The Tragedy of Fat-Shaming
[Note: This is long and personal, so ignore below the cut if you can’t stand it]
This post is definitely worth reading below the cut. It details how the prejudices doctors hold (such as fat phobia) affect medical practice. This post really reinforces my belief that people who hold positions of great responsibility and trust, such as doctors and lawyers, should definitely receive more thorough, systematic education in issues of ethics and social justice in order to understand how personal biases may be impacting their ability to do their jobs properly.
Historically, Fat Acceptance has framed body positivity in fairly stringent and problematic ways. I think a lot of work has been done to address these issues, but oftentimes these things get played out over and over again as new people come to the fold.
When you first discover body acceptance, after years and years of hating yourself and fucked up weight loss attempts and (for many) disordered eating, it can be so tempting to latch onto this mantra of “LOVE YOURSELF NO MATTER WHAT, THERE IS NO ROOM FOR COMPROMISE”. This results in a lot of fat activists advising others to simply “accept yourself”, and anything else is automatically Bad Activism.
Of course, not understanding the nuanced ways we experience ourselves/bodies and embracing this approach to self-acceptance often means trying (usually unsuccessfully) to sweep one’s more ambivalent feelings under the rug. It also means not being open to others’ discomfort with their own bodies in ways that can be racist, ableist, and cissexist.
In The ‘Fat’ Female Body, Sam Murray writes about one of the more insidious aspects of this kind of humanist logic: it reasserts a problematic dichotomy between mind and body. It says that we must, in our minds, overcome our bodies (and hatred of them). This is problematic for a couple of reasons: 1) this is the same strategy we are supposed to use, according to contemporary fat-hating society, to lose weight and become “normal” people, and 2) our bodies and minds are not ACTUALLY split—we perceive and understand the world THROUGH our bodies, and to imply that we can just “change our minds” about how it feels to be fat in a fat-hating world—in a world not made for our bodies—disregards this pretty important reality.
Long story short: it’s really crucial that we make room for bodily ambivalence in our activism.
All of this is to say that my own body has changed a bit in the last several months. After a couple years of staying at a steady weight without dieting, I have found myself facing an unexpected shift that has added nearly 30 lbs. to my person. I wouldn’t have known it was 30 lbs. (although I did know I had gained weight—I looked and felt different, and didn’t fit in my clothes the same way), except for the fact that my friend had a scale at her house, and I snuck a peek after weeks of wondering how much, exactly, I had gained.
Prior to knowing the exact number, I didn’t feel BAD about my body. I didn’t like some of the small mobility changes I was noticing (back pain happening after only walking a mile, not being as limber or flexible, pain after any extended period of time in one position, etc.) and I definitely didn’t like my clothes not fitting, but I still loved my body, the feel of it and the look of it. I didn’t blame my mobility and pain stuff on the weight gain, per se, but on a lack of physical activity in general.
Now that I know for sure that I’ve gained 30 lbs., I still don’t feel bad about my body, but I had a moment (or two or three) of feeling like a really bad fat activist. And knowing that exact number triggered a lot of shame in me: shame that I couldn’t help wanting to know the number, shame that I had picked an arbitrary number that I didn’t want to be “over” and when I wasn’t I felt relieved, shame that the act of weighing myself triggered diet-y, weight loss-y feelings in me, shame that I felt shame.
I’m gonna be real honest with y’all right now: gaining a lot of weight really quickly kinda sucks, similarly to how losing a lot of weight really quickly, or any other swift changes in our bodies, can throw us for a loop.
And I’m struggling with What To Do about it. In the distant past when I have gained weight my response has been to crash diet. I’m obviously not going to do that; I’m not going to engage in anything that could be called a “lifestyle change” or that involves me eating less of the things I love. I might try to practice some more intuitive eating—eating that requires that I check in with my body instead of just feeding it the easiest/cheapest things. I will be moving my body more, in an effort to stave off the pain I’ve been feeling lately as a result of my inactivity. And I’ll be working on continuing to love my body, to feel good as a body, to treat me with kindness and respect. I’m going to work on the shame I feel when I experience bodily ambivalence. I’m going to work on cultivating an activism that has room for all the ways I experience being fat in a fat-hating world. I’m going to work on understanding my self as a whole, not a split between a wispy being of thoughts and feelings and a separate, solid thing made of fat flesh and bones.
And I’m maybe not gonna step on a scale again. That shit fucks with my head.
This work is hard. But absolutely, certainly, 100% positively worth it. NOW GO LOVE YOURSELVES OR ELSE.
(via hellomynameislore)
“Wrong Century” — Brilliant illustration by artist Tomas Kucerovsky depicting the fate of plus-size beauty in the modern age.
