This is Thin Privilege

I rolled my sleeves up at the park today.

It’s such a ridiculously tiny thing, to be as meaningful to me as it is.

I haven’t shown my upper arms in public since I was probably 10 or so, with the exception of being at the beach (and even then, I usually wear a t-shirt), or with select groups of friends.  I have never worn a tank top in my adult or teenage life.  At some point, I got it in my head that my upper arms were too fat ever to be seen in public, and I was never able to shake it.

Until today—it was nice out and I wanted sun, so I rolled my sleeves up to my shoulder.  Nobody noticed or cared. It was awesome.

• Tags
• body positivity
• fat acceptance
• submission

bigfatfeminist:

By now it’s entirely likel you’ve seen it: Dove put out an ad where a bunch of women sit down and describe themselves to a forensic artist. Then, a stranger they just met describes them to a forensic artist. Surprise! They’re not as ugly as they think they are!

Look, here’s some real talk: I do not know a single person who doesn’t struggle with body image on a daily basis, male or female, to varying degrees. And when I first watched this ad, I was moved. Of course I was — they’re paying a lot of people a lot of money to ensure I am moved. And it is, in fact, moving to see an advertisement so clearly focused on pointing out that people are often their own harshest critics, and that being hard on yourself isn’t fair. I loved that. Let me repeat: I loved that, and was nearly in tears for a good part of the ad. 

I am all for things that make people feel more beautiful. To paraphrase Margaret Cho, I’m gutted by those who don’t find most others beautiful, because they’re missing out on a lot of beauty in the world. I have no doubt that the women featured in this ad did feel shitty about themselves, and might still. Listening to them describe themselves felt like… Well, like listening to myself. Can’t be too vain, here. Gotta be “honest.” Gotta play ourselves down, all the time, as if admitting that we like something about ourselves is a cardinal sin.

God, it hurt.

And then we got to the strangers, and the first stranger says, “She was thin, so you could see her cheekbones… And her chin? It was a nice, thin chin…”

God, that hurt too.

Thin, thin, thin. The mantra I’ve been repeating to myself my whole goddamn life. No part of me is thin or ever has been. My wrists, maybe? Uh?

Of course, they show the women seeing their portraits, too — the ones they described and the ones others did. And most of them tear up. I would, too. Hell, I did, too, because when I watched this the first time I was emotionally tangled up in it in a way I didn’t expect. I wanted to like it; I wanted to be moved. I was moved.

One woman looked at the portrait of herself that she’d drawn and said, “This one looks more… closed off. Fatter. And sadder, too.”

Ah.

I wanted to love this ad. I wanted so badly to believe that an advertising company is using its considerable powers for good. I wanted to feel like acceptance is a thing, like at least one ad company really is trying to expand the ideas of what beautiful is and what people want to see.

Instead, I got more of the usual: Thin good. Fat bad. It triggered serious body dysmorphia in me today that I had a lot of trouble dealing with and tried to ignore or circumnavigate instead of approaching head-on.

Why are we so validated by this dichotomy of fat versus thin? Why are we so relieved when others tell us we’re thinner than we think we are, or that we’re not fat? I ask these rhetorical questions because I have answers: we equate good traits with thinness and bad traits with fatness. Thin people are friendly, open, healthy, beautiful, and good. Fat people are lazy, stupid, gluttonous, unhygienic, ugly, and bad. When you tell someone you don’t think they’re fat, what you’re usually telling them is that you don’t associate any of the aforementioned traits with them. This has nothing to do with whether or not they are actually fat.

Ultimately, Dove is trying to sell us something, and that something is a cosmetics product. Given this, I understand that my frustration is probably a little unfair, but God, am I sick of feeling alienated by campaigns promoting “real beauty” that want nothing to do with my fat ass.

Thin privilege is a body acceptance campaign that includes your body type but excludes fat people.

-FA

• Tags
• thin privilege
• fat discrimination
• moralism
• morality
• ethics
• corporatism
• capitalism
• fat acceptance

bumsquash:

When Is a Question Not “Just a Question”?

fatbodypolitics:

vixyish:

Over at This Is Thin Privilege, we’ve been getting a lot of people objecting to our handling of trolls by insisting, “They were just asking a question!” And a lot of trolls who insist that we must answer whatever question they’ve come up with this time, because we owe it to them, or it’s the polite thing to do, or whatever the hell else. This is, of course, bullshit.

What they really want is for us to accept the premise of their questions, because the premise is that fat is bad and fat people are bad. There is no way to give them a response they will accept as an answer to the question unlessit accepts the premise.

Don’t know what I’m talking about?

Sort of the classic example is the question, “Have you stopped beating your dog yet?” You can’t answer yes without accepting the premise that you used to beat your dog, and you can’t answer no without accepting the premise that you not only have been beating your dog, you’re still doing it. The only way to get out of it is to say, “What the fuck are you talking about, you complete shit, I have never beaten my dog, how dare you say such a thing?” We call this rejecting the premise of the question.

