Dear Skinny People,
Hello, it’s me. A fat girl. I have a very large (pun possibly intended) bone to pick with you. Back in November, it was reported that some women riding London’s subway were given cards calling the women fat, among other hateful things. While anyone with half a brain and a grain of compassion in their bodies can see that’s a horrible thing, I was struck by why these men seemingly needed to tell women they were fat. This is something that has happened to me and many other fat women a lot and I don’t really get it.
Twitter
Why, skinny people, do you feel the need to inform us fat people that we are indeed fat? What do you get out of it? Do you really believe we have no idea? Do you think you’re the first person ever to tell us we’re fat? How exactly do you think this conversation will go?
Just me being a fat girl doing fat girl things.
“Hey, um, I don’t know if you knew but you’re fat.”
“WHAT?! ARE YOU SURE?! I HAD NO IDEA! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR INFORMING ME OF THIS BRAND NEW INFORMATION THAT NO ONE HAS EVER TOLD ME BEFORE!”
Yeah… That’s not gonna happen. You see, fat people (fat women especially) are told we are fat almost every single day of our lives. We get told this by skinny people, average sized people, hell even other fat people. In this particular case, it seems like the hatred of fatness collided with misogyny to create this useless group and these hateful little cards. In the end, their message towards these women was “I don’t find you sexually attractive, so you need to change and make yourself sexually attractive to me.”
Groups like this with their shitty little cards are not outliers. They are, essentially, the norm. While, no, fat women aren’t given flyers informing us of our fatness every time we walk out the door, we do get informed of it implicitly and explicitly every day.
We get the message that we’re fat and unwanted when the plus-size section in the store consists of three racks of clothing squeezed between clearance and maternity. We get the message when the plus size section only goes up to a XXL. We get the message when the plus size stores refuse to use models our size and shape and they only carry our size online. We get the message every time we see your dirty looks as we order or eat food in public.
You see, what that group didn’t realize was they didn’t need to hand out cards telling women how fat they were. They already knew. They had probably already gotten the message twenty times before they boarded those trains. Being handed a card telling them that they were a disease upon the planet because of their size was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So skinny people, please have some type of compassion for us fat folks. We are humans too and we deserve respect. We are not a disease. We are not a danger to the environment. We are not a burden upon you or anyone else. We are not a blight upon the earth that must be eradicated. We are people. We are human and we’d like to be treated as such.
Sincerely,
A Proud Fat Woman
This post originally appeared on Medium.
image via Pixabay
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