I wish feminists understood how fat womens existence is treated and that all the sexual assault and harassment is thrown towards us just as much as any other woman, it is done in the most fat fetishy way and is exactly why yall cannot recognize when fat women are being sexually humiliated or even fully violated. 1. Yall think any attention we receive is a blessing and 2. You equate sexual violation with sexual attraction instead of seeing sexual harassment and abuse for what it is, power and domination.
To men, fat women living and existing as such is porn to them. Once a woman is fatter than most she becomes nothing but an object. Shes the object of fear and disgust for women and shes the object of sexual humiliation/abuse for men. Realllyyyyy wish these things were talked about among women as much as other things are talked about.
big thanks to @jaehyurb! ty moot for opening up this conversation, it doesn’t get talked about enough in these circles.
Ok, so! I grew up consuming horrific amounts of media. If it’s a show or movie, I have probably seen it. Throughout all my watch time, I started to notice a trend in how media, particularly American media, portrays fat women vs fat men.
There are so many popular classic TV shows starring fat men. The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Sopranos, Spongebob Squarepants, The King of Queens, Modern Family, Cheers, Drake and Josh, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and many more. Movies too.
While men in these shows were made fun of for their weight, it never overshadowed other aspects of their personality. For example, Tony Soprano. In the show, Tony gets made fun of for his weight by his colleagues a lot. However, there have been multiple instances where Tony responded with physical aggression in response to being called fat. Times where Tony responds negatively to others over comments about his weight are usually taken seriously by both the show and its audience. His fatness usually never takes precedence over his mobster nature, oftentimes his fatness compliments his character and allows us to see a more human aspect of a relatively rough person.
On the flip side, fat women in media are rarely portrayed and when they are, it’s mandatory for them to constantly apologize for their weight, looking for some way to lose weight, feeling constant shame, or obsessing about their weight one way or another.
I can’t name 5-10 shows starring fat women. Roles where fat women aren’t being constantly berated are even less prevalent. The only somewhat positive movie that comes to mind is Hairspray, and even in that, conversations about the main female character’s weight takes up a fair portion of dialogue. Hell, the main characters mother is also fat, and a majority of her dialogue is about how she’s ashamed of being fat and dumpy and therefore, “unloveable”.
This showed me (and probably other young fat girls) from a young age that fatness in men is tolerable and even lovable, but fatness in women makes you irredeemably subhuman. Like a lot of ideas from media, this view has been proliferated heavily in the real world, warping society’s views and treatment of fat women.
Reading feminist literature has helped me understand the root causes of this disparity is the relationship between women and beauty. Be amicable and be beautiful, the world says, for that’s the only measure of worth for a woman. If you aren’t either of these things as a woman (i.e. being fat) it is socially acceptable (and encouraged) to treat you like pond scum.
If we as radical feminists want to address the destructive nature beauty culture has on women, we must address fat women as a class and how that class is treated much worse in comparison to other similar groups, solely because they are deemed more “unattractive”. Even if you feel some way towards fat women or fatness in general, you cannot deny that this dynamic is very lopsided, with most vitriolic comments about fatness being directed towards fat women.
Like put aside your disdain towards fatness for ONE ☝️ second and realize how fatphobia (with a lot of misogyny mixed in) absolutely destroys women and our solidarity. If we can’t fight against these ideas without putting down fat women, we are never going to dismantle the hegemony of beauty that entraps all women.
I’d like to write more about this, if anyone wants to see that just lmk and I’ll keep going lol
Thank you for reading and I hope you’re having a good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you are.
