What Skinnies Need to Understand About Weight Discrimination
Mirror crying and school bullying is just the tip of the iceberg when some of us can’t get jobs.
Yes, it is unbelievably painful when others ridicule and belittle us so hard that we end up standing in front of the mirror sucking in our bellies and desperately trying not to feel less than. But what led us to that point is a more diverse set of influences than many of us often think about, even us voluptuous ladies. Because that time they chanted ‘Eat, Big Birtha!’ when we were trying to eat our lunch in third grade. Those times when men spoke to us roughly, handled us roughly because it’s supposed to be understood that fat women are the unwanted leftovers that should be grateful to be eaten. The times when there is nothing you can say that will be heard because society sees fat women as bumbling, b*tchy, bossy, and embarrassing: these times are depressingly, not the worst of our problems. It is when, despite all of the unprovoked harassment, we manage to spruce ourselves, shoulder some confidence, and try to make our financial ways in the world; that these prejudices end up hurting us the most.
Correlations between areas with more overweight people and higher unemployment rates have been made since 2009, but we rarely discuss the reasons behind this correlation. One 2009 study states:
“The prevalence of weight discrimination in the United States has increased by 66% over the past decade…, and is comparable to rates of racial discrimination, especially among women….”
Another 2012 study of the prejudices of HR professionals finds that:
“Participants underestimated the occupational prestige of obese individuals and overestimated it for normal-weight individuals. Obese people were more often disqualified from being hired and less often nominated for a supervisory position, while non-ethnic normal-weight individuals were favored. Stigmatization was most pronounced in obese females. … The data suggest that HR professionals are prone to pronounced weight stigmatization, especially in women.”
Yep, surprise, surprise, females have it worse. And not only is it already hard enough for a woman to get paid what she’s worth, but the more we gain the less we are hired and promoted, or in other words, the less we are able to support ourselves. One comes to expect that retail positions, customer service positions and positions that involve presenting a public face to discriminate against we, the pleasantly plump. Yet even in the corporate world, where you’d think weight discrimination should be better equalized behind desks and among spreadsheets, we are continually undervalued and more importantly impeded from supporting ourselves.
Weight discrimination is such an ingrained set of prejudices that we often don’t question them. Being overweight has historically been associated with laziness, incompetence and greediness, possibly stemming from an era, extremely BC, (or BCE, if you’re PC), when food production in a hunter gatherer society was directly related to your physical output. Fast forwarding through time, fatness became associated with wealth during the medieval period and particularly with overabundance, greed and bourgois overindulgence into the rebellious 1700s and up through the 1900s. After all, if one of the deadly sins is gluttony and we are consistently subject to the assumptions of a 1% that is dominated by a Christian European worldview, then it starts to make sense why we are treated like a criminal second class.
But don’t let history fool you. Our food situation is very different than it once was. Its production is now centralized, industrialized and distributed in a system that reflects the inequality between those who can afford to pay for high quality and highly nutritious foods, and those who can’t. The less money you make, the more likely it is you will be buying cheaper foods, which are higher in sugar and starch content and lower in real nutrition. And zaftig sisters if you remember your last 85 doctor’s visits where they lectured you on proper nutrition after seeking treatment for the flu, you’ll remember that quick burning sugars and starches only make you hungrier once your body burns what little nutrition it can glean from what you just ate. So eating lower quality foods, necessarily means eating more of it to get you through the day. If you are financially challenged, you are also less likely to have adequate cooking space, food storage space and the time to cook or exercise since you are probably constantly running to more than one job and probably have a smaller or shared living space. This modern picture of weight management is worlds away from the portrait of a fat king feasting on a flock of roast chickens.
So if we deliciously curvy are more likely to be underpaid and underemployed and the under-financed are more likely to be bodaciously thick: then the grief we routinely give ourselves really stems from a societaly encouraged downward spiral that isn’t going to be broken by any of us losing weight. Our pain is an echo of some serious societal problems that affect you skinny people too. Because being thin does not equal being healthy. Being thin does not relieve you from the paranoia of self weight policing, as societal prejudices keep you in justified fear of weight gain as much as they do to us. So the next time you skinnies see a fat pride meme, put your knee jerk reactions aside and consider this: these women are fighting for your freedom from this system as well. Because fat or thin, there is no woman in this society that hasn’t once poked their belly in a mirror and fearfully asked themselves, ‘Do I look fat in this?’….