We Need to Start a Dialogue On the Way We Talk About Fat
Fatphobia was always a problem, but now craziness is coming from well-meaning people on the left.
I’m fat. This is a statement of fact. I have two chins. My breasts, were they not hairy, are perky enough to cause jealousy with some women. I have a big ol’ belly that shakes when I see tweets such as these:
And my thighs are, in a word, thunderous. There’s no mistaking it, no hiding it, no euphemizing it. I’m both weirdly okay with it, because I’m not so big that I can’t move around easily, but I’m also not okay with it because I have a hard time finding clothes that fit. I’m in, what one might call, a devil’s area, where the regular-sized clothes don’t come up to my size, but big and tall clothes are more plentiful in much larger sizes. Given that big and tall clothing generally is more expensive than regular size, slimming down is probably the play here.
If you believe some well-meaning but myopic people in social justice spaces, the desire to slim down inherently is fatphobic. Someone on Twitter this past Monday asserted that telling someone that they looked good after slimming down is insulting, because they would have looked good even at their heaviest. She received such backlash that she locked her account, and while I don’t think her sentiment is completely on point, again, she’s well-meaning. I know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but there are times when you need to weed out the genuinely naïve from the concern trolls.
The issue at heart here isn’t that fatphobia isn’t real or that slimmer people don’t look better than fatter people. Fatphobia is real, and body mass has absolutely nothing to do with how people look. It’s about commenting on someone’s body and the appropriate times one should do it. The appropriate time to comment on someone’s weight is when you know they’re trying to lose weight and they’re successful at it, or they’re trying to gain weight and they’re successful at it. In some ways, telling someone “they look great” when they’ve lost weight when you don’t know their circumstances is an asinine thing to say, if only because people tend to make that their first priority when they see someone.
I know that when I dropped all the weight I did from my thyroid, the “you look great!” exclamations I got from people didn’t feel all that heartwarming, mainly because I had a gland that had gone berserk and put my health at risk. I don’t necessarily begrudge people for having that reaction because at some point between the Renaissance and now, back when fatness was seen as good because you could afford to eat better than gruel and hardtack, Western society at large switched up from “fat is good” to “skinny is good.” It’s hard to deprogram people, especially when the medical community has institutional fatphobia baked into its DNA.
Odds are, if you’ve been to a doctor’s office in the last forever, you’ve been told to lose weight unless you’re one of those people who has been blessed with immaculate metabolism and the drive to exercise regularly. All kinds of health problems get blamed on weight, but more and more, people are finding out that you can be fat and healthy, and that diagnoses of being too fat were covering up actual, medically significant diagnoses of things like cysts or tumors. This misapplication of blame on fatness opens up a lot of socially acceptable mockery, either outright or as thinly veiled concerned trolling, where the scorn is dressed up as care for people. Making fun of fat people is for their own good, you see.
Fatphobia feels like it’s the last socially acceptable phobia because being fat isn’t like being gay or Black or even trans. As much some medical conditions can make weight loss or gain difficult, the ebb and flow of body weight is seen as something to be controlled. Again, no one wears their medical history on their sleeve, so if you have a thyroid condition opposite to the one I have, no one knows that just by looking at you. So people assume.
However, there has been an entire movement of people who are in the fat-shamer demographic who have screamed “MY BODY, MY CHOICE” when it comes to wearing a mask or taking a vaccine that would help curb a global pandemic. One might think that it’d be my choice if I wanted to carry around 50 extra pounds for whatever reason, but the thing about people who co-opt slogans from people to the left of them is they rarely do it in good faith. But “My body, my choice” is a familiar pro-abortion rallying cry as well, and people from the left should take that cry as universal when looking at things from the other side.
You can recognize that society puts a lot of pressure on people to be thin without stigmatizing the work that people do shed fat for legitimate reasons. Just as if someone wants to be fat, it’s their right to be so, if someone wants to be muscular or skinny or to be not as fat as they were, that’s in their right too. They have reasons, whatever they are. A person loving themselves and their body doesn’t just work in one extreme either way, and quite frankly, the fact that a person’s body image has become a talking point in either direction is a sign of a society that doesn’t know when to mind their own fucking business.
Policing fatphobia isn’t pointing out instances of it in innocuous cases. It is first changing your own outlook on food, exercise, body image, and science itself. It’s stopping yourself from equating eating a lot with being fat or not making snide comments because a kid’s shirt doesn’t fit over his belly. The West has a lot of work that it needs to do in order to destigmatize fatness, because fatness isn’t a disease of the wealthy and powerful anymore. It’s not necessarily a disease at all.
The best thing you can do for someone is to support them in what they do. The second best thing would be for you to mind your own business if they haven’t shared with you the details of why they’re fat or skinny as a rail or whatever. If that sounds harsh to you, welcome to my life. I’ve been getting nothing but shit my whole life for being overweight, and I’m not about to start allowing people from the other side give me shit for trying to play the hand I’ve been dealt. I already have anxiety issues anyway over things not even related to my weight. This country, this world is out of control with the way it talks about body image, and I fear it’s only going to get worse since we cannot have a conversation about literally anything wanting to tear each other’s throats out. I just don’t want fat people, a group that has suffered psychologically in ways that have probably not even begun to have been explored, to have to suffer any more, even if it’s from people who mean well.