re thinking WTF?!, imagine being in my position and having to read six pages of that. You see, I currently work part-time as a tutor at a writing center. As such, my job is to help students form thesis statements, reorganize their paragraphs, and figure out how to write a conclusion. Veering off track and lecturing students on their prejudices is really not part of the job description.
The first time I came across a questionable assertion, I went, “hmm.” Then it snowballed into pages of nasty generalizations, and my “hmm” turned into me trying not to turn to the student and go, “WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM?!” Also? In addition to the blanket statements, the writer of this paper also liked to mix up it up a big and use different words for “fat,” such as “obese,” “overweight,” and “plump.” Yes, plump.
I have been put in a somewhat similar situation before. Last year, I taught English courses at a college in New York. One of the assignments was to analyze an ad, and one of my students turned in a racist, misogynist “analysis” of a Venus and Serena “Got Milk?” ad. He had a habit of turning in papers full of “dark humor,” and he knew damn well what he was doing. He just kept pushing it to see how far he could get with me. Being in a position of power as his professor, I let him know it was not funny and not acceptable, and that unless he rewrote the ad analysis, he’d get a zero. I also warned him if he ever pulled something like that again, he wouldn’t get a second chance at a rewrite.
But this whole fat-prejudice situation is a different in that I’m a lowly tutor. In fact, while I was doing the initial read-through, the girl was messing around on the computer totally ignoring me. She was basically expecting me to mark the corrections and give her the paper back so she could be on her merry way.
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