Remember when everyone demanded fat mannequins?
Well – now they’re doing the same thing with functional mannequins.
As in, the ones you put into a car before rocket launching that car into a brick wall. (I think they’re also known as “crash test dummies”. ) The thing about this story is that it’s so distracting in its amusement that I can’t effectively assess my feelings. So lets start by just getting the obvious out of the way and acknowledging the elephant in the car. Room. The elephant in the room:
This is hilarious. And not just because plastic fat is ironically funny (when plastic mannequins are an ideal for clothes showcasing and plastic bishes are meant to be the ideal for post-nip tuck perfection). But also because he’s wearing a surfing suit of sorts. (For.. modesty?)
Now that we’ve addressed the obvious, we can move on to marvel at just how bad we’ve gotten as a culture that we have to manipulate the testing that has to do with a passenger’s well-being, when that passenger clearly doesn’t care about their own well-being. Is that a stretch? To say that – if someone’s slowly killing themselves via suicidal ingestion until a mass of adipose waves whirlpool them inward into oblivion? Nevermind that it’s a habit that ultimately costs you and I money when they start having health problems. (or that the results of these tests will probably mean heavier, stronger equipment which means we all have to pay more for cars in general just in case we bring a hippo sized homo-sapien home one day). Nay, let’s infuse some compassion: for all its visual disgustingness, food addiction induced obesity is a mental illness; you’re voluntarily doing something to yourself that’s multi-leveled detrimental but you carry on with it anyway. And doubly so if you’re in such denial about it being the number one threat in your life, that you think a bigger concern is going to be whether this seat belt strapping you down like a Thanksgiving turkey is gonna do the trick in the off chance of an accident.
I’m not saying that obese people aren’t more likely to die if an accident does happen – they are – by a landslide of 78%. All’s I’m saying is they’re more likely to have an early death induced by these habits that are totally fixable than by a random turn of traffic events. And that if they fix the former, they’ll lower their chances of the latter leading to premature deadsies.
“This year, more than 300,000 Americans will die from illnesses related to overweight and obesity. Obesity contributes to the number-one cause of death in our nation: heart disease. Excess weight has also led to an increase in the number of people suffering from Type 2 diabetes.”
(Per Wikipedia, you can compare deaths by car accidents by lopping off a zero from the obesity figure)
When I look at it that way, making a corpulent crash test doll to address a fixable problem just feels like when my doctor gave me another pill to counteract the effects of the 100’s of mg’s of narcotics he had me on. Instead of saying, “These may not be working. Also, I think you may be addicted. As your doctor, I’m weaning you down and retracting your prescription.” That doesn’t make anyone any money though.
Plus, I feel like dumpy dummy falls short of what standard American obesity looks like.
“Een United States, obesity crashes YOU!”
But, as I mentioned, food addiction at this level’s a mental illness. A problem from within. That means it can only be solved from within. What we need are for more free-of-charge programs that address the root cause of their suffering induced comfort eating (and they are suffering – only more obviously so to the public than more furtive addictions are because people can see fat easier than trackmarks). I’d say sitting here and pointing a finger at fatty from across the lunchroom till he changes or goes home and kills himself in his “big fun” tee shirt (“Heathers” anyone?) is the right course of action. But in my experience, that doesn’t work. Or feel good. It didn’t work for me and my problems. What did work was someone who knew not to look down on someone unless they were helping her up. And that sort of help should be available to all people.
We get that sorted, and we’ll see happier people who look more like standard store-shop mannequins.
And we won’t have to make these massive death test ones.