You all remember our discussion from a few days ago about people not being hired—or even being fired—for smoking. I’d posed the question:
What about the obese? Is banning the hiring of overweight people–who, like smokers, could theoretically control their conditions–next?
So I was flipping channels last night and happened upon Boston Legal. William Shatner was holding forth in a boardroom meeting with a former employee who was about to sue him. The employee was an attractive, rotund woman (by the standards of Hollywood, anyway). Captain Kirk had fired her for being fat. The dialogue went something like this:
Kirk: There’s this study from Harvard—you’ve heard of Harvard, haven’t you—that found that fat was contagious.
Fired employee’s lawyer: But you didn’t think she was too fat to hit on.
Kirk: Oh, I like chubby sex. I just don’t want to catch it.
Fired employee: Ka-ching.
Kirk: What? I don’t have anything against the Chinese. Just fat people.
Fired employee: Ka-ching, ka-ching.
Funny, right? Except it rang a bell. I went looking for that Harvard study, and found it reported on in this TIME.com article titled “Obesity Is Contagious, Study Finds,” by Laura Blue (bolds mine):
Researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, reviewed a database of 12,067 densely interconnected people — that is, a group that included many families and friends — who had all participated in a major American heart study between 1971 and 2003. …According to their analysis, when a study participant’s friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. “You are what you eat isn’t the end of the story,” says study co-author James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego. “You are what you and your friends eat.”
Gah! Kirk isn’t just loopy from all the bed-hopping he did on Star Trek; fat can be caught, like a cold!
Be that as it may, there’s no way this stands up as a reason to fire a competent employee. Or so I’m inclined to believe. But when you consider the arguments for firing smokers, it begins to sound awfully similar. Could this Boston Legal episode be the harbinger of a scary new trend? Can fat people be fired because obesity might be catching?
Here’s Shatner as fat-hater Denny Crane, with James Spader as his law partner Alan Shore. You know, Shatner ain’t such a Slim Jim himself. / ABC
Lest we forget the various virtues of girth, read this report in Slate today:
A study says curvy women are smarter. Sample: 16,000 females. Result: Women with high ratios of hip to waist size “scored significantly higher on [cognitive] tests, as did their children.” Theories: 1) Hip fat contains omega3 acids, which promote “growth of the brain during pregnancy” and “could improve the woman’s own mental abilities,” whereas waist fat has more omega6 acids, “which are less suited to brain growth.” 2) Teen mothers produce dumber kids because they’re thinner and deficient in omega3. 3) Men like curvy women due to “the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child.” Skeptical reactions: 1) The omega3 theory is pure speculation. 2) Diet and class are more plausible explanations. 3) Men don’t care that much about waist-to-hip ratio. Rosy feminist spin: “Research that proves you can be sexy and intelligent is really positive.” Cynical feminist spin: Except when it implies that being unshapely makes you stupid. (Related: Slate’s XX Factor on a similar new study.)