TW: (abstract) discussion of rape
To start: I really like this piece of art. Because I like this piece of art, I want to respond to some of the interpretations of it that I have read. I’m not an art expert, or a plus-sized beauty expert, but when the interpretations do not match up with, or ignore parts of, the piece of art, I think it is fair to critique these interpretations.
The most common, and most over-simplistic, interpretation of this piece goes something like this:
“The theme of the page is clear, and the title of the piece confirms it: the girl visiting this museum was born in the wrong century, for in any other era her generously indulged beauty would have been worshipped and celebrated.
In the degenerate modern age in which she lives, however, her loveliness cannot be comprehended, and the public has been brainwashed into accepting the beauty-hating tastes of the arbiters of modern culture.” (http://www.judgmentofparis.com/board/showthread.php?t=2500)
And maybe that is what the author was trying to say (I have no fucking clue), but I think there is A LOT more going on in this work. Here are some of the major things I see going on:
1) I agree that there is a point being made here about how notions of beauty have changed over the centuries. In the 17th-century (when the painting she is observing was created), women’s “fatness” was seen as beautiful, even though the same “fatness” might today be seen as undesirable. Okay, so we see that beauty is socially constructed and there is nothing inherently un-beautiful about fat bodies. Fair. However…
2) The painting that the woman is looking at is Rubens’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c.1618), which I think is very important. While the daughters in this picture are depicted by Ruben as both “fat” and beautiful and desirable, there are many pictures of the time that do the same but not all of them depict the beautiful women being raped. This choice of painting is very interesting because it both: sets up a contrast between the oft-deemed “unrapeable” (because purportedly undesirable) fat woman of contemporary times with the “rapeable” (because desirable) fat woman of yesteryear, but also shows howthe treatment of (fat) women is different in two centuries, but in each case they are still disrespected and oppressed. Neither the raping men of the painting nor the heckling men in the museum have any real reverence for the personhood of the women they interact with. Whether the (fat) women are perceived as beautiful or not does not necessarily correspond to a recognition of their worth and subjectivity.
3) The idea of the romantic “good old days” where “full-figured femininity” was appreciated really ignores the way that beauty has been constructed in past and present. For example, it has been argued that “fatness” used to be the ideal because fatness attested to the class of the person and their ability to procure abundant and indulgent foods. Today, thinness is seen as the ideal, in part, because thinness often correlates with class status and the ability to procure healthy foods and spend time working out. For this and similar reasons, I think it would be silly to see our age as one where human beings are more degenerate and shallow. Seeing fatness as definitive of beauty is as arbitrary as seeing thinness as definitive of beauty. The fact that people in the past appreciated fatness does not mean that they were paragons of body positivity. It means that they lived in a different social context.
TL; DR: I don’t think it is reasonable to see this art as a romanticization of past times where fatness was regarded as desirable and appropriately feminine. I do think that this piece says a lot about the possibility of seeing fatness as beautiful. And, while I think this art encourages us to accept the fact that different bodies can be beautiful, it also suggests that beauty is not enough. Recognition of beauty does not guarantee recognition of subjectivity and worth. While the acceptance of all bodies is important, it is also not sufficient.
(via laurabarton)
Re:
lovelywinkers said: In what other areas of life do you define the standard as “the minimum needed to survive”, you have a tumblr, meaning you have access to at least several things you don’t need for survival, is that morally wrong? or is food special somehow?
wavesandmoon said: One should not make that assumption because one is not that person or that person’s doctor. Perhaps there are other things at play that contribute to the person’s weight. And even if there aren’t, it’s not actually my business how much that person consumes. I don’t like the…
Okay I’d like to address these both questions simultaneously because they’re both in response to the same post: http://madamedechevre.tumblr.com/post/24207985109/wavesandmoon-answered-your-question-questions
First off, I am using third person because ~I personally~ am not about to go out and start hassling people about their consumption of food or anything else. Really I’m not. Because, as lovelywinkers points out, I’m hardly getting by on “just what I need” so it would be silly of me to make that a standard by which I judge others. I’m asking most of these questions hypothetically, on the internet, because I have no intention of actually playing out any of these scenarios in real life. This blog is a space for me to think through problems so I can inflict my ignorance on people in the face-time world as little as possible.
So, to answer lovelywinkers: yes, I was posing the problem originally as “Is it okay to question and judge people’s food consumption in the same way one might question their consumption of other material goods, such as gasoline?” I wanted to know whether there is a fundamental difference in the way one might interrogate different kinds of consumption, or whether some types of consumption should be exempt from questioning and why. Or perhaps personal choices should never be interrogated and any issue of over-consumption (relating, for instance, to environmental concerns) should only be addressed structurally and socially, not individually. I don’t have an answer to the question.