A little more directly applicably, trolls ask things like, “Given that being fat is completely unhealthy and places a horrible strain on the health care system, how can you justify being fat?” They want us to just grant that being fat is unhealthy and puts a strain on the health care system, when it doesn’t. That’s their premise, though, and the only way to reject that premise is to address that. So we say, “What bullshit, being fat is not automatically unhealthy, and so it doesn’t place a strain on the health care system, and anyway we don’t need to justify being fat any more than we need to justify being short.” And then they scream that we haven’t answered their question, they deserve an answer, we haven’t been polite enough. (This attack almost always comes with a side order of tone argument.)

And then other people jump in and tell us that we shouldn’t assume they were being horrible, they were just asking a question, there’s nothing wrong with asking a question, how dare we say there is.

This, obviously, is more bullshit. When the premise of the question is that fat is bad, and fat people are bad and deserve to be treated badly, then the question is not “just a question,” the question itself is a statement of bigotry and is harmful. The entire idea that there’s never anything wrong with asking a question, and that a question that doesn’t openly use bad language is automatically polite, is nonsensical. The question itself is damaging and insulting, and treating it as if it is a “legitimate” (people keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means) question is accepting its premise and does its own damage.

Insisting that these questions deserve to be treated as innocent questions accepts the premise as a valid one, and reinforces fatphobia. Period.

This is also a really good example of how to disrupt the power exchange involved when it comes to people believe that fat is inherently bad or really any other form of oppression where people are taking oppressive stances.  Many people refer to these exchanges as rejecting the master’s discourse by disrupting / rejecting the premise of the exchange to legitimize the experiences of the victims. By rejecting the premise of the question you are not only disrupting what is being said but you are also legitimizing the experiences of fat people. I really wish more fat activists would take this kind of stance when discussing fat politics. We consistently play myth busters when it comes to discussing fatness and health but don’t think about how we are just reinforcing our own oppression.

I’m really interested in how different fat activism would be if we stopped accepting the questions / comments that are made and instead outright reject them altogether. 

I’m really interested in how different fat activism would be if we stopped accepting the questions / comments that are made and instead outright reject them altogether. 

The answer is innovative, interesting and positive. We all need to do it and do it NOW.

I agree. We need to reject the premise that it’s okay to hate or discriminate against fat people based on their supposed bad health. Fat activism needs to be explicitly for ALL fat people, regardless of their health status or just how fat they might be.

What I see in a lot of FA spaces are activists straddling the desire to reject the health premise by saying things like, “Even if all fat people were unhealthy, health status isn’t a reason to hate or discriminate against someone,” while still giving credence to the health premise by going into a fat health mythbusting spiel. 

I can’t tell you how many anti-fat statements I’ve seen that were little more than rank hate, qualified with “because it’s just a fact that being fat isn’t healthy.” 

Traditional FA arguments have relied on the idea that the way to diffuse these hateful statements is to prove that fat isn’t necessarily unhealthy. But by doing so we’ve ceded the premise that health status is, in fact, grounds for hating or despising someone. And as long as the tiniest statistical correlation between fatness and whatever-disease exists, we’ve lost the argument, because we diffused the wrong bomb: we should have rejected the idea that it’s okay to hate people for being ‘unhealthy,’ period. 

-ArteToLife

• Tags
• health
• healthism
• fat acceptance
• argumentation

Letting the health stratification put forward by healthists — that healthier people are better, that health is generally controllable by engaging in healthist-approved behaviors, and that saying ‘health doesn’t matter’ in a civil rights argument is equivalent to promoting/glorifying sickness and disease — be entertained in a civil rights space is conceding their point: that health does have a place in a civil rights argument.

Cut health out of the argument. State that BMI limits (on paper or just in practice) for things like health services, adoption, employment and state service, and immigration are wrong without qualification or exception.

State that ‘fat fees’ in the form of higher prices for of plane/transit fares, clothing, healthcare, being pressured into participating in diet culture and risky weight loss interventions that result in higher healthcare costs down the road and time lost in prioritizing diet culture and weight loss behaviors, are wrong without qualification or exception.

State that mistreatment for being fat by healthcare professionals, teachers, parents, employers, coworkers, and peers is wrong without qualification or exception.

State that the de- or hyper-sexualization of fat people is wrong without qualification or exception.

State that the fat wage gap is wrong without qualification or exception.

A fat rights argument does not need to include health in order to have merit and power.

In fact, I’d argue that fat rights arguments appealing to the healthist belief system and the stratification of rights based on perceived or real health status sap the power from a fat rights argument.

-ArteToLife

• Tags
• heath
• healthism
• concern trolling
• health concern trolling
• fat discrimination
• fat rights
• fat acceptance

juicyjacqulyn:

I am not here to coddle my oppressors

I am not here to be nice to my oppressors

I am not here to hand hold those who send me hate and threaten me

I am not here take it easy on people who hurt me

Stop telling me how to react, instead of telling them how to act

Stop blaming me for refusing to just take it

If you really think the victim is the person to blame, you’re part of the problem

• Tags
• thin privilege
• fat acceptance
• fat
• obesity
• bullying
• oppression
• intersectionality

bumsquash:

Hatred as health, as noble righteous. An expression of goodness and good for people. It’s good to hate people and it’s good for their health.

