On Fatphobia: “Shut Up You Square-@ss Whale-Face!”

The title above is something I was told long ago at school by a classmate (and even the teacher laughed). What many often ignore, is that those words are unforgettable (in every possible bad way).

I took some notes on Candace Lowry’s photos on 18 Women Respond To The First Mean Thing Someone Said About Their Bodies: 10 were insulted with something related to their weight, out of which 3 had to do with being thin. And life was only getting started for them.

This one makes a particularly important point: As a young fat person, you learn quick enough that you’ll have to stand out for your personality, because your body is too awfully noticeable for everyone and you’ll be dragged down just because of how others perceive it.

Furthermore, bodies are never in a constant immutable state, and they will keep changing as we go through life.

“Fat people make up excuses”

Excuses for what? For commiting the crime of existing and having a body weight you think is worthy of shaming? And having to justify it to… you? Who do you think you are?

Haley Morris-Cafiero is currently working on a photo project called Wait Watchers, in which she exposes public reactions to her mere existence as a fat woman while doing random normal things on the streets. What’s the excuse of those people?

Fat men don’t get it nearly as tough as fat women, and this is directly connected with the (patriarchal) idea of women having the duty of being constant sexual desire objects for cishet men. When a woman is not considered the sexy virgin she’s expected to be and look like, she’s attacked as if she were a demon that shouldn’t exist.

“But… but… thinphobia is real!”

No, it’s not. Thinphobia is to fatphobia what misandry is to misogyny.

Just as I previously stated, some may have it worse than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s the oppression olympics. This is not a competition.

However, when you’re not socially considered fat:

1. You don’t lose job opportunities just because the potential employers make the presumption that you’re mentally and emotionally unstable.
2. Your capabilities are not questioned because of your weight.
3. Groups of people will not gather together anywhere to discuss how much they hate bodies like yours.
4. Your opinion is not automatically considered invalid because of your weight.
5. Most films have casts in which the majority of their bodies look a lot like yours.
6. Most videogames characters look a lot like you, too.
7. Most pop stars also have bodies that resemble yours (and they’re also pressured to meet impossible physical standards, such as eternal youth, so the media has to resort to tools like Photoshop).
8. Even if you’re so thin that you have to buy clothes at kids’ stores, you don’t pay extra for horrible designs and awful fabrics.
• You also don’t have to purchase those clothes from the other corner of the world, either.
9. Photos of bodies like yours don’t usually appear with a huge “before” sign in magazines, as something that must be compared and changed because of how terrible it’s considered to be.
10. If you get sick of something completely unrelated to your weight, you won’t be told to change it as if it would magically cure you (including mental illnesses).
11. People don’t stop walking on the streets just to stare at you with disgust.
12. People don’t assume that you’re lazy, dirty, sweaty, and smelly.
13. People don’t presume that you won’t live long and/or that you have high cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes.
14. If you were sexually assaulted, noone would think you should feel “thankful” for it, or that you must be lying because they assume noone would want to rape you (this is also connected with the ignorant idea that rape is about sex or pleasure, when it’s actually about power and submission).

What can you do?

Here’s the easy part, because I, and I bet more fat people too, got tired of losing weight just so we wouldn’t be bothered and people would consider us human.

• A person is not a body.
• Realize that people are not defined by their bodies.
• You can’t tell someone’s health just by looking at them.
• Their bodies, their business.
• Don’t be a jerk. There’s no excuse for it.

Cover photo: Precious (Lionsgate/Lee Daniels Entertainment/Smokewood Entertainment Group).