Please excuse me; I'm unwell. I think I may have caught 'being fat' from a stranger, probably on the tube. At first I couldn't believe it either. Then, one evening, after an Indian takeaway, several glasses of wine, and two Snickers, I was sprawled on the sofa, with my jeans undone, wondering how on earth it could be that I'd put on so much weight, when I came across a report in the New England Journal about 'socially contagious weight gain' and 'fat influencing relationships'. (Basically, hang around fat people long enough and you become fat, too.)
Piecing this together with other recent reports about a 'fat virus' causing 'infectobesity'... and everything became clear: despite the fact I delight in exuding all the physical dynamism of a sack of wet sand, my blubber isn't my own doing after all. Either because of a corpulent stranger on a tube train, or the random horror of 'infectobesity', this fat thing had been done to me.
Sound ridiculous? Don't count on it. Fat isn't a feminist issue any more. It's a victim issue: anyone's fault but your own. Or so the new rationale goes. And obviously it would be lovely to believe in 'fat viruses' and the rest. People like me wouldn't have to blame our repellent stomachs on our sloth and greed. We could just say: 'I've gone and caught that fat virus, you know the one in the papers.' From Black Death to Social Death in a few easy centuries, how frightfully convenient.
All of which makes you long for more honest times, when the overweight would merely stutter excuses about 'glands'. Indeed, how did it come to this? When did otherwise sentient people decide to conjure an entire belief system out of their own faux-corpulence? For it is my belief that it isn't, as always presumed, the long-suffering people with genuine weight problems who inspire this kind of thing, it is rather those individuals (some men, but usually women) who are not fat at all, yet fear fat to such a phobic degree that they seize upon all the pseudo science they can get on the subject. In short, the same people who neurotically read the calories and the carbs on the backs of food packets are the same people driving the ludicrous 'Where is fat from?' industry.
The New England Journal findings don't even seem to understand the basic fat people/thin people axis. It's always been my understanding that, far from loathing bigger people, the professionally thin adore them because they make them look smaller. So, fat people don't make you fat at all, if anything they make you feel a lot thinner. The Spices comeback photo shoot was a case in point. While Posh was in her exultant Twiglet-thin element, the rest of the Spices were reportedly scrabbling not to stand next to her because they knew, by comparison, they would resemble beanbags with facial features.
Some weeks on, the magazines, rather chillingly, are full of Geri's 'drastic new diet', and Mel B's 'rigorous exercise regime', which on the face of it seems to prove the NEJ's point that, just as one can 'catch fat', one can also (hurrah!) 'catch thin'. Alternatively it could be proof that a once strangely real and touching group of friends have turned into ropey paranoid baggages quite prepared to sacrifice any semblance of real friendship, or creative unity, just to be the thinnest. And there we were thinking Girl Power was dead.
Of course one understands the point that constantly being around thin, attractive people makes you up your game. One also sympathises with those with real weight problems who truly hope that there really is some kind of 'fat virus' and subsequently a 'fat antidote'. However, the rest of us could probably do ourselves a favour by realising that sedentary is Latin for 'lazy cow' and accepting some responsibility for our own actions. And to that end, I'm going to buy a bike. I'm not going to ride it, but I'm definitely going to buy it.
The faux corpulent could go one better, simply by refusing to succumb to what has become a kind of female pornography of weight (gain, loss, it's all the same). Otherwise, with things so bad even now, what is the future for female camaraderie - some murky unforgiving whirl of self-delusion, one-upmanship and competitive dieting? Getting to that terrible point where we could quite truthfully claim: we're all Spice Girls now.
