E.Jean's Fat-Phobic Advice

by Sarah Menkedick · 2010-05-25 12:00:00 UTC
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And this week's award for crappy, demoralizing, myth-perpetuating and body-hating advice goes to ... E. Jean of Elle magazine! Bravo, E. Jean, you join the ranks of our nation's surprisingly inept advice columnists, who seem to be part of a secret coalition to keep on victim-blaming women and pressuring them to conform to unhealthy beauty standards.

Like the charming Amy Dickinson, whose helpful advice to a rape victim was to blame herself for going to a frat party, E. Jean lays the guilt squarely on the letter-writer's shoulders. In this case, a woman who signed her letter "overweight and overlooked" wrote E. Jean saying that she thought she was being discriminated against at work and denied a promotion because she was "too fat." Would this be the fault of, say, a fat-phobic culture and obvious illegal discrimination on the part of ignorant employers? Nah! It's the overweight employee's fault, obviously, because she can't simply accept that this culture doesn't like fat people and get with the program (Weight Watchers is E. Jean's program of choice) to lose weight already.

E. Jean's take on the writer's situation is that yes, we live in a culture in which people are "damned" by their weight, but there's nothing we could possibly do about it. Even doctors are grossed out by fat people, so how can we expect non-physicians to actually treat them as human beings? And since culture is a distant and obscure entity that we couldn't possibly alter, kind of like the rotation of the planets, well, we might as well just start dieting.

Can we get a big, resounding F-A-I-L here? I guess Elle's more interested in promoting thinness paranoia, body hatred, and a big ol' resigned shrug towards discrimination than it is, say, empowerment. Thanks, E. Jean, for reminding us that you're happily in the business of putting women in their (thin, degraded, paranoid) place.

Photo credit: xJasonRoger'sx

Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has spent the last five years teaching, writing and traveling on five continents. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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