February 8, 2017 • 42 mins
Weight bias, also known as fat-shaming, has serious real-world impacts on overweight and obese women. Now, thin women are making their voices heard about so-called "skinny shaming" as well. Cristen and Caroline discuss the harmful spectrum of body shaming and what women can do to stop it.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how stup
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we're talking about body shaming,
which is going to be an umbrella term for both
fat shaming and thin shaming. Because a few months ago,
(00:26):
over on stuff I've Never Told You the YouTube channel,
a viewer asked whether or not skinny shaming or thin
shaming exists, and so I did a video talking about
it and how yes, you know, I think that there's
a you know, a spectrum of body shaming, and not
to pit one against the other, I e. Pit fat
(00:49):
shaming against thin shaming, saying which is worse, which is better,
because that's not the point. And it generated a lot
of conversation, and we asked in the podcast whether or
not we should talk about this topic as well heard
from a lot of you, and so here you go,
let's talk about body shaming because I feel like this
is such an important issue for women to really really
(01:12):
pay close attention to, yah because we're not careful in
the I think there's a lot of good intentions of
wanting to encourage girls in particular to have a healthy
body image, and in the process we end up shaming
women who look like what we don't think they should
(01:34):
look like, whether that is larger or smaller, right, exactly, Well,
so why do we have these views? Why do we
have these views of what's too big or too small? Yeah, well,
a lot of the research is focused on weight bias
in the sense of fat shaming weight bias, and there
are a lot of theories as to why it exists,
(01:54):
because it is once you start digging into the literature,
there is I mean, it's so persistent and it's long
standing and astounding how early those biases develop in us. So,
for more of an evolutionary perspective, there's this idea that
a weight bias exists because it's humans pathogen avoidance mechanism
at work. Basically, this inborn response to us seeing someone
(02:19):
that doesn't look like us, you know, and us being
you know, like a a middle weight person and having
some evolutionary response of like, oh, well, you must have
some kind of disease or something that I need to
stay away from. Right. And there's also the idea, and
this could stretch back all the way to our puritan
(02:39):
early American ancestors who considered over indulgence and actual moral
failing that if you over indulged in food or alcohol
or anything like that, that you clearly had something wrong
with you. Yeah, because today a lot of fat shaming
involves just assumptions that, well, these people just have no
self control whatsoever. Um, which we'll talk about more and
(03:02):
how that is a total myth. Um. But there also
might be some feminism tied up in this, not in
the sense of feminism promoting way bias, but perhaps weight
bias being a reaction to it. For instance, Naomi Wolf
in the book The Beauty Myth, she talks about how
urging women to be thin has noticeably spiked during the
(03:24):
suffrage movement and second wave feminism, and she writes, what
are the implications of advocating thinness for women at times
when these women begin to take up more space and
hold more power? Right, So, women are are leaving the
home and suddenly they're outside. Oh my god, there's there's
women outside and they're on the bus and they're going
to work. You know, we we have to take them
(03:45):
down a peg, you know, like like we're we're taking
you down a peg so that you won't be as
threatening and that involves judging you for all of the
fact that you do or don't have on your body, um,
instead of you know, letting you prove yourself as a
skilled worker or what not. Yeah, And a lot of
weight bias research does focus on women because, let's face it,
(04:10):
women are often judged more harshly for not meeting normative
attractiveness standards. Yeah, and like that's the only thing, Like
I mean, you know, not in a fat shaming or
thin shaming sort of way. But I think Hillary Clinton
is an excellent example of that. It's like, really, that's
all you have to judge her on the fact that
she wore that suit or did her hair that way.
(04:31):
You know, I think, you know, her peers in government
do not her male peers in government do not face
the same focus. And that's something that women just have
to deal with. And and we just happened today to
be talking about the weight aspect. Yeah. And and the
wight bias has been just kind of peddled to us
over and over again through media messages, imagery, photoshop. I
(04:54):
think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I
clearly remember being around all of years old and for
the first time really becoming aware of what my thighs
looked like because I was flipping through a Delia's catalog
and it had, you know, bikini shots, and these girls
had very thin thighs. I did not have very thin thighs.
(05:18):
When their legs, you know, when their feet were together,
their thighs didn't touch mine did. And it was all
of a sudden it just set off as domino effect
in my brain that oh, my god, I have massive
fat thighs. This is awful. I don't look like that. Yeah,
I was. I was watching a show the other night
and you know, had all this this research in my brain,
(05:39):
and I was looking at all the characters on the
screen and it was just like a general shot of
the main character at an airport, and so there's a
million people around and not a single one of them
was over a normal or average weight at all. They
were all very slim, slender, and I it just occurred
to me like, oh, well, we're getting this this universe
presented to us every day all day long, of the
(06:02):
fact that the only people who exist who are worth
being on screen or who are worth thinking about are
people who look one specific way, and if you're smaller
than that or if you're bigger than that, then obviously
like something's wrong with you. Yeah. I mean the very
fact that Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling's Wait, for instance,
which are pretty much average for American women, The fact
(06:24):
that their bodies are such constant topics of conversation, as
though it's revolution that they're even on screen right, speaks
so much to where we are with this issue. Um So,
what we know also about weight bias from these studies
is that it starts very early. It's also more predominant
among white women in particular, and it has been on
(06:48):
the rise in recent years. Um So, as for that
age issue, this was startling to me. A two thousand
seven study found evidence of a weight bias and in
that sense, an anti fat bias. They found evidence of
it by age five age five, and these are the
This is the same time when, as we've talked about
many times in the podcast to Caroline, that we're forming
(07:09):
our earliest gender schema, kind of getting a sense of
the world and who we are, and along with that,
this wait bias comes in. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean,
is it coming from parents, is it coming from peers?
