Why Female Fat Acceptance Is A Feminist Issue

There's a radical notion floating around the fem-esphere that I think we feminists should support. It's the completely foreign idea that every woman's body is different and, no matter what her body looks like, she has the right to accept, embrace, even (shocker!) love it. This is particularly novel when it comes to fat women, who, in addition to constantly being told they're seconds away from dropping dead and killing the planet, are generally treated with equal amounts of disdain and malice whenever it's at all socially acceptable to do so.

Fat acceptance trumps the idea that people are fat because they eat more and exercise less than thin people. As I'm sure we've all encountered, it's impossible to look at someone and surmise their eating and exercise habits. In fact, it has been my experience that most people look the way they do, fat or skinny or somewhere in between, by chance, not because they work to look a certain way. This is important to note because stereotypes about fat people (especially women) being lazy and unhealthy fuel people's disgust, prejudices and all those "it's for your own good" conversations.

It's important for women to accept that being fat is a natural variation of the human body because it's important that we eradicate discrimination for all women, not just some. And it's not just to help fat women, since women of all sizes are trapped in body image hell for fear of becoming fat. If we all believed in fat acceptance, we could look the "fear of fat" in the face like author J.K. Rowling, who responded to tabloid allegations of her weight gain with, "Is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'?" When we treat fat like its a disease, declare every overweight woman as "struggling with her weight" and support the fear-of-fat pornography that the weight loss industry has become, we affirm that fat is worse than being all of those things.

Because I know it's coming, let's also talk about health. Are some fat women unhealthy? Hell yes. Are some non-fat women unhealthy? Yep. Can you gauge a person's health from looking at them? Nope. Cemeteries are full of the prematurely dead of all sizes. I'm not trying to convince anyone that being fat means a person is in tip-top shape (although it's hard to look at women like Queen Latifah and think "unhealthy"), but the average thin woman isn't either.

Ultimately, we should support fat acceptance because fat-shaming is patriarchal. Women have the right to feel comfortable in their bodies and not be made to always seek someone else's idea of perfection. We need fat chicks like this and this and this to love the body they have and not feel pressure to go to unhealthy lengths to change it. We need thin chicks to support fat chicks and the idea that women are people too, not dolls to be admired. We need to get rid of euphemisms like "chubby," "thick," and "big-boned" that make fat sound like an insult. Basically, we need to support all women.

Photo credit: freakapotimus