Fat Woman and the fat jokes

Fat Woman isn't averse to a good joke. Fat Woman hasn't found that many fat jokes to be good jokes. Usually a fat joke relies on the punchline being that someone is fat, large or heavy. Sometimes fat jokes use the idea that fat people are round like balls and are therefore bouncy, but these aren't even funny.

Fat Woman did hear one funny fat joke, once. Fat Woman said: "Are you suggesting I should raise money by selling my body?" The joke was: "You'd make more money selling it by the pound." Fat Woman was tickled by this and laughed. Fat Woman understands others might not find this amusing, but context was important.

Fat Woman has had to put up with a couple of fat jokes this week. The first was a birthday card Fat Woman's cousin sent his mother. It featured two fat men in workout gear with a caption about how no one had much hope for the British Olympic sprint team. Auntie found it terribly funny. Fat Woman didn't find it amusing. Fat Woman was actually rather unimpressed by the utter dimness of her relatives. Surely they would twig the joke was offensive to a fat person?

The second fat joke was on Personal Trainer's Twitter feed. Having been given the whole "friends" issue some thought Fat Woman was about to follow Personal Trainer on Twitter. The top post was a retweet of a fairly rubbish joke - "I saw a fat girl in the gym today. She had an iPad strapped to her arm."

Fat Woman has de-constructed this joke and reasons that it must be funny because an iPod is so small against a fat arm but an iPad is larger and would therefore be considered to scale. Perhaps the humour is that the size of the iPad shows just how large the arm is.

If Fat Woman had an iPad she would be wearing it strapped to her arm tomorrow.

Fat Woman is now feeling very self concious about her size in the gym. Fat Woman has an arm band for her iPod which she wears in the gym. Fat Woman is now wondering if people look at her and see the flesh bulging around the strap and think that she is revolting.

Fat Woman is wondering how Personal Trainer sees her. Fat Woman had already made it clear that if she heard Personal Trainer talking about how disgusting anyone's at was she would fire him. Fat Woman has blocked Personal Trainer on Twitter. Fat Woman doesn't feel she can say anything as it was a personal feed that she was not yet subscribed to.

Fat Woman is struggling with the idea that someone can like her as a person but find people like her risible. Fat Woman wonders if it is a similar issue to a person of Asian descent being friends with a racist. The racist might say: "They're all dirty scroungers - except for you, of course." All fat people are fat and lazy, except for the ones you know as a person ,of course. Fat Woman doesn't want to fire Personal Trainer over this, but it has rather hurt her feelings. Fat Woman thought Personal Trainer saw her as a person who happened to be fat and assumed that extended to other fat people. Yet when her family who love her can hold the same view it makes Fat Woman think that perhaps she is laughable. Or possibly revolting, disgusting and vile.

Fat Woman hasn't doubted herself this much in a long time.