The stepped up efforts in the “War of Obesity” are finally creating casualties in a highly publicized fashion. Our first instance comes from Montreal, Quebec Canada. A very upscale nightclub called Muzique has found itself in a work of controversy when recently on it’s Facebook page with it advertised an event in which it stated “NO FAT GIRLS ALLOWED!!!!!!!!!!”. Muzique owners stated that this was done as in inside joke by a friend of one of the owners and the post had been removed and the owners have stated “It was not an intentional thing. It was actually an accident. It was someone thinking he was funny. “We don’t think it’s funny at all. We didn’t even realize (the comment) was there until a couple of days ago, and it was too late to retract it because the event had already happened,” said John Jay, who oversees communication and marketing for Muzique.

Screen capture from one of Muzique's owners Facebook page after the apology

The management at Muzique said the comment was an accident and they are thinking of posting an apology. The funny thing is that a “Boycott Muzique Nightclub”  page has cropped up and posted the following exchange of an owner and a potential customer

So any apology would be pretty superficial at this point.

Then there is the case of Michelle Fonville of DeKalb County, Georgia USA. Michelle went to have a manicure, pedicure and eyebrow arch done at Natural Nails on Covington Highway in Lithonia. When she went to pay her bill, the salon manager Kim Tran, rang up her bill which was $5 more than it should have been. Tran explained that the $5 was a surcharge for her being overweight.  “I said, Ma’am, you can’t charge me $5 more. That’s discrimination because of my weight,” said Fonville.

Salon manager Kim Tran told Philips that the surcharge was due to costly repairs of broken chairs by overweight customers. She said the chairs have a weight capacity of 200 pounds and cost $2,500 to fix.

“Do you think that’s fair when we take $24 [for manicure and pedicure] and we have to pay $2,500? Is that fair? No,” Tran said to reported Eric Philips of Atlanta’s channel 2 Action News.

Tran refunded the $5 and asked Michelle not to return.

I think the problems starts with the government and the media. They start with the attack on the “thing” in this case obesity. They sterilize the subject so much that they separate obesity from the person with obesity and it becomes easier to attack. Then, slowly the two merge in the public mindset, thus making the obese person the subject of the attack, then, we find businesses like Muzique and Natural Nails and managers like Kim Tran who find it easy to vilify a person for their size.

So the question begs to be asked, as large/overweight/fat/obese or whatever label we are tagged with, what are we going to do about it?