Skinny people, I see you: Taking up space where you shouldn't and what to do about it

Two photos side by side of a light skinned fat woman with medium

length pink hair in a black top with greenery in the background.

The right picture shows the woman after the photo was put through

facial improvement software, making her face and nose slimmer as

well as making her eyes more symmetrical and larger and her lips

plumper.

I see you skinny people. I see you struggling. I see your self confidence issues. I see you hiding your
stomach in a one piece bathing suit because you're too afraid of a bikini. I know that self loathing body issues are not exempt for you. I know that fatphobia affects you.

Now let's talk about what else I see and don't see. I don't see you sticking up for me, the fattie. I see you occupying space in fat acceptance instead of raising up the voices of fat people and allowing us the space you occupy. I don't see you trying to change fat oppression. I do see you trying to change "skinny shaming" though. I see you equating "skinny shaming" and fat oppression as if hurt feelings are the same thing as dead children. I see you screaming for yourself, but not for me. I don't see you in my social media posts where I have to defend myself against fatphobes with no allies to help me. I see you subtly contributing to fatphobia and then crying "but I'm an ally!" when called out on it. I see you asking me to educate you on my oppression, but I don't see you trying to educate yourself. I see you, right now, about to type "not all skinny people!" to defend yourself instead of reaching out to your fellow skinnies and helping end my oppression.

Here's the thing, asking you to help end my oppression does not discount your experiences or suffering at the hands of fatphobia and the patriarchy. All it says is that, in this particular instance, fat people are suffering more than skinny people when it comes to fatphobia. In the same way, the patriarchy informs toxic masculinity which affects men negatively, but it's going to, by definition, affect women and femme presenting people more.

Regardless of how fatphobia bleeds over onto you, remember that it's targeted at me. You still hold power over fat people and have privilege in a world that favors you over us. I know it's not a power you asked for. It may not even be a power you want, and I get that. I have privileges too. Hell, I even have relative thin privilege compared to people who are fatter than I am. Being a size 22/3x, I can buy a lot of clothes that just don't exist in a 4x or larger. I can fit some places that people larger than me can't (like airplane seats and certain chairs, and even medical equipment), I can, mostly, be left alone in public depending on where I am, and I see people, however rarely, who represent me. These are all things that give me some privilege because privilege exists on a sliding scale. Thin people, have all these and more, including important ones that can mean life or death (such as having a doctor take your illnesses seriously).

Basically, it doesn't matter how badly you feel about your body, you're still the oppressor. I'm still the oppressed. I have the right to be angry at you, regardless of your personal issues, I have the right to express that anger, I have the right to have access to fat only spaces and to insist that you don't get to be a part of it.

Mostly though, your job as an ally is to always be learning, always doing better, and always taking pressure off of my shoulders. Your job is to educate other thin people (people with internalized fatphobia you don't need to deal with because you can't police how someone deals with oppression- even if those ways are shitty and oppresses other fat people). So next time your facebook friend posts a fatphobic meme or comment, try educating them, posing links to information and posts from fat people. When a fat person speaks, don't be so quick to jump in with your experiences- try just supporting your fat friend and quietly being there for them. Don't ask us to educate you, but rather, when you don't understand something, or have questions, ask a group dedicated to intersectionality and education or google articles or posts by fat people. Remember too that you can take all of the rules of allyship in an intersectional setting and apply it to fat acceptance and fat liberation.

Ally is not an identity, it's not a title that you get once and you're done. It's an ongoing, organic, thing that takes emotional labor and mental effort on your part. The emotional labor and mental effort that I put in is on a daily, hourly, and even minute by minute basis. Please take some of that from me. I see you, and want you to know that I see you (all day, every day, whether I want to or not), so please.. see me as well. Because my suffering is made invisible, but you can do something about that.

"Reverse Discrimination"

Oh yeah, you know how some women don't trust men because we live in a patriarchal society that ensures subtle and overt violence against women from emotional/mental to physical to sexual and how that's totally reverse discrimination? Just like when a person of color doesn't really like white people because they've been systematically oppressed and discriminated against their entire lives while white people live a life of white privilege often intersecting with other privileges as well and how that's completely reverse racism? Yeah no, I didn't think so either. I'm not going to rehash these topics too much because there are other, more competent and eloquent social justice bloggers who have done it for me, but I do want to talk specifically about weight and "reverse discrimination" Specifically thin shaming.

