miskatonicdotedu:

fatbodypolitics:

If ANOTHER person tries to tell me that being called mean names or told to eat a sandwich is the same as government backed campaigns to make fat people no longer exist I’m going to blow a fucking gasket. Body shaming is horrible no matter who it happens to but the idea that people are comparing words to numerous industries that are trying to find a “cure” for fatness is ridiculous. I’m going to need all of the readers of Bitch who wrote on their facebook page about this story to sit down and shut the fuck up when discussing a girl who seriously believes that girls are taught being fat is the ideal and started a kickstarter campaign to make a book that looks like every fucking magazine in the history of forever. I would really love for someone to find an industry whose main purpose is to find a cure for thinness. If you answer with the food industry you have already failed. Go and find out who owns Jenny Craig asshat.

I’ve had this argument before and gotten a lot of hate because I took it a step further by explaining that, when women snark on each other, a fat woman telling a thin woman to “eat a sandwich” is speaking from a place of hurt, or resentment, or sheer exhaustion in the face of institutional fat hatred, but a thin woman calling a fat woman a “fat slob” or something is speaking from a place of power and re-inscribing fat hatred on the mind and body of her target. Neither instance of name-calling is “right.” But the latter is “more wrong” from a perspective that acknowledges the social context. The thin woman can walk away from a negative encounter with a fat woman and find a vast array of spaces that celebrate her body type and encourage people to be like her. The fat woman can’t walk away from fat hatred.

It’s true that all women are targets of body policing as an iteration of structural misogyny and capitalism. Individual women’s bodies are never portrayed as fully acceptable—women are always told to be thinner, or more “toned,” or to have larger breasts so that we keep spending money on products and services to attain aesthetic perfection.



But fat hatred is a specific form of institutional oppression, and it is very, very real. Fatness is specifically regarded as unhealthy, ugly, and unclean. Fat women are told—by marketing campaigns, by mass media, by fiction, by medical discourse, by the people around us—that we are unlovable, lazy, and worthless specifically because we are fat. Individually, women may never be allowed to be fully at home in their bodies—no woman is perfect as she is, because then she wouldn’t have to buy anything to maker herself look “better”—but thin women on the whole are considered beautiful, healthy, and desirable. Society demands that fat women turn ourselves into thin women—it never encourages women to be fatter. In the big picture of cultural discourse, fatness is synonymous with ugliness, unhealthiness, and worthlessness, while thinness conotes health, beauty, and productivity.



Maybe one time a fat person told you to eat a cheeseburger and that hurt your feelings. Fat people get “you’re a worthless ugly slob” from all sides, every second of every day.