Judging a Weighty Issue

You’ve probably heard of racism and sexism, discrimination based on race and sex, respectively. But have you heard the terms, weightism and heightism? These two other categories of prejudice, one about weight and the other height, have joined the ranks of their racist, sexist predecessors to wreak havoc on a person’s identity and self-esteem. In a series of four posts, blogger Julie Goodman will explore each of these ways in which society judges people based solely on traits they cannot change.

Let’s begin with weightism.

About a month ago, I was talking to a guy friend about the type of girl he likes. This guy is not the typical college sophomore. On more than one occasion, he has complained to me about a friend of his who consistently makes girls uncomfortable with unsolicited, over-the-top advances. Thus, I was expecting a refreshing answer about something other than butts and boobs. "For you to like her, does she have to be thin?" I asked him.

"A girl doesn't have to be that skinny," he said. "Girls worry about weight too much - unless they really look fat, I think they're fine."

I felt reassured - OK impressed. But then he went on to define what "fat" means to him: "If she's spilling out over the top of her jeans, then she's not attractive," he said.

My heart dropped.  Putting aside the debate about what a girl should or should not wear given her body size, my friend's statement forms part of the dialogue commonly heard among adolescents and young adults. Pejorative comments like "Did you see that girl's muffin-top? She should lay off the chocolate," and "Oh, and that girl is too fat to wear a bikini" unfortunately are part of our everyday conversations. Our fat-phobic society says that any excess weight is disgusting and quickly forgets the person underneath the fat.

Case in point: In a recent blog thread entitled, I Think I Like a Fat Girl, a guy laments about how he likes a girl but is reluctant to ask her out due to her body shape and size. To find a representative photo to show the Internet commentors, he types into Google the phrase, "hot chubby girls with big thighs." I saw the photo.  Most disheartening to me is that the girl is normal weight. The fact that the guy says she's 'chubby' tells me something is off in our perception of what is normal versus overweight. And something may be equally awry in the characteristics we attribute to people based solely on body size.

To get a sense of what those characteristics might be and how they play out between males and females, researchers Paula Brochu and Melanie Morrison at the University of Western Ontario in Canada set out to determine people's explicit and implicit attitudes towards individuals of various body weights. After viewing images of overweight or normal weight individuals, participants rated the degree to which they believed the depicted individuals possessed specific positive (i.e. friendly, happy, hardworking) or negative (i.e. lazy, sloppy, undisciplined) attributes. Participants also expressed how much they would want to interact socially with the individuals depicted in these images. Not surprisingly, participants associated negative traits more often with overweight males and females, regardless of gender. And participants overall were more reluctant to socialize with overweight individuals in various settings.

We could say the study suggests that individuals who are overweight suffer from social isolation and blows to self-esteem due to prejudice. But that would not be enough.

More disheartening, males in the study tended to judge overweight individuals more harshly than did female participants. And both male and female participants ascribed fewer positive traits to overweight females than their average weight counterparts. (Images of overweight males received equal numbers of positive and negative attributes.)

Thus, in our society, weightism couples with sexism; people judge curvaceous women most harshly. At the same time, few would argue that more women than men tie their self-worth to their appearance rather than their accomplishments. The result is that "fat women" lose on all counts: first because they are fleshy; second, because they are fleshy women; and third, because they are women that criticism is far too important in their feelings of self-worth.

What can be done? The key toward reversing such misguided attitudes is to understand the stereotypes behind them. In Full of Ourselves: A Wellness Program to Advance Girl Power, Health, and Leadership, Catherine Steiner-Adair and Lisa Sjostrom debunk common Fat Myths:

• Body fat is bad; it serves no good purpose.
• The thinnest girl in the room is the happiest girl in the room.
• People get fat because they eat too much and exercise too little.
• The thinner you are, the healthier you are.

In reality, fat insulates and cushions our bodies; size and happiness are not correlated; weight is intrinsically linked to genetics as much if not more than lifestyle; and self-starvation in the form of anorexia carries a 20 percent mortality rate, the highest of any mental illness in teens and young adults.

So what does it really mean if a girl spills out of her jeans? Sadly, young adults like my friend think the renegade flesh says a lot about who she is as a person. "Fat girls send the message that they don't care at all about their bodies," he said to me.

But big girls are more than their bodies. They are not like the images used in Brochu and Morrison's study, which merely depict two-dimensional silhouettes. They have stories, histories, and backgrounds that give shape to their personality and character. They have genes, life events, and environments that have molded their bodies into their current form.

Girls are multi-dimensional, and guys need to take that into account. So a message to guys: When you exclusively focus on thunder-thighs and big hips - well frankly, that's just not attractive to us.

Julie Goodman is a sociology student at Brandeis University.

Comments

[Tony]

good post!

i agree, ideals (what "want") and distributions (what "are") differ. but that introduces issues interesting themselves, such as if guys who go after ideals (or girls who go after ...) are preferable to those who go after places in distributions.

go after what want, or aim for what can get? are looks all to look at? what do different people aim for? what do different social systems of mating (arranged vs love) go after? Is one preferable?

to me, american girls like to think guys are one-dimensional. is that so?