kiddotrue

Mood.

The Thinking Behind “Men Are Trash”

It’s come to my attention that men (and some women) don’t fully understand the power dynamics at play behind the phrase “men are trash.” That’s rather unfortunate, but not totally surprising. Here is my feeble attempt at educating those who truly don’t understand.

When (wrongly) comparing men saying “women are bitches” to women saying “men are trash”, you must consider the history behind both…

(Re)examining Fat Stigma through Black Women’s HistoryPosted on

April 1, 2017

by

Ava Purkiss

Through my research on black women’s exercise and fitness culture from 1900 to the 1930s, I discovered a little-known history of black fat shaming. While I expected to find that black women engaged in exercise for general health, I never imagined that some black women would craft their exercise programs for weight loss and at the same time participate in fat stigmatization. My surprise stemmed from common-sense assumptions about black people’s fat acceptance and flexible standards of beauty. Popular culture, academic studies on body image, and news outlets help to perpetuate these assumptions. R&B and Hip Hop is known for celebrating black women’s voluptuous bodies, including Drake who rapped famously he likes women “so thick that everybody else in the room is so uncomfortable.” Studies on self-assessed attractiveness often conclude that despite their higher Body Mass Indexes, black women have higher levels of body satisfaction compared to white women. More pointedly, a few years ago writer Alice Randal claimed in the New York Times “Black women are fat because we want to be.” While these examples speak to contemporary iterations of black fat acceptance, they obscure a longer history of intraracial black fat contempt. Historical evidence shows that black women did not accept fatness with open arms as some imagine. Black men were also critical of fatness and decried fat black women in the public sphere. Chronicling this history enables us to reconsider the popular and scholarly consensus about black body image and helps to peel back the layers of race, gender, class, and fat stigma that black women have wrestled with throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Advertisement for Weight-loss Products, The Chicago Defender, Nov. 28, 1925, p. 10

African Americans began to express fat disdain after the turn of the twentieth century, especially in the black press. Between 1904 and 1934, writers and health experts used the following terms to describe fat women in two of the most highly circulated black newspapers of the time: lazy, deranged, sluggish, mammy, out of style, abnormal, ugly, and a menace to good health. The press did not loosely attach these terms to fatness; they made them fundamentally constitutive of the fat body. In the 1910s, black newspapers advertised weight-loss products that presented a clear health-thinness-beauty triad. The New York Age often promoted the thirty day treatment for the weight-loss product “Fat Fade” that promised to “make superfluous flesh just fade away.” The advertisement appeared exclusively among women’s beauty ads for hair pomades, wigs, straightening combs, and skin lightning creams, conveying the message that a weight-loss product doubled as a beauty accoutrement. In 1918, the Chicago Defender ran ads for weight-loss pills, like one for “Tabasco tablets” whose manufacturers asserted “too much flesh is undesirable as most quite stout people will readily admit and it detracts from one’s good appearance.” It is unlikely that African Americans manufactured these products, but the fact that they appeared in one of the most vital social and political resources for black people reveals potential consumer appeal and tacit endorsement of weight reduction technology.

In all likelihood, the black press engaged in fat stigmatization as a form of protest to the ubiquitous mammy figure that inundated American print culture in the twentieth century. Media outlets portrayed the mythical black mammy as unattractive, overweight, and unfit for full-fledged citizenship. In a 1932 study on black consumerism, Fisk University professor Paul Edwards presented southern, urban African Americans with advertisements of stereotypical depictions of black women as mammies. Respondents viewed ads of smiling, overweight black women who donned handkerchiefs on their heads for pancake and soap companies. Black women respondents expressed their general dislike of the ads, but “professional” black women commented specifically that they “do not like [the] big, fat colored woman” in the ads. Unsurprisingly, class informed varying magnitudes of fat disdain. Other participants added that they generally did not appreciate seeing black women in servant roles, but the “big” and “fat” black woman elicited a visceral rejection from black women professionals.

Later in the twentieth century, other black women commented on the problem of fatness. In her essay “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-Hating Culture,” Margaret K. Basstells of the fat prejudice and self-loathing she experienced as a child in the segregated South in the 1950s and 1960s. Bass explains that racism and Jim Crow policies did not trouble her self-perception; rather, it was her weight that evoked the most violent forms of teasing and self-deprecation. She notes that while her parents attempted to shield her from the dangers present in the South, “No one prepared me for living as a fat person.” Similarly, Johnnie Tillmon, a welfare activist, commented that fatness, in addition to race and poverty, led to her increased discrimination when she explained in Ms. magazine in 1972: “I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all.”

