This week (lol it turned out to be two weeks), I’m doing a series of posts about privilege. By privilege, I mean the rights I enjoy as being part of a dominant group subject to certain attributes. Because of my privileges I have rarely if ever suffered oppression or discrimination, because my group has the power to subjugate others. For information on how discrimination against me differs from that against marginalised people, I suggest my post ‘Not Reverse Discrimination’.
Sugaredvenom showed in this post how Google’s autocomplete function reflects societal attitudes to fatphobia and sizeist issues. The results were fat people ‘jokes’, ‘falling over’ and ‘eating’. In another search it was revealed that fat people are considered ‘lazy’, ‘gross’, ‘a burden on society’ and ‘useless’.
It is also considered that they ‘should be killed’.
The results for thin people are unsurprisingly more pleasant. Their ‘eating habits’ and ‘secrets’ are sought and it is questioned why they ‘live longer’. The grim spectre of fatphobia still lingers, with those searching for thin people with stretch marks or diabetes. These seem to be a mixture of fat people trying to prove diabetes is not necessarily weight-related, and those trying to prove to themselves that if they did lose weight and become our standard of beauty, that stretch marks wouln’t be their downfall.
If I pick up a magazine or watch T.V. I will see bodies that look like mine that aren’t being lampooned, desexualized, or used to signify laziness, ignorance, or lack of self-control. I can go home from meetings, classes, and conversations and not feel excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped, or feared because of the size of my body.
The Thin Privilege Checklist by Fatshadow is a list of the ways in which thin people enjoy freedom and security. Many responses to its original posting were denying this privilege, because body image issues are universal. This is true. But why are they universal? Because fatness is seen as not only avoidable but abhorrent. 50-70% of normal weight women believe themselves to be overweight. As a result, their body image issues don’t arise from being fat, but from society’s fatphobia.
Of course there are thin people who feel they need to gain weight. But this is the result of us seeing a norm as the impossibly elusive ‘curvy’ figure. Basically, having a very narrow view of beauty is the cause of body image issues (leaving out individual traumatic experiences which cause eating disorders). But thin privilege goes very deep to normalise those under a certain weight.
In my post on Fat Shame, and the general misconceptions that surround people of different body shapes, I talked about how we react to fat people as if their bodies were a topic of discussion. They are used as archetypes of laziness in the media, inspirations for weight loss (‘I never want to get that bad’), they are seen as the ‘other’ with thin people as the ‘norm’, and they can find it difficult to get work because of their size. It is limiting, it is reductive, and it is rude that our society has expected standards. Despite the conventional wisdom, fatness is not an indicator of ill health, just as ‘normal’ weight is not an indicator of health.
I know that my weight will never be a barrier to me, an issue to be discussed, and will always approximate the images shown in magazines and on TV. I know that my size will never bar me from getting a job involving physical work, despite the fact that I am not exactly healthy or athletic.
I will not go through every day thinking that the way I look is unattractive and that it’s my fault. I will not be advised to do more exercise or eat more healthily, despite the fact that these are things to do, as a result of my privilege.
I recognise my thin privilege, and seek to reduce its impact on others.
AT SOME POINT: Western middle-class privilege.
:)
People with unexamined thin privilege shouldn’t be our leaders in the area of ‘body image’. It’s not such a difficult concept, people; grasp it!
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mymilkspilt: sugaredvenom: i-am-the-lighthouse: This week (lol it turned out to be two weeks),...
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