Advocating for Fat Acceptance

While I appreciated Susan Bordo’s take on eating disorders, the media, body image and its effects on women, I believe she did not address a large majority of women, fat women. They too are affected by society’s demands of the “perfect” body. However, fat women are quite frequently left out of the conversation. It is unfortunate that fat women are not seen as worthy of any positive attention and as fat people are often portrayed as the very thing that all people should strive to avoid. I’d like to bring attention to this topic because as a fat woman I am both highly visible and invisible at the same time. I am large and I take up more space than a non-fat person and as such I am aware that my fatness makes others uncomfortable. I embody that which America and much of the world has been told to hate. To many I am disgusting, ugly, and unhealthy, among other things. Society has such narrow and impossible standards of beauty that most average women can’t physically attain. As a member of the fat community, I am further away from attaining any of those standards and instead am encouraged to cover up, to hide my body under layers of unflattering clothing, and to become invisible, so as to not make any normal sized people uneasy.

It is unfortunate that in our society people are taught that to be fat is the worst thing you can possibly be. This kind of belief is what generates a lot of the stigma, discrimination and hate towards fat people, especially women. What is even more alarming is that people who discriminate against fat people have found a way to justify their hate, through the battle against obesity. People like me are part of the obesity epidemic and must be cured for the good of the human race. But the reality is that a majority of women in the US are not thin at all, I’ve read in several articles that the average American woman is a size 14. Yet we can’t walk into department stores without feeling shame or guilt at not finding clothes in our size, because most department stores do not carry sizes larger than a 12. This means a large percentage of women are technically “obese”. However it seems ridiculous that society does not cater to or support fat women when there is a large population of these women. Instead it vilifies them and treats them as sub-human, unworthy of any dignity.

We see it in the news almost everyday, obese women, portrayed as headless fatties. Rarely are we portrayed as a full person, with our heads fully visible, and any other information about us other than our fatness. Fat women are not seen in the context of their careers, their contributions to society, or hardworking. Despite the many qualities that a fat woman may have society refuses to acknowledge her. The only way society will become invested in a fat woman is if she decides to lose weight. Only then can she be attributed some worth.

It has taken me a very long time to accept myself as a fat woman. But I refuse to base my self-esteem on whether or not I meet a cultural stereotype of beauty. As a fat woman, I too am deserving of the space my body takes up and of respect from others. I do not believe that shaming fat women will make them go away or “help” them. There needs to be greater movement for acceptance of people of all sizes and greater respect for the different ways that people live their lives. As a society we need to stop correlating people’s worth to their body size.