Memphis photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has long noticed the stares she gets when she walks down the street. Setting up a camera on timer, she started photographing people’s reaction to her. In public spaces around the world, her ‘wait watcher’ photos show familiar signs – shock, snickering and scorn from strangers. All because she is fat, an F-word society won’t accept.

It’s curious that this sort of public derision is considered acceptable in society. Swap a person’s weight for any other physical attribute – age, height, race or ability – and such behaviour would be criticised. Instead, we make entertainment from our hostility to fat – from the (often short-lived) transformations on the Biggest Loser to aggressively demanding to know what fat people eat, such as a recent special about weight on SBS’s Insight.

Fat activism: Aquaporko! celebrates larger ladies. Credit:Georgia Laughton

This hostility doesn’t end on TV. Many report their lives are continually forced under scrutiny wherever they are – from grocery shopping, eating out, at work, socialising or exercising. All have stories about someone commenting on their choices based purely on their size or, as Morris-Cafiero noticed, they just laugh behind their backs, tilling a hostile environment to become even more aggressive.

Perhaps, you might argue, the behaviour arises from true concern, a desire to make an overweight person’s easier. When you consider the overwhelming academic and statistical research shows how fat people are discriminated against in every aspect of work and society in ways completely unrelated to their health, perhaps we’re not admitting the true benefit of weight loss: where a smaller waistline results in less discrimination and hostility.