Body terrorism isn’t real and no one wants fat people to kill themselves.
mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-12…
Except, those 2 statements are ignorant and factually incorrect. When society tolerates large parts of itself plus the media shaming, hazing, discriminating against, and ridiculing overweight people, that society is hardly any more advanced than one that arrests women for not covering their hair. Fat people, women especially, are being terrorized all their lives and smugly expected to hate themselves. Sometimes this terrorism is thinly veiled in “health concerns” not shown in similar harassing fashions to smokers and other way less healthy people, meaning it’s really just a fib as nobody can possibly be sincerely concerned with a stranger’s weight-related health if not with a smoker’s or an alcoholic’s – plus, concern isn’t voiced by ridicule and unsolicited, demoralizing commentary.
Unlike Iranian women who uncover their hair, fat women in the West may not be legally prosecuted or punished, but they are beaten and bullied as children, and shamed and ridiculed as adults, if not personally, then by blanket fat hate, and little is done about it other than victim-blaming: “So just stop being fat” or, while kinda hard to convince an impressionable child it’s possible to be lovable when everyone is violently hating you, “Nobody ever gonna love you if you don’t love yourself”, which is nonsense, because you can love yourself all you want and still be brutalized and no child sets out hating herself – self-hate is conditioned, not inherent. I don’t know of any fat girl/child who hated herself for being fat before getting repeatedly and meticulously bullied for it. Plus, me hating myself entitles no one else to attack me in any form or fashion.
Fat hate, and (mostly women’s) fear of fatness, is a huge contributing factor to body image issues, eating disorders, and depression leading to suicide. But since the hate continues and is tolerated in school, in professional settings, while shopping, pretty much everywhere and accepted as a thing of daily life, there isn’t much a fat person can do other than suffer to lose weight in order to stop suffering from being dehumanized by society (and usually failing, while not owing anyone thinness to begin with and being an equal, worthy human being at 500 lbs as much as at 80). And failing that, many kill themselves, and nothing changes, meaning society accepts it. Just look at the internet’s response to suicides. Pretty thin girl: poor thing, so young, so pretty, why? Fat person? Lots of victim blaming and posthumous belittling and diminishing the cruelty the person suffered leading up to the suicide. Shouldn’t have been so fat then. Fatty got their giant butt hurt. If the fat person’s suicide gets any attention at all.
Hand these cards to people of color, disabled people, anorexic or mentally ill people, the world would be up in arms. But since it’s “just” fat people who have no right to respect and dignity, as confirmed by entertainment media who mostly cast us as a source of comic relief or villainy, we’ll just have to torture ourselves to lose weight in order to be treated like equal human beings, right?
Weigh on me. 