Chuck Prochaska has a habit of producing arguments that are rigorously well written and just as rigorously wrong. Witness his Nov. 17 column, “Fat mess America,” which bemoaned America’s “obesity epidemic” while laying the blame on excessive social tolerance of fat. Prochaska’s tales of grievous inconvenience at the hands of plodding, indifferent leviathans read like the ranting of a xenophobe who complains of always being stuck behind Asians in traffic jams. It’s easy to blame one’s daily frustrations on a particular group if one has already singled them out for especially rigid surveillance.

Prochaska, unfortunately, is not alone. Contrary to his whining about “universal acceptance”, our popular culture schizophrenically idolizes both the glamorous vulnerability of malnourished emaciation and the robust security of taut, muscular health – all the while leaving no space for even the slightest physical plenitude. Thus the women appearing in a recent series of ads for that stuff the Dove brand keeps insisting is “not a soap” were described as “fat” in countless media write-ups, despite the fact that this supposed rotundity consisted of some merely pedestrian curves. And Kate Winslet, who never exhibited anything more than garden-variety voluptuousness, is still regularly lauded for flouting Hollywood’s established conventions of slimness – even though observant star watchers will have noticed she’s been shedding pounds faster than you can say Titanic.

No wonder, then, that my stint as a bakery cashier was often marred by the indecision of certain female customers, who would gaze hungrily at the cheese danishes while sadly voicing the guilt-laden relationship they seemed to have constructed between themselves and food. No wonder Newsweek’s Dec. 5 cover story reports the rise of anorexia in children as young as 9.

The aesthetic seductiveness of the slender physique shapes even the findings of medical science. A March 2004 study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was widely reported as finding that obesity came second to tobacco as a preventable cause of death, accounting for 400,000 American deaths in 2000. But the study in fact attributed these deaths to “poor diet and physical inactivity,” tackling the weight issue only through an unsubstantiated assertion that “overweight would account for the major impact” of these factors on mortality. Given that heart failure remains the most fatal disease among Americans, and that poor diets and sedentary lifestyles damage cardiovascular health regardless of body weight, one would have hoped for a stronger defense of this claim.

This attempt to demonstrate the menace of each unchecked pound was further undermined by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s own April 2005 follow-up study. While it estimated annual deaths from obesity at 112,000, it also suggested that being underweight was itself a risk factor, and that being overweight (but not obese) might in fact be protective.

A panel of Harvard researchers promptly convened to debunk the latter finding, with one JoAnn Mason declaring it “biologically implausible” that being overweight might decrease mortality. Of course, insofar as “overweight” is defined to mean any weight above the healthy range, Mason’s statement was tautological. What the Center of Disease Control and Prevention’s study suggested, however, was precisely that the weight ranges defined as “healthy” had been set a touch too low. Such is our paranoid obsession with fat that this possibility apparently went unconsidered.

Now, I do not presume to exempt myself entirely from our culture’s lustful love affair with leanness. My blood effervesces as much as the next man’s at the sight of our svelte athletes running shirtless around the quad, affecting the calculated nonchalance of youthful male narcissism. Indeed, my enjoyment of Prochaska’s screed was cruelly interrupted by this predilection: I found myself compelled to prematurely flee my chosen coffeehouse, having inadvertently inflicted the Male Gaze upon a waifish waitress who promptly dropped a stack of dishes.

Nonetheless, for Prochaska to launch a moralizing campaign against the full-bodied, simply because he takes irrational umbrage at their existence, is an illiberal brand of bigotry in which none of us ought to engage. Least of all a small-government Republican who, by his own admission, has himself recently been following his party’s Congressmen in their trend towards packing on the pork.

Sam Harding-Forrester is a senior in LAS. His column appears every Thursday. He can be reached at [email protected].