The Influence Of Fatness In America

America has a hierarchy of body size that places thin people at the top and fat people at the bottom. This has been a rather recent development; slightly more than 100 years ago, fatness was considered attractive because it showed that the person could afford to eat well and gain weight. However, in the late 1800s, being fat began to be looked at as if it exemplified “an inward and spiritual disgrace, of laziness, of self-indulgence” . Because of a changing economy that allowed for more food to be produced and sold for less money as well as a large influx of naturally shorter and rounder immigrants, the American elite sought a way to differentiate themselves from the impecunious immigrants. They did this by idealizing a thin and tall body …show more content…
Desks, like airline seats, are unforgiving to fat bodies. In many schools, desks and seats are connected by a metal rod on one side. The original intention for desks like these was to keep the classroom tidier, but by not allowing the chair to be pulled farther away from the writing surface, fat people have a hard time being comfortable in desks. There is an idea that this is a deliberate, but perhaps unconscious way of telling fat students that they are not worthy. Ashley Hetrick and Derek Attig contest that classroom desks seek to create bodies that fit their mold of what a student should look like. They continue that desks punish those who cannot fit comfortably with pain and social shame. They also contest that by making school uncomfortable for fat people, those in power are maintaining the stereotype that thin people are smarter and more apt to go to college and to succeed in the professional world. In college classrooms, professors are also often thin and conventionally attractive. It has been shown that students evaluate attractive professors better than unattractive professors. Since stylish clothing is generally unavailable for fat people and being fat is seen as unattractive, fat professors are more likely to receive negative reviews from students. This is an obvious example of conflict theory because the thin people who are in charge of schools (both high schools and colleges) who have …show more content…
There are a few organizations who champion body positivity. One is The Body is Not an Apology which is an organization “committed to cultivating global Radical Self Love and Body Empowerment.” They believe that every body is a good body regardless of physical characteristics such as sex, gender, size, color, race, age, etc. They believe that the media is highly influential and highly detrimental to healthy body image and that social inequity strengthens and is strengthened by internalized self hate. They believe that the best way to combat this is to “act in honor of our bodies today, no matter the form they currently take…Your body needs you to love it today, just as it is, however it is, unapologetically.” Another organization is The Body Positive which seeks to “create a lively, healing community that offers freedom from suffocating societal messages that keep people in a perpetual struggle with their bodies.” They also focus on loving one’s body the way that it is right now, not how it could be in the future. They also want to foster positive thoughts about bodies and vehemently oppose the media’s ability to influence what people think about themselves and others. These organizations propose a very different philosophy than that presented by plus sized models in the fashion industry. Body positivity seeks to love all bodies- even fat bodies that push past the barrier of