I have just finished three books within the past week. All of these books has extremely problematic views on fat bodies. All of them talked about getting fat, as it was the worst thing a person could do. All of them made food have morality in that they were good or bad. All of them talked about larger bodies with negative adjectives and assumptions.
If you are wondering why we have ingrained anti-fat bias, it is because it is permeated in everything that we consume from movies, TV, advertisement, books, and social media.
In stories where we are asked to suspend our belief of real and imagine made up people and places, writers have continued to use a narrative that is shaming and damning to fat bodies. As if even in a fictitious world, we are “beasts" that should not exist or should be feared.
All of it tells us, fat bodies are wrong.
All of it focused on women based characters consumed by the notion that fat is bad. Where male characters are given permission to be obsessed with food and the female counterparts are told to fear it, ostracize it and themselves, as if it is a personality trait.
Moreover, if I am being truly honest, in all of the 35 books I have read so far this year…. All of them had problematic views on bodies, zero of them have been about health, and a majority of them have been fiction.
If this doesn’t make you mad, you’re not paying enough attention to the programming that goes into hating your body and the misogynist message that continues to tell us women are inherently a failure, especially when they are fat.
As a heavy reader in my adolescence and early teens, I do not think I ever truly paid attention to the subliminal messages telling me that my body was wrong but I consumed it regardless, little microaggressions to internalize for later.
Anti-Fat bias is real and if you say it is not at this point it is willful ignorance.
Comments
Post a Comment