I think it's coming from parents, peers, coaches, teachers, what
they're seeing on television, what they're hearing how probably have
(07:31):
you know a lot of how they hear people talking
about other people. Um And in studies, children perceive obese
peers as lazy, stupid, and undesirable. I mean, these are
the kinds of things that kids are reporting about kids
their own age. I don't I don't remember when I
first thought I was fat, but I remember distinctly, like
(07:53):
I remember it crystal clear, being in fourth grade and
squatting down on the ground in front of my cubby.
And you know how when you squat down and your
thigh broadens out, And I remember looking down at that
area like lower thigh, upper knee area and being like, look,
how big my leg is? How old are you in
(08:14):
fourth grade? You're what like nine? So self aware? Yeah,
I also distinctly remember when and I was a tall child,
but I was also a pretty as my grandfather told me,
I was a pretty husky child. And I also distinctly
remember a boy calling me fat and it just like
(08:35):
shattered my world. Yeah, I had the same thing happened
to me. I went on a retreat. I can't remember
what grade this is, in. But we went on like
a class retreat and we had to do a trust
fall and when I got up when it was my turn,
the boy that I had a crush on in the
back of the line was like, great, here comes Fatty.
Hope we can catch her. Things like that stick with people,
and like, uh, you know, shame on their parents for
(08:58):
not telling them to keep their traps shut. But I
wonder that. I mean, it's so pervasive. Even if they
don't hear it from their parents, they're probably going to
hear it from somebody else. Um. But let's talk for
a second about these ethnic differences as well, because there
is a study that we found looking at the intersection
of ethnicity and the stigma of obesity and the engagement
(09:20):
with a thin ideal to put it in very clinical terms,
and found that it was more predominant among white women
compared to African American women. So there might be a
bit of cultural differences coming in there as well. So
looking at a bunch of different studies, and this is
coming out of the Red Center, but they set that
between and two thousand and six there was a sixty
(09:43):
six percent increase in weight bias, which was calculated based
on the number of people who reported experiencing it, and
so what are the real world effects of these weight biases.
Not surprisingly, it's a lot of terrible stuff. Um. Just
for for one snap shot, there was study which I
realized is kind of dated, but there's a study looking
(10:06):
at this and they found that in this this was
among college students. They found that students considered obese people
being the fifth lowest on a ranking of desirability, preferring
quote to marry an embezzler, cocaine user, ex mental patient, shoplifter,
(10:26):
sexually promiscuous person, communist, blind person, atheist, or marijuana user
before wanting to marry an obese person. Interesting, you would
rather marry a shoplifting coke addict. I mean, that's that's
some pretty communist shoplifting coke at I know, it's it's
it's it's a little bit dated, Sarah, Yeah, even though
(10:50):
still so. I mean that right there speaks to how
kind of deep this is. But the Red Center, as
we mentioned, which is out of Yale University, has really
focused a lot on looking into the weight bias and
its real world effects and has conducted a lot of
research on it, and they've identified all sorts of ways
(11:11):
in which this weight stigma impacts people's day to day lives,
starting with workplace discrimination, which is a massive problem and
does affect overweight and obese men and women, but women
are more likely to experience it compared to men. Right,
the National Survey of Midlife Development in the US did
find that women are sixteen times more likely to report
(11:33):
weight related employment discrimination than men, and a separate survey
that studied overweight and obese women found that twenty five
percent of those women reported experiencing job discrimination and reported
weight stigma from employers or supervisors. And in the European Union,
there was a similar study that found that a ten
(11:55):
percent increase in one's b m I correlated to a
three point three percent drop in wages for women compared
to a one point nine percent drop in wages for men.
Um And even when people leave work and for instance,
go to the doctor, wait, bias still crops up there
a lot too, especially for women. There was one study,
(12:17):
for instance, which found that women, compared to men, were
more likely to agree with this statement, Nobody looks into
why I'm overweight. They just put me on diets. Yeah,
and I mean this, uh, not to go off totally
on a tangent, But that that quote really kind of
jumped out at me because of the whole Hashimoto's thing.
