The British Medical Journal, already well established as a source of policy recommendations noxious to individual liberty, is at it again:
Clothes made in larger sizes should carry a tag with an obesity helpline number, health specialists have suggested. Sweets and snacks should not be permitted near checkouts, new roads should not be built unless they include cycle lanes and food likely to make people fat should be taxed, they say in a checklist of what we might “reasonably do” to deal with obesity.
(Nigel Hawkes, “Larger-size clothes should come with warning to lose weight, say experts”, Times Online (UK), Dec. 15).
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Clothes with very small sizes will come with phone numbers for eating-disorder help lines. Ugly clothes will have phone numbers for singles lines, while professional clothes will have tags directing the wearer to national headhunting and job-search hotlines. Used clothing will be re-labeled with contact info for hipster clubs, film festivals. Black clothing: suicide hotline. Black leather: you can guess.
Private individuals and companies can have their own phone number placed in articles of clothing, where they can freely discriminate by clothing article and size. That’s right ladies, your underwear will come complete with the phone number of some creep sewn inside.
Go for it, Walter. No society has the right to fight the national tragedy of obesity by attempting to effectively communicate directly with the porkers.
With reguards to Greedy Trial Lawyer’s comment, I find the term “porker” offensive. Maybe I should sue him. Can anyone reccommend a “good lawyer”?
As someone who has worn “plus” size clothing most of my life (6′-7″ 280 lbs.), what needs to be done is to change the normal range of clothing sizes to reflect the changing population. The current clothing sizes were developed just after WWI. Since then there have been changes to the average size of a person.
Too many people associate size and weight with health. Just remember we all are different. What may be healthy for you may not be for me and so on. My health is excellant except for some disability as a result of some time I spent in the Navy.
I’ll admit that I am a large man, but I don’t need the waitress to swap my Pepsi for Diet Pepsi because she thinks that she’s doing me a favor. I have a severe allergy to chemicals used in artificial sweetners.
Of course, warning labels on large clothing is hardly “effectively communicating” with the obese (though somewhat better than calling them porkers); such shame tactics are almost certainly counterproductive.
I wonder where they’re going to start the designation of “larger size”?
Out here in CA most women’s size 10s are built for people who are still stick-thin, and just happen to be six and a half feet tall. Or, alternately, have the upper half of a Japanese schoolgirl and the lower half of a New York runway model.
If the clothes I can get my Germanic-heritage self into (that’s polite for being built like a short Viking opera singer) start having obesity hotline numbers in them I’m going to give up on clothes entirely and just start wearing reindeer pelts.
GTL: Do you think the “porkers” don’t already know that they are fat?
I hate when I’m walking down the hallway and find myself blocked passing one of these individuals. Perhaps the warning label should be on the outside of the garment, “Wide Load”, just like is used on mobile homes on the highway.
The labels on clothes is certainly the wrong way to go. But what is wrong with making bike lanes on all new roads? People might actually take up exercising, as well as reduce environment pollution if they actually had a reasonable way to get to work without a car. Just because you are so lazy that you want to drive everywhere doesn’t mean that you have to force everyone else to be that way.