The
struggles of the fat may be difficult to imagine for a person who can
shop for clothing in virtually any store; who can eat dinner in a
restaurant without being frowned upon; who can jog down a street without
being ridiculed.
While millions of thin Americans wallow
in a variety of unwholesome personal habits, it is the big person who is
set apart and publicly reviled for her “lack of discipline” and her
presumably self-destructive health habits. Also making life for the fat
more difficult are again, media portrayals: constantly presenting fat
people as physically unattractive and physically undesirable. Nearly
every television show provides evidence of the “perfection” of thinness.
Sensuality has become synonymous with showing skin—as long as you don’t
have that much skin. The elite have the privilege of watching
innumerable actors proportioned much like themselves live out a variety
of romantic storylines: there hardly exists a lead character without a
love interest. It is an extremely rare occasion, however, when a fat
actor finds his or her character an object of attraction. Fat is
portrayed in the media as the virtual antithesis of beauty: fat people
are portrayed as slobs.
“Yes,” the fat oppressor says to
himself, “I realize that it probably isn’t nice to make fun of fat
people, but they’re just so unhealthy, lazy, dirty, greedy, and so on.”
Rationalization characterizes the excuses that the bigot makes in order
to justify his mistreatment of the fat. Eventually, these hateful ideas
work their way into the cultural consciousness until they’re things that
people “just know.” The accuracy of the beliefs is not longer
questioned and the notion is no longer judged, but simply acted upon.
Mimi Nichter, in her book Fat Talk: what girls and their parents say
about dieting, quotes a high-schooler making a typical statement of
rationalization: “‘I have no respect for her,’” she says about an
overweight classmate, “‘She has no respect for herself’”.
The rationalization of fat hatred takes
the blame off of the oppressors and places it back onto the victim. The
victim, unfortunately, often comes to believe that she does, in fact,
deserve the blame for other’s feelings of hatred for her. The
rationalized reasons for hatred of the fat woman are endless.
Stereotypically she’s sloppy, lazy, greedy, stupid, gross, clumsy,
sweaty, smelly, antisocial, self-indulgent, hostile, loud, sarcastic
and insensitive to the point of delusion. With all these marks against
them, it’s a wonder that fat people find the strength to carry on at
all.
Resistance to oppression marks one of
the first steps in the ending of oppression, as lofty as that sounds.
Organizations like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
(NAAFA) and the International Size Acceptance Association (ISAA), are
working to raise awareness about fat oppression as well as magazines
such as Dimensions, Radiance, and Mode Magazine, which feature articles
directed at the fat individuals and fashion spreads featuring larger
models.
“[We] could be the first to break the
equation linking body weight to moral or psychological status, to judge
clients and neighbors for who they are and not for what they weight, to
examine [our] own attitudes toward people who are overweight and to work
to overcome negative stereotypes”. -Cassell
