Fatphobia: the aesthetic hatred towards obese people

In 2005, psychology professor and researcher Kelly D. Brownell, along with Rebecca Puhl, Marlene Schwartz, and Leslie Rudd, published a book called Weight Bias: Nature, Consequences and Remedies.

This work raised an idea that in recent years has been taken up by many social movements: Although obesity is a health problem, part of its drawbacks are not limited to the physical discomfort that produces. There is an extra discomfort, of a psychological type, which is produced by a discriminatory bias against overweight people: fatophobia.

What is fatphobia?

The concept of fatphobia is used to designate an automatic and normally unconscious bias that leads to discriminate, objectify and belittle overweight people, especially if these people are women.

Fat people are automatically associated with a lack of self-esteem, to the difficulties to live a sexuality in a satisfactory way and to the need to attract attention by trying hard. Definitely, it is understood that these people start with a definite disadvantage that makes them worth less

by not "being able to compete" with the rest. Seen through fatphobia glasses, these people are perceived as desperate individuals, who they will accept worse treatment, both informal and formal, and that they will be willing to be further exploited labor.

It is, in short, a way of thinking that is characterized by burdening obese people with a social stigma. This means that it is not part of a clinical picture, as it does, for example, the agoraphobia. In fatphobia, being overweight is considered an excuse to make certain people pass for another moral standard. Somehow, aesthetics dictate the type of ethics that applies to this minority... Because overweight people are a minority, right?

It's getting easier to be obese

Fatphobia has a paradoxical aspect. Although obese people are considered something strange and with less value because they are outside the statistical normality, that same statistical normality is increasingly reduced, especially in the case of women.

Although from a medical point of view the standards on what is and what is not obesity are well founded and are based on scientific knowledge about what a healthy body looks like, beyond these specialized and professional environments, being fat is, increasingly, the normal. It is not that women eat worse and worse, it is that the threshold for what is considered obesity is lower and lower, it is very easy to cross it.

Even in the world of models, straying slightly from what beauty standards dictate gives rise to conflicts. For example, ask Iskra Lawrence, who is known especially for their responses to the "accusations" about your weight. The fact that even these women have to face these treatments serves to get an idea of ​​what anonymous women have to endure and as much or more removed from the beauty canon.

The word "fat" is taboo

Fatphobia has left such a powerful mark on our culture that even the concept it alludes to is taboo. The fashion industry has had to invent a thousand and one neologisms and euphemisms to refer to large sizes. and to the morphology of women who from other contexts are accused of being fat: curvy, plump, size big... linguistic formulas that are intuited artificial and that, in a way, give the term "fat" more strength due to its resounding absence.

That is why from certain social movements linked to feminism it has been decided to start fight fatphobia by reappropriating the term "fat" and proudly displaying it. This is a political strategy that is reminiscent of a proposal in psycholinguistics known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and that simply put consists of the idea that the way in which language is used shapes the way in which it is thought.

This hypothesis may or may not be true (currently it does not have much empirical support), but beyond this it is possible to imagine that reappropriating that word can be a way of defending yourself against fatphobia by fighting on your own land. It is clear that the fight for equality involves making these irrational biases disappear, which are psychological but also have social roots, and which only hinder human relationships. And it is also expensive that there is a long way to go.

Defend the possibility that all people can Living in a healthy way does not mean stigmatizing those who are different.