Thin privilege is your body type being the default avatar in video games and on websites because it’d be too hard to make a bunch of different body sizes, and then naturally when body diversity isn’t an easy thing to do, it seems only the natural choice that you make your avatars thin.
I’ve seen the argument made a thousand times on dress up game sites, and in video games that it’d be too difficult to redo the programming or whatever to fit a bunch of different body sizes and types (sounds a lot like the real life argument “well, it’s expensive to make clothes to fit bigger bodies, so naturally they cost more and they’re harder to find”, doesn’t it?), and for a long time it made a lot of sense to me. Yeah, that does sound hard, and it’s not my area of expertise, so who am I to say someone should make a dozen different avatar options for their games because I’m sure it’s easier to go with just one or two basic molds, because then you don’t have to re-size everything.
But it just hit me now… they don’t HAVE to pick a thin girl every time. They could go with someone chubby, or hell, even plain FAT, and that could be their basic mold, they could design everything to fit HER, that one size avatar, and you could have thin girls crying out for some representation. “But why can’t we have more size choices? I don’t want to be a FAT GIRL.” But it’s never like that. It’s always the one skinny girl, and maybe an “average” size dude, who you can pick for your body size, maybe at best you can customize your facial features and hair, but your body in these games is always skinny, and other people will tell you it’s because it’s “too hard” to offer choices. Well, you know what, fuck that. Until I see a game out there where the only option is to be a fat girl, and I don’t see ANY skinny girls whining about their lack of representation in that game, which I know would be bound to happen, fuck that. If the sims can pull it off, even if arguably poorly, I expect other game developers to figure it out, too.
But excuse my rambling.
You see what brought these thoughts about for me is that I was looking to buy a video game that I’m pretty sure I’ll like. (I played it’s predecessor on the DS and was genuinely surprised how much fun I had, and this is I guess a sort of “sequel”, for lack of a better term, on the 3DS. And I was browsing reviews on Amazon in anticipation, wondering what new features it had and I came across this review, which I thought was an amazing and detailed, not to mention, much needed review of this type of game, because this is likely the kind of game parents would buy for children without a second thought and even in supervising them would likely not really notice what their child might be getting out of such a game since it’s not violent or anything, but children do pick up on the types of messages this game might be sending, and this person was clearly very educated on how children learn and absorb these messages.
Instead of people accepting it was a highly intelligent and detailed review that was likely much needed for any parents looking to buy the game for their children, what happened was people totally missed the fucking point.
The first two comments (ignoring the one which was deleted which was deleted by amazon, because I don’t even know what you have to do to get a comment delete by amazon) brush it off stating “it’s just a game”.
It goes all the way to last comment so far on the review which I felt I needed to screenshot, just in case it’s removed or something, though I doubt it will be.
“And I don’t think its.. Bad for young girls to see only skinny models. What’s better? Obesity or thinness?”
Well, one, I love how in that statement fat people are pathologized, but thin is just thin. Not underweight, emaciated, nothing that treats them like a disease or something inherently unhealthy, but just a word. Fat people can’t just be fat, we have to be a DISEASE which will infect and kill our children. So which sounds better when you put it like that? Well, it’s a little unfair? Two, which is better? Neither inherently. And thinking it’s REALLY not bad for children to grow up seeing ONLY skinny models, is a terrible idea for anyone to have. I shudder to think what kind of issues this person must have with their body and themselves and with OTHER PEOPLE.
People need to grow up seeing all sorts of people, because a person is going to grow up and have the body their going to have. And it may not look like the “skinny models” they’ve been limited to seeing by people who think one type of body is inherently better than another. And that feels bad when your body doesn’t look like you’ve been made to feel it SHOULD.
It really shouldn’t be that hard. I know to a lot of people, it might be easier to accept their bodies if they could play people like themselves in video games, and it would just be more FUN to play someone who looks like you do. It’d be nice if it wasn’t always an issue being brushed off as “well, it would take so much more effort and so people just DON’T make more body size options”. It’d be nice if someone someday made a game where the default options for your avatar was fat, and when skinny people complained we’d get to say for once “well, you know, it’d just be too much EFFORT, to make more options, so you’re stuck with being a fat character”. But it’s NEVER like that. It’s always the default skinny character, and it’s always so easy for people to say it’s too hard to make more options, but no one ever explains why the default character isn’t just fat in the first place, so at least for once we get a turn.
Except maybe their kind of “explaining” when they make comments that imply our bodies are inherently just worse than thin bodies, and there is NO damage that could EVER be done to a child from ONLY ever seeing one body type represented in media. But that’s not a real explanation. It’s just showing their bias.