You know what thin shaming is, right? "Real women have curves" "Only dogs want bones" "Go eat a fucking sandwich you anorexic". It's a shitty thing to do to anyone. It's horrible that people who are trying to accept their own bodies would lash out at another group, usually a group of women who are specifically targeted by the media to try to make them feel like shit about themselves.  It's fucking unacceptable and it needs to stop.

But I'll tell you one thing it isn't. The same thing as fat shaming.

Just like reverse racism doesn't exist, just like reverse sexism doesn't exist, or reverse homophobia,  reverse fatphobia doesn't exist. Why? Because bigotry, discrimination, and oppression are part of a systematic tool used to keep an entire class of people under privileged while a ruling privileged group reaps the benefits whether they want to or not. I'm white and cis. I reap the benefits of being those two things in a culture that values whiteness and being cis whether I'm personally against that privilege or not. In the same fashion, a thin person reaps benefits from thin privilege whether they're a fat acceptance ally or not.

"But how is being called bulimic when you're not a benefit?" Well, duh, it's not. No one said that shitty things don't happen to thin people. They absolutely do. But most of those things are rooted in fatphobia. For instance, the assumption that only super thin people having eating disorders when being fat actually puts you at a greater risk for eating disorders. Hell, even thinking you're fat puts you at a greater risk for eating disorders. There's a clear link between fatphobia and eating disorders, period. And even when someone says something like "real women have curves" they're not talking about people like me who are deathfatz, they're talking about hourglass shaped women who are still damn close to the social ideal.

So there's one blogger, Red No. 3, that I absolutely love. Why? Because he talks about being a fat man but he talks about it in context of relative privilege. A Spectrum of Privilege is a post that everyone simply must read. As a man he has greater privilege than a woman for example. And this is how we have to talk about thin shaming- in context. Skinny people don't live in a vacuum or a bubble. Their experiences have context and that context happens within thin privilege.

For example, on /r/bodyacceptance today someone told me the story of how she was constantly mistaken for someone who had an eating disorder and, as a result, complete strangers would, for example, report her to school officials in an attempt to help her. That's pretty fucking shitty. No one should just assume someone has an eating disorder because they're thin. But, she phrased this story in a defensive way to defend an article about thin shaming that failed to mention thin privilege even once. So, to frame her story in the context of thin privilege, her peers (wrongly and horribly) thought she had an eating disorder and reached out to try to get her help. In a fat person's world we can be hospitalized or even die before an eating disorder is detected simply because extreme weight loss or ED behaviors are seen as good fatty behaviors. Does this make her experience less hurtful? NO. Does this make her body issues less valid? NO. But when a lot of thin people imply that thin shaming is just as bad as fat shaming they're showing a basic ignorance of the lived experiences of fat people who face systematic discrimination and oppression. This includes friends, family members, peers, and even the goddamned government!

I'll give you another example. Someone, again in r/bodyacceptance on reddit, pointed out that every once in a while a thin shaming comment graces the comments section of an article and that's proof that thin shaming is equal to fat shaming. Well, It's true, on the article I mentioned above, I did have to remove a thin shaming comment. And eleven fat shaming comments. So far. And this was on a post that didn't even have anything to do with fat people. Can you imagine how many comments us mods have to remove on a post that's actually fat related?  We have entire comment brigades invade our subreddit just to insult fat people including rape and death threats. Just today someone compared being fat to self harm (ie, cutting, burning, etc). It's not uncommon for fat to be seen as a mental illness while fat people with actual mental illness are ignored and mocked and called liars.

Let me say again that thin shaming is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG. No one should try to build themselves up on the backs of someone else. But I'm tired of people, thin and fat alike including some fat activists, claiming that the fat oppression and skinny shaming are in the same arena while the same people are likely to balk at someone saying "well white people have it just as hard as POC"  or "straight people have it just as hard as lgbt people" or, of course, and all feminists are familiar with this, "what about the menz?!" So while we should continuously try to fight thin shaming (and men bashing, and whatever else), let's not pretend that a highly privileged group faces the same battles, risks, or experiences as an oppressed group and certainly not in the same way.