Phrases like thin privilege seem weird to me. and I noticed that leftist sre quicker to assume are sctionarcy skinny.
I whould have thought it have been the opposite? outside the west arent the poorest people skinny? not saying that weight determines you as privileged or not.
dont think skinny people face medical discrimination. and I can confirm that fat people in the global south are also medically discriminated against, worse then in America, that's what my cousin says. well she says the American doctors are better in everyday too so that's probably the reason. she has to come here for chemo.
dont think skinny people face medical discrimination
Not in the same way, but there's definitely discrimination against anorexics and diabetics and folks undergoing weight loss from cancer treatment and illness.
There's a fetishization of thinness certainly. But that's often as bad as being shamed, as you're functionally lauded for your poor health.
you have a strange perception about the global south. most of my family is fat and they live in abject poverty worse then anything you'd see in America. like the real world isn't like those save the Children ads. like you can on youtube right now and of those poverty porn vids, most people are not emaciated, you'll see far more fat people. also, this is all heavily dependent on the geography of where people live as well. go to the Caribbean, go to the ghettos, people are very fat, I don't know what to tell you. most people eat fast food everyday because they don't have time to cook and there are no walkable spaces. this is true for most of the global south. have you spent time in an actually poor country?/ sincere. edited to ad tone indicator.
skinny people are not skinny because of their choice
sure I agree with that but I just feel like this whole convo is veering a bit reductive. there's clearly a lot of nuance, and every single country is different. plus there are different levels of poverty of course. also last thought. if you live in the west, and your talking about your healthcare system I think its ok to just talk about your country's conditions, I think everyone understands that things are different in like mail then in America.
yeah im very sorry but i do not understand what you are trying to say at all besides the sidenote. also I in no way was making an accusation it was a genuine question, that im still courious about, i wanted to know where you were coming from because what you are describing is so different then my experiences. If you have been in a counrty thats in civil war i think that would explain the disconnect. most working poor people are not in those conditions. i added a tone indicator. but yeah its a very valid question that was meant with no hostillity.
People who are emaciated because they lack food have that physique as a product of their lack of wealth privilege. In the west, the opposite is true for the same reason: People who are obese have that physique because fattening foods are cheap.
This is further compounded by the fact that lower income earners not only have less free time generally speaking for physical exercise (indeed, many of the poorest people in North America have no leisure time as they've filled whatever would have been free with second and third jobs), and even in this overworked state still cannot often afford extraneous expenses such as gym membership.
So-called "fat shaming" in the west is especially hurtful for exactly the same reason that an equivalent "thin shaming" would be in Chad or Yemen, because in both cases the person in question is a victim of their circumstances.
nobody's said that starving makes you "privileged". you won't face weight-based medical discrimination if you're starving but you obviously have other problems. there's no tier list of oppression
Why are Skinny grouped with privileged groupd (White,Cis,Straight) and Fat grouped in with other opressed groups(POC,LGBT) by western progressive spaces
In the west, fat people face discrimination, worse medical outcomes, etc. In the US, if you're very poor, you are probably still going to get enough calories, but the cheap calories are all super bad for you and make you fat. Then there's environmental pollutants, epigenetic factors, and a bunch of other stuff correlated with poverty. The only rail-thin poor people I encounter are (a) folks who are addicted to stimulants (b) recent immigrants.
when did this shift happen?
honestly I have no idea. American stereotypical poverty changed from rural to urban sometime after WWII. Bourgeois beauty standards (which result in discrimination) changed earlier: think of the skinny flapper girls of the 1920s. I suppose conditions must have changed sometime after Rubens was doing his thing.
Intersectionality.
Skinny from involuntary malnutrition is considered less desirable than skinny from overexercise or abstaining from food.
And that's different from being considered a healthy weight (skewed by unrealistic body standards like when actors dehydrate themselves for muscle definition).
The hate for involuntarily malnourished people and the hate for fat people in general are classist at its root.
Take things like food deserts in the US. If I don't have a car, I can't store perishable food in a safe location, or I'm overworked to the point I can't prepare meals, I'm gonna go for the fast, cheap, and easy. Drive thru, frozen dinner, or something I can get in bulk for cheap. That's gonna affect the way my body looks.
People see that as me making a moral failing when it's just pressure from outside systems. And that's not even getting into things like abuse or trauma that can cause an eating disorder.
With skinny people, you can at least pretend you're making a moral victory by appearing to have some control over your body and health. It's a lot like being able to pass. It's a lot harder to justify your existence when you're fat in a lot of the world.
A AMAB person whould not be praised for being skinny even if they told people they exercise but only if they have muscles.
that's not even true. twinks are praised and desired for being skinny, no muscles required
you need to stop separating people into fat and skinny. there's more than two categories. Someone who's fit and works out is not treated (or analyzed by leftists) in the same way as someone who is starving
Muscular men get over emphasized bc of toxic masculinity/patriarchy for exactly the same reason skinny women are: it’s to appeal to straight men.