Both Bass and Tillmon’s reflections illuminate the ways in which fatness functioned as a painful experience for some black women as opposed to a source of bodily appreciation and pride. Generally speaking, the field of fat studies, body positivity activists, and the fat acceptance movement denounce the above-mentioned examples of body shaming in their historical and contemporary forms. But for a group of people who have been regularly characterized as overweight mammies, medically obese, and fat accepting, this history of fat hostility is an important rupture in the narrative. Within the context of black women’s history, fat shame may illuminate a progressive political project that African Americans mounted to counter racist and sexist notions about black women’s excessive bodies. This history frames African Americans as co-architects of fat stigma and challenges presumptions about black women’s levels of body satisfaction, aesthetic values, and philosophies of health. To be clear, this history should not be weaponized to advocate fat shaming. But it can be used to question our long-standing cultural assumptions about fatness and help us confront pernicious ideas about black women.

This entry was posted in

Body Politics

I am currently in a Fat Studies class at Parsons and my classmates and I are creating a website to talk about fat fashion, its history, and its radicalness. I am looking for some fat fashion bloggers from around the globe to talk to! Please signal boost this!!! Additionally, my portion of the project is going to be about fatness and lingerie, and I want to try to track down people who design plus size lingerie, fat sex workers, fat trans people who wear binders, etc. etc. If you fit any of the above, plz reach out to me or signal boost this post!!!!!!!!

I love how they’re being portrayed in various forms. Dainty and feminie, not dainty and feminine, carefree, etc… Hopefully we’ll continue to see illustrations like this for all types of black women. Including trans black women, disabled black women, and more…

 Helen Mozão‘s new photosereies, ‘GORDA FLOR ‘(Fat Flower), aims to empower and uplift the often marginalized plus-size black woman. The images are stunning. Take a look:

I wrote a story for @bustle featuring 48 images of fat babes embracing parts of their bodies typically deemed flaws and I also wanted to share two of the comments that made me feel really proud to be the author of this. Your fat visibility matters! And the more that we can celebrate that visibility, the more that we are working to remove the stigma of being fat. Fat is beautiful. You are beautiful. 😬😘❤️

So, yesterday’s indiegogo campaign was…amazing and kind of intense. @kiddotrue ​and I are so excited to build something really cool, and to be able to do more than we had even been dreaming about because people gave so freely.

If you’re still interested in supporting our work, please feel free to set up a monthly donation to our Patreon. Continued support like this will allow us to get paid for our work and to create more (and more interesting) content.

Whenever anything shows up on my Facebook page regarding weight, or curvy barbies or plus size models, the first comment will inevitably be someone USING SUPERFICIAL CONCERNS ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE’S HEALTH AS A WAY TO VALIDATE THEIR FAT PHOBIA. 

And I am getting so fucking sick and tired of seeing this shit. 

Now, I myself, am not fat. I’m not thin either, just, you know, average. My mother on the other hand, is fat. Now she exercises in some form or the other every day/every other day, she used to go to the gym a lot, but now she just does those really fast walking things or swims. She has more stamina than I do, she’s probably more fit than I am. 

You would not think it to look at her, you’d probably just label her as that fat woman who doesn’t work hard enough to loose weight. She’s been lucky enough to have doctors that realised that she wasn’t loosing weight and they recommended that she check her thyroid (she found she had hypothyroidism) to see if that could be why she wasn’t loosing weight instead of  just assuming that ‘she doesn’t work hard enough.’

People can be vile, though. And it makes me sad and angry and I want to scream because there are days when my mum doesn’t want to look in the mirror because she’s ashamed of what she looks like, there was a time when we went for a holiday, and someone came up to her about a weight loss thing, in a very rude way, mind, in the middle of the lobby of a hotel, when we were with another family that we were travelling with, and she got upset, and embarrassed, was almost in tears, and the parents from the other family we were with tried to trivialise it because they didn’t have the problem since they are all fairly thin.

There was also this one time we entered a shop to look for clothes for my cousin, and my mother picked up a t-shirt, it was a small size, and the lady in the store comes up to us, and says, ‘I’m sorry ma'am, but we don’t have clothes in your size.’ or something to that effect. My mum got really pissed and walked right out of that fucking shop. 

I think the worst part is that there have probably been so many many more situations like this, but these are the only ones I’ve been witness too and remember.