a file I just found

[jeweledhibiscus]

A couple of weeks ago, I wound up watching Tyra Banks's show, and I made some notes about it. They are not particularly coherent and they're probably too blunt to really be polite, but here they are for kicks:

"Do you know how many things people could look at you right now and say?"
"Then they say it, they say 'em--"
"No, that's ugly! That's ugly

Comments

[stealthava]

Sorry, this is long; your post sparked a lot of thoughts about this. I'm always a little curious at the good-looking women who have such visceral disgust at seeing fat women. You'd think they'd be sort of spitefully happy about it; the more unattractive women there are, means that the attractive women would presumably have better odds of landing a man, since the pool of good-looking women is smaller but the number of men remains the same. Basically, if there's one hot girl surrounded by ugly girls, the hot girl would get all the men's attention and you would think that logically she would be happy about that, instead of bitching that the other girls are fat.

From a feminist perspective, women hating other women for not buying into the patriarchy's ideal of what a woman "should" look like, and ostracizing or degrading them because of it, means that those women have completely bought into the status quo. Who is a fat person hurting by being fat, exactly? Only their own health is at risk, so why worry about it? "She hurts my eyes!" is the usual jackass comeback, and that's the whole problem: the judgement against fat women is almost always on the grounds of their appearance. Their actual health and wellbeing are seldom considered. They don't fit what people want to see, so they're judged.

Anyways, on a politeness note, yes, it's obvious when someone is fat, but even though it is visually super-obvious, I still feel that it's rude to go up and call them "fat". Firstly, you have no idea /why/ they're fat. They could be lazy and greedy, which is the usual assumption. Or they could have a medical condition whose symptoms (or whose treatment's side-effects) cause weight gain. They could be poor and unable to afford any food except ramen or other cheap, processed foods, which cause weight gain. They could be heavily muscled, like this athlete (the middle one). If you saw her on the street, you'd dismiss her as obese... but she's an Olympic weightlifter who's in better shape than any of us and can lift 300lbs over her head.

Secondly, even if they are morbidly obese, and even if you somehow know that it really is because they simply eat too much, calling them out as fat still serves no useful purpose. Trust me, they know they're fat. Insulting them will not motivate them to lose weight. It just puts them down, and makes you look like an asshole. Calling somebody fat is pejorative, just like calling someone ugly or smelly. It's rude to say, even if it's true. You can think whatever you want about them, but you don't have to blurt out everything you think. Self-restraint is a good thing.