Muscular men’s physiques are aspirational to straight men but they aren’t generally seen as more attractive by women and gay men in the way that skinny women are to het men.
At least not in my experience, all of the women and gay men I’ve ever known are much more accepting and diverse in the body types they find attractive than hetmen are.
It’s a very common refrain in het male circles that they got super muscular and experienced exactly 0 more interest from women but had a lot of dudes coming up like “woah nice pecs bro”
Lmao this is incel shit
edit: also
its myth that feminime men are more attartive
never heard of Kpop i guess lol
My response to the reply since removed by mods in case you come back:
It is generally true even outside of progressive spaces, I’m not talking from experience in those spaces, I don’t have any in my irl life
Women do plenty to uphold patriarchy sure but that particular kind of attraction brainworm doesn’t really work on them bc the appeal isn’t for them actually it’s for men. If they’re upholding patriarchal body standards it’s typically policing each others body types from internalized misogyny
This is observably true bc you don’t see women blowing up their chances with men bc they’re not muscular enough or saying shit like “I wont even look at a dude unless his biceps are bigger than his head!” Like you do with straight men.
If I had a dollar from every person who ascribes to the idea that attraction is some written in stone thing based on some Adonis ideal (a very cishet male way of viewing attraction) being completely confused about a woman dating some guy with a body type outside of that i could push the communism button myself
I don't think anyone here is saying that, but we're a leftist space and not a liberal/progressive space.
And what you're describing is the way poverty manifests in different places. Skinny people could have an eating disorder or struggle to afford food enough to maintain a safe body weight, but it's a no-win situation however you look when you're poor.
It's a Morton's Fork situation. If you're fat and homeless, you obviously don't need support because you are eating enough. I'd you're skinny and homeless, you're probably abusing drugs or spending money on booze instead of food.
In the US at least, because that's my only point of lived experience, if you're fat, you're not working hard. There is this weird math in play that says it doesn't matter how much you eat if you exercise hard enough to balance it out.
You can be skinny, but if you can't do your job then you're weak and considered useless. Remarks against skinny people hurt, as does any body shaming, but there isn't the same history of shaming in the US. I think that comes from the warped misunderstanding of work ethic and the signs of work on the human body.
Just as an example of things I see more as a gay man - "no fat, no fem, white only" is something that is still common on the apps. There is probably an intersection where skinny falls under 'fem' but it's not explicitly called out in the same way.
skinny privilege is an oversimplification and focus on one aspect of lookism (and class-correlated signifiers)
it's keeping the tradition of naming stuff backwards, but we're not going to overhaul the entire nomenclature of sociology.
No, the post does read as fat-shaming at first glance. OP's comments, however, refute that assessment.
I don’t think leftists think weight is exactly equivalent to class, race, gender or sexuality in terms of systemic oppression. That doesn’t mean that people don’t experience weight discrimination or fatphobia.
In the west, the working class is less likely to be able to afford nutritious food than the upper class. Food deserts are most common in impoverished communities and this is absolutely by design. It’s also worth mentioning that people can be both fat and malnourished. Malnutrition isn’t just caused by the quantity of food people eat, it can also be caused by a lack of quality. In the US in particular, many fat people are both poor and malnourished; there really isn’t a contradiction here.
Cooking your own meals and building an effective exercise routine can be time consuming. People who need to sell their labour to survive generally have less free time to spend on these kinds of tasks. Fatphobia is an issue that is more likely to impact the working class and marginalized communities, at least in the west.
There’s also a LOT of intersection between racial discrimination, fetishization and body shaming. The horrific objectification and exploitation of Saartjie Baartman is an (extreme) example of this but it isn’t difficult to find similar instances of this kind of hypersexualization and abuse directed towards minority women who don’t fit into a specific eurocentric idea of health or beauty. This also overlaps pretty heavily with medical discrimination, which Othello already mentioned.
It's US Protestant brain in full overdrive. Fatness is seen as a sign of personal failing. People are fat because they don't make healthy choices. The reality is that being fat is the result of many factors that are biological, material, and socio-economic in nature that extend well beyond someone's personal locus of control. Genetics, food deserts, and pollution are some prime examples.
Thinness on the other hand is seen as the result of hard work, dedication, and access to better health and wellness care. Look at any advertisement from the last hundred years and you'll see the inevitable message that thin equals beautiful and desirable. Entire industries are built around this premise. Fat people are judged by employers, doctors, police, and random schmucks on the street.
There is also a very real racial dynamic. Black and brown neighborhoods are more likely to be cut off from access to healthier food and better healthcare. Earlier I mentioned food deserts and pollution. These factors disproportionately affect minorities.
We're in this transitional space where we still have images of greedy fat cats
but are also learning fatness is not some cut and dry indicator of a person's character or even class.The irony in the US is that MOST people are fat for some or all of these reasons.
It's in a Western context mostly. I don't think people are claiming that it's a global thing.
