The sexual preferences of straight white men do not actually provide a good basis for classifying bodies as diseased

How’s that for a super-woke headline kids?

But it’s . . . you know . . . true:

What’s going on here is that on Friday Ana Navarro, who co-hosts the ABC daytime talk show The View, was supposed to do an interview with Kamala Harris. Just before the interview, she and co-host Sunny Hostin were told on live TV by the producer to leave the set, because they had tested positive for COVID. (The interview ended up being done remotely with the show’s other two co-hosts).

It turns out the tests were false positives — both Navarro and Hostin are fully vaccinated — but that didn’t stop Donald Trump, Jr. from tweeting out that Navarro is fat, and hey this is a Legitimate Health Issue despite what all the Crazy Leftists say about body diversity and fat acceptance, which is just crazy because look at the Science.

I can’t really blame Navarro for taking the bait and pointing out that Donald Trump Jr. is a hopeless cocaine addict and pathetic failson whose father has never loved him, especially in comparison to his sister (but I know it’s only lust).

Anyway, a few days ago I noted that the big CDC study on this Legitimate Health Issue reveals that there is essentially no relationship whatsoever between risk for hospitalization, ICU admission, or death and body weight for people with BMIs between 25 and 39.9, relative to that in the “ideal weight” [sic] reference group of BMI 18.5-24.9. The former BMI range, which I would hazard a guess Navarro is presently somewhere towards the middle of, includes 87.5% of the people who are currently classified by our public health establishment as having diseased bodies solely because of their weight.

Yet in the CDC study, the highest relative risk for hospitalization, ICU admission, or death due to COVID found across this enormous weight range (for a 5’5″ inch woman like Navarro, this would be any weight between 150 and 240 pounds) was 1.14, which if you know anything about risk ratios might as well be nothing (Go to the long post linked in the previous graph if you want a detailed breakdown).

I post on a Michigan sports message board, which features another poster who is obsessed with the idea that “obesity” is a huge health risk, and the other day he was going off about COVID and fat, so I threw some stats at him, which of course had no effect because none of this is about actual science or statistics. What it’s actually about is revealed by the fact that after some back and forth he tried to poll the board — made up almost exclusively of men, and overwhelmingly white professional class men — about whether they would prefer to have sex with a woman with a BMI of 20 or of 30.

This was his ultimate and indeed only comeback when confronted with the fact that the moral panic over obesity is just that, because that’s one of the three key pillars of this panic. Along with aesthetic disgust/sexual revulsion towards fat bodies, the other two are class anxiety — fat bodies in America are very strongly associated in the public imagination and to a somewhat lesser extent in the actual national demographics with lower SES — and of course the financial interests of the weight loss industry, who can’t get third party payments for their worse than useless products without getting higher than average weight classified as a disease, which those products are supposedly treating.

That a degenerate scumbag like Donald Trump’s son and heir is playing the but obesity is really bad for you so it’s OK to body shame a fat woman game (Navarro is a self-described lifelong Republican, whose father was literally in the Contras in Nicaragua; she has now gone all the way over to the other side, voting for Clinton and Biden in the last two presidential elections, which is what all this is really about) is a nice little reminder of how phony that game actually is.