Fat Like Me

This week in class we have been talking about overweight/obesity and the stigma attached to it and it got me thinking about this movie I saw on lifetime a few years back called Fat Like Me. The movie was about this girl who all of her life had been an athlete and she was banking on getting a softball scholarship to pay for college, well she ends up breaking her ankle during the season and misses out on the college scouts and the scholarship. Now with no scholarship she must find a way to pay for school so she and a class mate of hers enter a video contest to win a large cash prize. For their video the two girls decide to focus on obesity and the stigma that comes with it. For the summer the main character dresses up in a fat suit and attends college classes and recording with a micro camera all that takes place while on campus and how the other students react. During the movie while she is dressed in her fat suit the main character is called names right to her face, at one point when she can't fit into her desk one young man even yells lard ass right across the class room in front of the teacher. This was at first shocking to me when the teacher did nothing but ask the students to quiet down but then I remembered a teacher I had in high school who not only did nothing when students would verbally harass the overweight students but he himself would join in right in the middle of class and several times through out the year different concerned students would bring this to the attention of school officials and time after time nothing was done and then it dawned on me that we not only have a stigma on overweight and obese individuals but we also as a society have made it acceptable to harass these people and I don't know if its maybe because as a society we see it as their own fault therefore we as people feels its okay to treat them with less than an ounce of human respect....Really I just don't know!