Southwest Airlines and the Scandal Behind Bumping "Thin" Woman From Flight

The smug-toned articles at CBS News and Yahoo Shine! want to make it seem as if "Southwest can't seem to win for losing." They explain with thinly veiled contempt how Southwest airlines flight attendants asked a "thin" woman to give up her seat for an "extra-large 14-year-old."

The writers of these articles seem to have no problem whatsoever setting up a clear dichotomy between thin/innocent/good and overweight/disgusting/bad. They seem to delight in it, in fact. The story isn't about how, say, Southwest Airlines (and most other airlines) frequently overbook their flights and thus need to kick passengers off, or how they try to cram as many human bodies into as many tiny seats as possible in order to increase profits.

It's hardly even about the problem of airplane seats being so uncomfortable and ridiculous that it's hard for many adults to fit in them, much less get comfortable (it's a disturbing sign when people can't even lean their seats back without completely eliminating the leg room of the person behind them, as on my recent flight Miami-Santo Domingo).

It is entirely about our society's increasing fat hatred, and the supposed "oppression" of thin people by overweight ones. It is about seeing people who aren't "thin" as lazy, as pariahs on society, as impeding on the rights and the lives of the just thin ones.

For some reason, it's still okay to malign plus-sized people -- both forthrightly and subtly -- as if they were a blight on a society, to express blatant disgust for and prejudice against them. It's a pastime the media delights in, and which certainly serves their purpose of stoking the feverish national obsession with thinness (which sells). It also conveniently covers up the trail of companies that are obviously looking to squeeze the max amount of money out of each flight, seeing passengers as means to an end as opposed to human beings.

And so we keep spiraling downward into a cycle of thinness-adoration followed by fat-hatred followed by thinness-adoration, and more diet books, products, and body-watching tabloids are sold, and little is done to help work towards a national change in American eating habits (fat or thin, our processed corn-based foods produced by the bloated agro-industry are not doing us much good nutritionally) and girls keep growing up critiquing and hating their bodies into thinness, reading articles that so clearly align respectability, beauty, and morality with being skinny.

Photo credit: WexDub