When it comes to body shaming, it’s fair to say that people
don’t treat skinny shaming the same way as the treat fat shaming. It’s wrong to
call someone fat – presumably because we only see fat as a word with a million
negative connotations, despite the fact that it’s not an inherently negative
word – but it’s seen as complimentary to tell someone they’re soooo skinny.
Ages ago, when I first started blogging, I wrote a post about the Dove ‘real
women’ advertising campaign. The women in the photo were of various skin
colours, they were different heights and had a nice mix of hair colours. Of
course, they were all real women, but there was not one skinny girl in that
advert. So are skinny girls not real? Sorry to burst the media bubble, but they
are. Some girls are naturally skinny, and some are battling with eating
disorders, and that doesn’t make them any less real than a girl with curves.
Representation matters and just like it’s wrong to only show skinny bodies in
adverts, it’s wrong to ignore them altogether because you think it fits some
sort of body-positive agenda.
I tweeted something along these lines a while back –
defending girls and boys who are victims of skinny shaming – and I was
instantly shot back with “fat girls shouldn’t talk about skinny shaming” which
in all honesty made me laugh for a good few hours. I’m certainly not a skinny
girl myself, but at the time I was a size 10 and far from being fat either.
That aside, I was literally calling people out for body shaming others: I was
defending people who are on the skinny end of the scale, only for one of them
to have a go at me for doing so because I’m not skinny myself. It beggars
belief, at the risk of sounding about 80.
If you’re against one form of body shaming, you should be
against all forms of body shaming. If
you wouldn’t like somebody to say it to or about you, don’t say it to or about
somebody else. As a bigger person, you have every right to defend others from
skinny shaming. As a smaller person, you have every right to defend others from
fat shaming. It works both ways; it’s a two way street, one on which we should
all be comfortable with the size we are.
