On Fat-Shaming

I guess people noticed this weekend when an evolutionary psychology professor decided that fat-shaming grad students was an excellent use of his Twitter account. (And by noticed, I mean went deservedly ballistic online. Jezebel helped.)

But yesterday Collin Gifford Brooke wrote a really terrific piece on, in effect, internalized fat-shaming and all the different humiliations and stressors that the obese face on an hourly basis. Here’s a sample:

I did want to make one more point, though. While I was gratified to see the speedy, collective outrage over Miller’s tweet, it made me think back a couple of weeks to a conversation that happened on Twitter about how academics should dress. Once upon a time, I was told (quietly) that if I expected to receive tenure, I would need to dress better. The thing is, when you’re overweight and wearing clothes that aren’t tailored to your body’s shape, your body puts different stresses on those clothes. Dress clothes in particular tend to assume the “norm,” and while it’s funny to watch Chris Farley split a jacket or the rear seam on a pair of pants, imagine doing it while you’re teaching a class bending over to retrieve a pen or a piece of chalk. And then imagine that the simple act of dressing one’s self every day carries with it that extra layer of anxiety over whether today will be the day that your body betrays and humiliates you. Most ties are manufactured with certain assumptions about the size of the neck around which they will be worn; for a fat person, a regular tie often doesn’t fit. Sports jackets often assume a particular shoulder to waist ratio. I normally teach in jeans, because for a variety of reasons, they tend to be manufactured to handle more stress and wear than dress pants. In this Twitter conversation, however, the idea of teaching in jeans was one of the things that was considered unprofessional among faculty of a certain age. I don’t mean to call anyone out about this, but I will say that I felt no less shame seeing this conversation than I did seeing Miller’s remarks. I didn’t see all the responses to the thread, but I’m pretty sure that most people didn’t think of it as fat-shaming, or respond to it with the same outrage. It probably didn’t register to them.

I guess my point is this: my wish would be to take a small piece of the outrage, and apply it to awareness.

When I was younger, I was pretty fat–fat enough that one of my colleagues brought it up when I said I was leaving my university a couple of weeks ago: “One thing’s for sure: you got yourself into shape over your time here.” There’s photographic evidence and everything.) It has been a long time since I carried that kind of extra weight, but it still governs the way I think about buying clothes. I shop as an embarrassed 30-yr-old fat guy all the time, regardless of my actual size, and you couldn’t make me try on clothes most days.

(Just typing that innocuous paragraph made me a little self-hate-y, as well as disappointed that the new comfort/shame food of the month isn’t out until Friday.)

Anyway, Collin’s piece is well-worth a few minutes of your time, even if you have no body shame issues at all, in part for the classy suggestions he makes at the end for ways we can all understand one another a little better. Read the whole thing!

Photo “Shame the Devil” by Flickr user Neal / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0