The thin end of the wedge
23/04/2008 11:24  - (SA)  

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Sport24's Tank Lanning and Phana Motlale. (24.com and Die Burger)

'Take leave to lose weight'

Chris Roper

Every Wednesday morning, I scan the news headlines for topical issues about which to write a column. Today's hot topics are "Clinton clinches primary," "Zim postpones African summit", and "'Take leave to lose weight'". Come on - which one would you choose?

Exactly. The sad tale of an allegedly fat woman who claims she was made to take unpaid leave to lose weight. It happened in the North West province, and the woman, one Phana Motlale, is 31 years old and weighs 135kg.

Our Sport24 columnist, Tank Lanning, weighs 135kg, but he's an ex-WP prop and as finely muscled as a young, slightly sexier Os Du Randt, so he's got a reason. I can't think of a reason to weigh 135kg, unless you have a medical problem. Ms Motlale works at - wait for it - Chubby Chick, a poultry farm.

According to Beeld, Motlale claims that Chubby Chick (also more prosaically known as Fourie's Poultry Farms) sent her on leave on January 25, and told her she had to lose weight by May 5 or resign. And at this point I have to applaud reporter Sanri van Wyk for writing a very sober piece of journalism in the face of what must have been an overwhelming urge to laugh hysterically.

Frankly, if you work for a poultry farm, you should find it easy to lose weight. I suspect you'd automatically cut fried chicken out of your diet for starters. But there's a larger issue here (heh heh), and that's Motlale's accusation of fowl play by the employers.

Fattist

Should you be able to send someone home from work because she's fat, especially in a country where our dominant body type doesn't seem to be the same as, for example, Sweden? Should you even be allowed to say fat? And then there's the backlash - if we start telling people they're not allowed to be fat, aren't we at risk of ending up with having to send people home from the chicken farm for being too thin?

Now that sounds crazy, but according to Independent.ie, a study in Ireland shows that 42% of women don't drink milk because they believe it will make them fat. This has led to Irish women being "urged to increase their consumption of milk to keep their bones, teeth, muscles and bloodstream healthy."

It sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing you'd say to a chicken at Chubby Chick, except for the teeth thing, but leaving aside the creepy portrait of Irish women as livestock, it all points to an incontrovertible fact, and one which hardly needs stating - society still judges people by their weight.

Now some of our more suspicious readers will look at the story of Phana Motlale, 31, and perhaps think to themselves: "Hmm. There's just an outside chance that this woman was actually sent on leave because of other reasons, and is claiming she's a victim of fattism as an excuse."

No, I say to those sceptics. No. Fattism exists, and is probably as bad as Mulletism (discriminating against people with bad hairstyles) and Crocism (discriminating against people with no style whatsoever).

I've noticed that South Africans are all getting bored of people crying racism all the time, even when, as is often the case, it's entirely justified. I'd prefer to see a columnist fired for picking on fat people, at least it's vaguely amusing. Not me, obviously, some other columnist.

Some thin columnist.