At a time when we're increasingly sensitive about insulting other minorities, fat people are still fair game.
In the real world (our world) it seems that it's OK to discriminate against the fat (even though we are told that "discrimination is now illegal - oh, yes? just who is kidding who?)
Studies in USA, Europe and Australia have found that fat people earn less money than others. They are less likely to be hired or promoted. They routinely face ridicule from their doctors and health facilitators (still!)
We've invested weight with so many meanings
that numbers on the scale have become a shorthand for self-worth.
that numbers on the scale have become a shorthand for self-worth.
We're told that:
"slenderness is not just beautiful - it proclaims that you;re feminine, self-disciplined, well-adjusted and sexy" "fat, on the other hand, reveals that you're sloppy and self-indulgent, out of control and out of the running as a sexual being"
It's a disastrous combination. Our ideal of thinness is unrealistic for most of the population, yet we all buy the idea that there's something seriously wrong with us if we deviate from it.
There is however, another value that we attach to overweight that may be even more powerful than a sense of sin. We see fat as "low-class". Our culture equates slenderness with sexiness and even intelligence.
And who, in the main, keeps this body myth alive? Women, yes women. There seems to be a clear connection between the gains women have made in the outside world - bringing confusing and conflicting choices about roles - and our growing hysteria about our own bodies. It's as if keeping the body on a tight rein, or not letting our lapses show, is a way of re-assuring ourselves and the world that our desires aren't voracious, that our needs aren't bottomless, that despite our own uncertainty, we are in control.
However, it's not enough to understand this obsession intellectually. The battle for self acceptance involved unlearning a lot of entrenched ideas. It also involves a lot of pain.
If you've spent most of your life starving yourself without success, it hurts to recognise that all that deprivation was a waste.
That's why a lot of women cling to the promise that thin equals happy. In many cases they want dieting to be a magical way of becoming another person.
It takes great courage to accept yourself in a world that values thinness above all else. The miracle is, that some people manage it.
You can too. If that's really what you want to do.
"slenderness is not just beautiful - it proclaims that you;re feminine, self-disciplined, well-adjusted and sexy" "fat, on the other hand, reveals that you're sloppy and self-indulgent, out of control and out of the running as a sexual being"
It's a disastrous combination. Our ideal of thinness is unrealistic for most of the population, yet we all buy the idea that there's something seriously wrong with us if we deviate from it.
There is however, another value that we attach to overweight that may be even more powerful than a sense of sin. We see fat as "low-class". Our culture equates slenderness with sexiness and even intelligence.
And who, in the main, keeps this body myth alive? Women, yes women. There seems to be a clear connection between the gains women have made in the outside world - bringing confusing and conflicting choices about roles - and our growing hysteria about our own bodies. It's as if keeping the body on a tight rein, or not letting our lapses show, is a way of re-assuring ourselves and the world that our desires aren't voracious, that our needs aren't bottomless, that despite our own uncertainty, we are in control.
However, it's not enough to understand this obsession intellectually. The battle for self acceptance involved unlearning a lot of entrenched ideas. It also involves a lot of pain.
If you've spent most of your life starving yourself without success, it hurts to recognise that all that deprivation was a waste.
That's why a lot of women cling to the promise that thin equals happy. In many cases they want dieting to be a magical way of becoming another person.
It takes great courage to accept yourself in a world that values thinness above all else. The miracle is, that some people manage it.
You can too. If that's really what you want to do.
© Rose Davida, UK
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