Dear “Skinny” Girls,
Because when I said, “Although I think you’ll want to reassess what your female character weighs. Supermodels may weigh 125 lbs at 5’8″, but that isn’t going to necessarily be healthy for most women.” What I REALLY meant to say was “FUCK ALL YOU SKINNY BITCHEZ!!!!”
I try very hard to avoid bashing you guys. Having had a couple of friends myself who looked “unhealthily thin” while eating every calorie in a five mile radius due to hummingbird metabolisms, I understand that it sucks when people accuse you of shit like being anorexic.
Kind of like when people accuse fat people of eating all the time and never exercising.
Now, I didn’t always try to avoid thin-bashing, and I’m sure if you look far enough back in my personal LJ, you’ll find shit I said that I shouldn’t have. And if I were a complete coward I’d delete those entries and try to pretend I never said it.*
But I’m not a complete coward, or I’m too lazy to go sifting back through more than ten years of entrIes. You decide.
That said, I would appreciate it, when I couch things about women’s bodies in terms of “not necessarily” or “for many women” you didn’t assume, “ZOMG! SHE’S BASHING ME BECAUSE SHE’S AN EVIL FAT BITCH AND SHE’S JEALOUS ELEVENTY THOUSAND PEE PANTS!!!!!!!!!”
When I say things like “for many women” and “not necessarily” what I am doing is saying that “Yes, many women in our society feel pressured to diet and engage in unhealthy eating and exercise practices in order to conform to an unrealistic beauty ideal, not all, but many.”
And if I am not talking about you, for instance if you don’t diet or exercise compulsively, then I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU!!!!
There’s a brilliant quote I’ve heard repeated frequently, often at Pandagon.net: If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.
I would like to add: Quit trying to make it about you.
Although, I will say that seeing the way you guys react to what I’ve said makes me think that when you’re fat-bashing and I say, “Hey, what the hell?” and get a round of, “Oh, we don’t mean YOU!” that you actually very much DO mean me. This would explain why when I use qualifiers, you don’t actually believe I mean them.
*Thin bashing seems to be a larval stage of body acceptance for fat women. After we decide that we’re tired of killing ourselves, we develop a loathing for those who appear to still be engaging in what we see as harmful behavior. Most of us grow out of it. Not all.
This entry originally posted at http://polimicks.dreamwidth.org/
9 comments on “Dear “Skinny” Girls,”
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Polimicks 
It may just be me, but a lot of the rhetoric on this topic feels ever so slightly like complaints about reverse racism/sexism/etc.
Yes, it’s true that a lot of naturally slender women get shit for their bodies. It’s true because women, period, get shit for our bodies no matter what they look like.
But let’s not pretend that there aren’t truckloads of social perks for being slender–even extremely so–as opposed to being fat. It’s certainly rotten that people assume eating disorders when they see a given slender woman, but that’s simply not the same problem as being more likely to face serious job and healthcare discrimination because of what number is on the tags in your clothes.
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Yup.
Now I’m not going to so far as some and ask thin women to quit saying they’re fat or having “fat days” like some bloggers have, because if they feel fat, I’m not going to tell them their feelings are wrong.
I am, however, going to ask them to quit assuming attacks and subtext that simply aren’t fucking there.
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I don’t get too angry with slender people who talk about feeling fat. What I do get angry about is if they talk about it in really negative terms. I’ve had to unfriend people who couldn’t stop going on about how “bad” they were for having a piece of pie, or how “gross” they felt because they’d gained two pounds. It doesn’t matter that they’re only talking about themselves or their own bodies; it still contributes to the overall message that body fat is inherently evil, and therefore people who have a lot of it are evil, too.
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Yeah, I find myself rolling my eyes at co-workers more often than I’d like because of that crap.
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That first comment sounded way more coherent inside my head.
Sigh
Long day, it’s my only defense.
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I guess I bypassed the larval stage because I grew up with my mother, who spent much of her adult life hating, then disliking (hey, at least she went down on the scale, LOL), thin women. She’d make snarky remarks about them while trying to BECOME one of them, and the disparity just hurt my brain too much.
I’m fat. That’s all there is to it. The only people I feel like justifying it to are my doctors, and we’ve already been around on this, so I know what they think and they know what I think. Everybody else can hang themselves about how fat I am or why. 😛
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Yeah, some people do bypass it. I wish I had, because I know I said some pretty vile shit in the past.
This does not mean that I still get pretty cheesed off, when in a thread about the difficulty in finding plus-size clothes that are stylish and don’t cost the gross national product of a small island nation skinny girls come in to bitch about, “Oh, I know exactly what you mean, I’m a size four and…”
Gah. Really? Because 4s I can find. In pretty much every store except Avenue and Lane Bryant. 20s, not so much.
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HA! I love the “if it’s not about you ..” quote. A must add to my basket of sayings.
and let’s add “And even if it is about you, it doesn’t mean I want to be you.”
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Thank you.
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