To answer wavesandmoon: I apologize for the unclear wording. I was assuming that one might make a judgment about consumption not based on weight, but about actual knowledge of the person’s consumption. (Since, of course, weight does not tell the whole story). But perhaps you’re right and it is impossible to know enough about any person to ever make such a judgment.
I guess what I’ve been thinking about as I think of these questions is the relationship between consumption, environmentalism, and privilege. It seems like a complicated threesome.
wavesandmoon answered your question: Questions about thin privilege and fat phobia
2. Probably. You don’t know what a person’s caloric needs are & do not get to define “over-consumption” for them.
I kind of hate myself before I even write this post, but, for a moment, I’m going to suspend my tolerant and open-minded side and play the unrelenting skeptic. My questions are:
-If someone is very overweight, and is eating enough to sustain that weight, why should one not assume that they are getting more calories than their body “needs”? (As in, could survive just as well on far less).
-Does this mean it’s not acceptable to tell anyone they are consuming too much of any resource? Is it not acceptable to say that someone driving a Hummer, for instance, is using more than they need and to suggest that this is wasteful?
*Ceasing questions and going back to not sounding like such a douchebag now*
inappropriate questions at 2:33 am
If it is fat phobic to not be sexually attracted to people who are “fat”, and it is racist to not be sexually attracted to people because of the colour of their skin, then isn’t it also a kind of prejudice to not be attracted to people because of their sex or their gender? Is it, for example, bigoted to say “but I just don’t like women” or “but penises are not stimulating” or “I prefer femmes”? Barring, for example, the seemingly reasonable claim “I have been victimized by such and such person and so am triggered by similar people”- when is it and when is it not prejudices that determine sexual attraction?
Questions about thin privilege and fat phobia
As I endeavour to become more conscious of how thin privilege and fat phobia operate, I pose the following questions, for which my research has not yet provided specific answers:
1. If a child has a health problem that could be partially or wholly alleviated by weight loss, should the parent try to encourage and help the child to lose weight in a healthy way? If so, how?*
2. It is fat phobic to condemn a person who is “fat” for their eating habits when one knows nothing of their habits or lifestyle. Would it, however, be fat phobic to disapprove of a person’s over-consumption of food (whether they were fat or not), in the same way one might disapprove of a person’s over-consumption of other material goods?**
3. If someone knows that fat people are not “objectively” less attractive, and knows that many people do in fact find fat people equally or more attractive, and is themselves open to relationships of any kind with “fat” people, but has, in general, found that they are more attracted to thinner people- is this fat phobic?
4. Is it inherently fat phobic to assume correlations between health and obesity? (If one keeps in mind the fact that these correlations are statistical and so speak to the general rules and that there are exceptions, and that being thin is also not equivalent to being healthy).
*Note: This question is intersectional because it deals with both ageism and thin privilege. It is not only the child’s weight that is in contention, but also the autonomy of the child and their right to make decisions about their health and body. Also note, by lose weight in a healthy way I mean that the parent encourages smaller portions, more nutritious and well-rounded meals, and reasonable exercise, such that the child’s happiness and well-being are not jeopardized by insufficient nutrition or overwork.
**Putting “fat” in quotation marks because different people define it differently.
I invite commentary. Anyone want to venture a reply?
Confession Time: Confronting my own ignorance about thin privilege
I do not claim to be very enlightened about social justice. (Yes I am doing an M.A. in Social Justice; no it has not taught me half of what I need to know because institutionalized education never can). So I am on an enduring quest to learn more about prejudice, oppression, power, privilege, and isms. Tumblr is very helpful in this respect- firstly because I follow some wonderful people and secondly because the ‘search tags’ feature is very convenient.
In particular, I need to improve my understanding of the related phenomena known as thin privilege and fat phobia. So you may notice that I am posting interesting articles and reblogging illuminating posts that I find that discuss thin privilege, fat shaming, body policing, fat phobia, and the like. It is important to point out here that I have and have always had thin privilege. Doctors are more likely to say I am kind of underweight and ask if I eat enough, but are completely satisfied when I tell them I do and ask me nothing further (a situation that itself would be interesting to analyze, but now is not the time). Consequently, I realize that my understanding of thin privilege will be affected and perhaps impeded by the fact that I have this privilege. As such, I welcome comments, suggestions, criticism, and anything else you think may be helpful for me to know.
That’s right, folks. A new study published in the fall issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology found not only that skinny women make more money than women with larger body sizes, but they make a helluva lot more — in fact, a whopping $16,000 more a year on average.
Here you go, everyone who says “omg thin privilege lol” or “what will those SJers think of next?” Here is evidence that thin privilege exists: people who are thin are being quantifiably and monetarily valued more than people who are not. Thin privilege and prejudice against fat bodies exists and that is a sad, sad fact.
