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Fat shaming is a feminist issue

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women's rights, eating issuesWomen’s Hour looked at an important under-reported issue recently: the public ‘fat shaming’ of women.

‘Fat shaming’, although hard to succinctly define, is exactly what it sounds like.

It is behaviour borne from the cultural assumption that being overweight is shameful and that it is therefore acceptable to mock, harass or belittle people because of their size.

Two bloggers, Karina and Bethany, spoke to BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey recently about public reactions to their bodies, and how this affects their lives.

Karina described the extent to which her life is restricted by the treatment she receives in public.

She explained how she rarely leaves the house because of cruel comments about her weight; people regularly shout abuse from cars or barge her in the street.

She also described a recent event in which a teenage girl walked up to her on the underground and went ‘oink’ in her face.

For any decent human being, it is hard to conceive of a world where this is allowed to happen.

But of course it does happen, in one form or another, everywhere.

From celebrity magazines to the Daily Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’, women’s bodies are scrutinised and mocked and journalistic vitriol is poured on any woman who deviates from a culturally constructed ‘acceptable’ size, even if they are pregnant.

For women like Karina, this is nowhere more apparent than on the street.

One of the most common misconceptions of street harassment is that it only happens to those who fit the paradigm of conventional female attractiveness.

The stereotypical image of the slim young woman passing a site full of leering builders has become entrenched in the psyche.

It may be difficult, then, for people to realise that the harassment women face in public is often about male entitlement, not ‘sexiness’.

It is also about a culture within which the policing of women’s bodies, and of their movement through public space, is normalised.

Some women have described fat shaming by men who, they believe, feel anger towards them for not fitting the sociocultural norm of the female body.

Women fat shame other women because our culture has made the female body public property.

Fat shaming is not entirely gender specific but both Karina and Bethany agreed that men are not subject to the same level of treatment in public.

Indeed, one recent study concluded that ‘women tend to bear the brunt of anti-fat prejudice’.

Women have been given space to share their experiences of harassment through the Everyday Sexism and Coventry Harassment Projects.

It would be interesting to know how many women do not view comments on their size through the spectrum of street harassment or gender discrimination because the comments do not – ostensibly – appear sexualised.

American photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero, a university professor and photographer, has recently completed a fascinating project entitled ‘Pictures of People who Mock Me’.

The photographs capture members of the public – unaware they have been caught on camera – reacting negatively to her body.

She described the project as ‘[taking] my power back’.

Susie Orbach wrote Fat is A Feminist Issue in 1978. Last year she wrote that ‘fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim’.

Some people are working to change this.

Bethany, for example, now runs the brilliant ‘fatshion’ blog archedeyebrow and describes herself as having ‘[reached] my full potential as a happy, confident fat person’.

  1. vicki wharton says:

    My 6 yr old daughter is already beginning to fear her body shape and is constantly looking for reassurance from sexist intimidation from both genders that focuses on the acceptable face of female. So many men and women plus boys and girls are constantly making negative and very often spiteful comments to little girls about the unacceptableness of their bodies in the same way that people used to make negative comments about black people’s skin colour, hair and lips. Disney, mens and women’s mags, and just about every TV programme, focuses on the fact that females have to look a particular way to be even acceptable in society – anything other than young, sexy and wafer thin puts you in enemy territory and subject to attack, both verbal and physical, from anyone around you that feels hatred towards you because of your size. I experienced this from a young girl whilst walking down the stairs at a tube station whilst 8 months pregnant. She physically nearly pushed me over whilst barging past me calling me a cunt for good measure. A number of other members of my ex’s family made ‘reassuring’ remarks about how it was normal to put on weight in pregnancy despite the fact I hadn’t mentioned my weight or called me huge as ‘banter’.

  2. Sinead connolly says:

    I was once told by a superior officer, whilst looking pointedly at my physique, that there was doubt ” over my fitness for promotion”.
    I was a SIZE FOURTEEN FFS. Only two tiny inches bigger than “skinny”.
    Since I’d NEVER failed my Navy fitness test , and DID get promoted, nothing more was said.
    But I STILL rage.
    I’d spent the first ten years of my naval career battling an eating disorder and being a size six. I stopped fighting, became comfortable in my skin, and reached a stable size twelve.
    Then I had a baby.
    It was the baby weight, apparently, that made me I less effective NCO.
    Years later, a subordinate used my weight, amongst other things, to undermine me and spread rumours.
    She was conventionally skinny and sleeping with the boss to gain favour.
    Which she never got, because foolishly, she was sleeping to gain something falsely promised.
    Something she felt entitled to, partly , because she was “thin” and ergo, better.
    In the. End, the silly woman was dismissed from the Navy , partly because of her attempts to bully her senior, namely me.
    People need to learn that such behaviour, even supposedly acceptable fat shaming, is bullying, pure and simple.
    And suffer the consequences, like she did,
    Me? I’m retired at 47, and my house payed for, because, though I’m still “fat”,I earned a nice little pension, through NOT being a bully.
    So still fat, with the last laugh!

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