Fat Pig
Of all the slurs hurled my way as a fat kid, “fat pig” was probably the most popular (and least imaginative) epithet of choice. So, I find it incredibly ironic now that I have two fat flying pigs grazing in my garden alongside my Buddha statuaries and shabby chic décor (yes, my garden is an eclectic one). The first I found at a local antiques store and the second I bought on sale at Pier One and then painted.
Not only are they ridiculously cute, but the flying pig is also a symbol of hometown pride for me. Before the age of railroads, Cincinnati was one of the top meat-packing cities of the nation, earning it the nickname “Porkopolis.” The Queen City was so famed at one point that many influential elites once supported making it the official U.S. capital. Being known for your city’s slaughterhouse history may not be the best of selling points today, but Cincinnatians nonetheless made a silk purse from a sow’s ear by adopting the Flying Pig as its mascot. A 2000 art exhibit saw hundreds of brightly-decorated fiberglass pigs root about downtown with names like “Frankenswine,” “Pigtoria’s Secret,” “Andy Warhog” and “Foodie Tootie in the Land of a Sows and Foods.” And the city’s ironically-named Flying Pig Marathon attracts hundreds of runners, walkers and spectators each year.
The fat pig has also long been revered in China, where as the last of the twelve zodiac animals, it’s considered a symbol of good fortune. In the folk saying, “The Fat Pig Pushing the Door Open,” the pig is considered to be a messenger of luck and happiness. Contemporary owners of pet pigs praise their pets’ intelligence, affection and loyalty – indeed pigs are reported to be just as clever, if not more so, than dogs. George Clooney, whose potbellied pig Max died a couple years ago at the ripe old porcine age of 18, said that he sometimes shared his bed with him – earning Max the envy, no doubt, of many a smitten woman, myself included. Pigs are so physiologically similar to humans that porcine heart valves are frequently used in cardiac patients and researchers get pigs drunk to test studies on alcoholism. And, of course, pigs are among the most edible of animals (the average American eats 48 pounds of pork each year). Yet pigs nonetheless persist as the subject of many an insult or negative characteristic – filthy pig, fat pig, pigheaded, pigging out and living in a pigsty to name just a few. As Franco Bonera noted, “No animal on earth is more unjustly treated than the pig. Abused, mocked, insulted, vilified, exploited – and in the end, slaughtered.” So, why the bad rap?
The pig has long been the object of scorn and taboo in Judeo-Christian tradition and Western society, where the porcine animal is considered to be vile and repulsive (but still tasty). The use of “fat pig” as a slur for fat people, especially fat women, is a relatively new phenomenon, however. For much of history, the insult had much different meanings. In Christian religious contexts during the Middle Ages, pigs signified vice and sin. In “The Faerie Queene,” Middle English writer Edmund Spenser characterized the seven deadly sins as people with the sin of gluttony depicted as riding a fat pig. But attacks on gluttony then were not so much attacks on physical fatness as they were an indictment of greed and excessive wealth. In an abridged version of Robin Hood, the Bishop of Hereford, a man known for his insatiable greed, complains to Robin that Little John had called him a “fat pig” to which Robin simply laughs and replies, “Little John never tells lies!”
Henry VIII – who was no slim dandy himself – ridiculed the pope by picturing him as a hog wearing a tiara. Likewise, seventeenth-century French insurrectionists used “fat pig” as a slur against the king and other aristocrats. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Margaret describes Richard as “thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog” not in reference to his physical attributes and deformities, which she goes on to insult later, but as an attack on his corrupt inner nature. It’s a good thing that Shakespeare‘s play came almost a century after the real Richard III’s death — in 1484, William Colyburne referred to Richard III as a hog and was caught, hanged almost to death, cut down, disemboweled and his intestines burned.
The pig became not only a common insult, but also an insult of the most egregious kind in part because of its association with the long-persecuted Jews. Jewish dietary laws prohibit the consumption of pork, so pigs became a focal symbol for anti-Semitic ostracism and malice. The Church of Rome represented its fight against Judaism as a duel in which the Synagogue sits astride a pig. Early Christians promoted pork consumption as an antagonism to Judaism. The idea soon followed that the reason Jews abstained from eating pigs is because they themselves were descended from pigs and would thus be committing cannibalism, which then led to the absurd suspicion that Jews ate Christian children as a substitute for pork. The German Judensau (Jew pig), a thirteenth century artwork which is still proudly exhibited in some churches, cathedrals and public buildings throughout Germany, depicts Jews, some with pig faces, copulating with pigs, eating pig feces and nursing from a sow. The Judensau was revived by the Nazis, whose propaganda posters depicted Der Jude as fat, fleshy and porcine-like as a way of influencing the masses to see Jews as rich, greedy bankers responsible for the dire German economic recession.
It’s hard to say exactly when “fat pig” came into mainstream use as strictly a fat slur. While gluttony has long been scorned in the U.S. owing to its Puritan background, American ideas about fatness remained relatively positive or at least neutral until the turn of the twentieth century. Peter Stearns notes in his book Fat History that “lardass” seems to have become a common schoolyard epithet by the 1940s and 1950s, so it stands to reason that “fat pig” evolved with it. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, first published in 1954, “Piggy” is the fattest and clumsiest of the marooned band of boys, which earns him their scorn and ridicule. But perhaps not so ironically, Piggy is also the most civilized and his sacrificial death signals the final breakdown of civilization among the children on the island.
The fat pig has had positive representations — Wilbur, Babe, the three little pigs, Petunia, Porky, Miss Piggy – and its porcine proponent through the years. The next time someone (even yourself) calls you a “fat pig,” think of the quote below from G.K. Chesterton, one of the most influential English writers of the twentieth century, and say, “Thank you.”
“The actual lines of a pig — I mean of a really fat pig — are among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet heavy, which we see in rushing water or in a rolling cloud…. There is no point of view from which a really corpulent pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves.”
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
posted on July 17th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
posted on July 18th, 2009 at 6:53 am
posted on July 18th, 2009 at 9:02 am
posted on July 18th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
posted on July 18th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
posted on July 19th, 2009 at 5:56 am
posted on July 19th, 2009 at 5:56 am
posted on July 19th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
posted on July 19th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
posted on July 20th, 2009 at 9:04 am
posted on July 22nd, 2009 at 7:37 pm