That’s a real problem.

(via fatanarchy)

• Tags
• thin privilege
• fat hate
• morality
• self righteousness
• hate
• bullying
• bullies
• fatspo
• fat
• fat acceptance

mccormcorp:

- fat shame is not the last acceptable prejudice, seriously. Look around you. Get it together.

- if you blog diligently about thin privilege but are unable to check your own privileges? GTFO. Stop looking up at the privilege you lack and start looking at the ones you’ve got.

- yes fat phobia sucks but if you shout to the rafters about being fat bashed but then say nothing about racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, ageism or any of the other bad isms? You’re doing it wrong.

- if your message is “fat is beautiful” but the subtext of every post you make is that fat is only beautiful when white, youthful, “beautiful”, able-bodied, hetero, cis-, economically advantaged, and always falling in a lockstep line with the slavish & brutal corporate fashion industries? umm you’re not helping, bro.

- let being fat inform the way normativity works in our world, how those of us with fat bodies fall outside the “norm” which is a system of classification set up to place on a pedestal the white, the young, the wealthy, hetero & cis people of this earth, and yes, thinness is part of that but only a slender fragment of the larger picture. Let your experiences being fat bashed inform the way you process race, class, gender, sexual orientation, class status, age, “ability”. Don’t just rally to be treated the same as other thin, young, white, pretty people.

thank you and much fatty loveness.

The above is very important. Read it, then read it again.

And WIN on the gif. 

-ArteToLife

• Tags
• intersectionality
• oppression
• privilege
• fat acceptance
• fat discrimination
• discrimination

fromonesurvivortoanother:

I wrote this in response to a post about people having “100% responsibility” for being fat, but I figured it would do well as its own list.

• Food deserts.
• School lunch programs which rely on fatty proteins and simple carbs.
• Lack of funding for social programs in poor, person of color communities.
• Historical trend in which black slaves were given the fatty, not as lean leftovers of the master’s food and forced to make use of it.
• Urban development and bad community planning which makes it impossible to live without using cars, buses, or other forms of transportation, and very difficult to be physically active.
• White sugars and high fructose corn syrup in processed foods instead of other sugars which the body metabolizes more efficiently (brown, beet, etc).
• Budget cuts for school health/nutrition programs.
• Inherited genetic traits which predispose some people to being overweight rather than others.
• Government subsidizing of meat over vegetables.
• Agricultural revolution/enclosure movement removing individual ownership of land for small farms.
• Suburban beauty codes which prevent homeowners from planting gardens.
• Edward Bernays’ ad campaign to popularize eggs, meat, and other heavy foods for American breakfast.
• Regional weather differences which make some vegetables and fruits more expensive in some places than others.
• Increased use of growth hormones in food.
• Increase in portion sizes in restaurants and at home— larger plates, bowls, cups, etc.
• Lack of clean drinking water in some communities (yes, here in the United States), leading people to purchase soda (or bottled water, which is a whole other problem) instead.

You can find all of these things on your own just by doing some research. Look it up. It’s all there.

Also:

• Low calories diets that wreck metabolism and cause weight gain when the diet is stopped.
• Socio-economic trends in which poor people are forced to make use of leftovers and less healthy parts of food by using nutritionless additives.
• Post-WW2 campaigns to fatten up the populace after mass government rationing caused illness and other issues. government subsidies of milk and cheese are a big part of this.
• Pricing between sizes also plays a large part in portions by casting larger sizes as “bargains”
• 8-hour work days expanding, with parents being forced to take a second and third shift to take care of kids, therefore having no time to cook and instead resorting to fast food.
• Childhood hunger becoming epidemic as worldwide poverty grows. Metabolism cycles are altered when food access is unstable.
• Disabilities, injuries, and illnesses which either cause weight gain/retention or prevent exercise (often both) going untreated or undertreated thanks to our astronomically expensive for-profit medical system (in the U.S.).
• Medications prescribed to prevent and treat those disabilities, injuries and illness when proper medical care is accessible.
• Inherited genetic traits should be number one. Twin studies have shown weight is as heritable as height — 80% — i.e. 80% of weight variation is determined by your genes.These can be genes for things like:
  • how your body processes fat/carbs/protein
  • the speed/efficiency of your metabolism
  • how easily you store fat
  • how easily you convert it back to energy when required
  • and about a thousand other things that affect how you gain, store and lose weight.

Almost every message to TITP recieved in refutation is made on the basis of fat people being in the moral wrong because “just lose weight”.

Obviously this list is not exhaustive. The second half was added by me on the basis of commentary made in replies and reblogs to the original post

-Fatanarchy

• Tags
• faq
• morality
• responsibility
• fat discrimination
• fat acceptance
• Size Acceptance
• health
• haes
• healthism
• sizism
• fat hate
• just lose weight
• dieting
• cr
• accountability