You know, when I was uh, gaining a surprising amount
(12:38):
of weight and not being able to lose it in
a very surprisingly short amount of time. You know, I
got weighed at the same doctor that I've been going
to for eleven years, and I'm like, you're not You're
not gonna ask me anything about the fact that I've
all of a sudden put on all this weight. It
was like up to me to then go to a
different doctor and be like, Hey, something is up with
(12:58):
my body. Can you fix me? Can you help me
and tell me what's going on? And not not that
I am walking the same path as someone who is
maybe fifty two hundred pounds overweight, but still, when something's
going on with your body, you want to be able
to rely on healthcare professionals to both be sympathetic and
be proactive and helping you figure it out. But yeah,
(13:20):
a lot of these people that were in the study
were saying, like, I just didn't get the medical attention
that I needed for for this this thing that's affecting
my life. They just sort of thought, oh, well, you're
fat and lazy. Yeah, you should probably just go to
the gym. And as a result, some women and men
alike will avoid going to the doctor altogether just so
(13:41):
they don't have to deal with that kind of weight stigma. Because,
I mean having to deal with weight stigma on top
of just the awkwardness of sitting in a in a
gown waiting, you know, in the tiny little exam room.
It can't be that can't be easy to deal with, right,
And if you look at schools, the Red Center found
at of overweight and obese women reported experiencing weight stigma
(14:04):
from a teacher or a professor and had experienced it
more than once or multiple times. Similarly, there was a
Swedish study that found lower educational attainment for overweight and
obese women partially explained by not being popular in school. Yeah,
I mean it leads to social isolation a lot of times.
Because again, these biases are not something that just magically
(14:28):
emerge in adulthood. Um. But in terms of the real
world impacts of it, the area that jumped out the
most to me was how weight stigma impacts relationships, because
this has overwhelmingly such a disproportionate effect on women. This
is a quote from that Rudd meta analysis finding that
(14:48):
weight stigma may have an especially negative impact on dating
prospects for obese women. UM, citing a study, for instance,
that found that both men and women negatively rated a
dating profile of a woman described as fat, overweight, or
obese compared to a dating profile that might have used
euphemistic terms like full figured, or a dating profile describing
(15:10):
a woman who had a history of drug abuse. Would
rather date a woman with a history of drug abuse
than an obese woman. Yeah, and it made it makes
me think of the whole um the sitcom problem that
we we seem to have, which is that we're we're
Also it's reinforced every night at dinner time for those
recurring sitcoms that the funny fat man is okay, and
(15:35):
he's a desirable husband and you love him and he's
a big bear. Um, but he always has the skinny,
like super made up, dolled up, big hair, gorgeous, high
healed woman for a wife. And so that's just something
that gets reinforced and it's a terrible cycle. Um. There
was a study that showed that both men and women
(15:56):
ranked an obese potential partner lower than those with mint
illness or a history of s t I S. Although
men ranked the obese women significantly less preferable than women
ranked the obese men, which goes back to that whole
sitcom Divide Too, I feel like, but also for this conversation,
because we're really focusing on I think a lot on
(16:17):
on women body shaming other women, it's notable that in
all of these studies that include male and female participants,
that women are just as shaming towards overweight now as
the men are. It's not like, oh, we're just one
like massive group of female solidarity rooting for each other. Nope,
we we are exercising these biases as well. And when
(16:41):
when there's one study looking at the source of fat
shaming within families, the most prominent shamer of all was
the mom. See it was it was opposite in my house.
My mother was like, eat a whole turkey, you're beautiful. Here,
have all of the sweets and chips. I want you
(17:01):
to finish the ice cream, which who knows what was
going on there. But my father was the one who
would like make a clucking noise anytime I like went
for the downut. Yeah, that kind of stuff makes me
so trepidacious about the prospect of ever being a parent,
because similarly, those are the kinds of things that also
(17:21):
stuck in my childhood brain of you know, some tisking
disapproval during my hushky days if I were to reach
for a snack or I mean, I love, I love
my mom. But she was also very proud of her
petite figure, and that was something that I mean, it
was just very much present in my formation of what
(17:45):
an attractive woman should look like or a girl should
look like, you know, because she would talk a lot
about how, you know, when she was younger, when she
was my age, she dated a lot, and then I
would look at photos of her and she was much
smaller than I was, and you you know, you start
building those bridges in your your little little child brains. Yeah,
I know that makes me sad. Well, let's talk about
(18:07):
some good news and do some weight stigma myth busting,
and also talk about some thin shaming on the other
end of this body shame spectrum when we come right
back from a quick break. Now back to the show.
So I think we pretty clearly established that weight bias exists.
(18:32):
We have experienced it in our own lives, Caroline. Um,
But let's do some myth busting. Let's spread some good
news to balance out all the terrible news of how
persistent fat shaming and weight bias in general is in
our society. Right. One of those myths is that people
who are overweight have a complete lack of control, that
(18:54):
that whole puritanical moral control issue. There was a literature
review you published in the journal Sex Roles that found
that fat women are deemed that they could be attractive,
but that they lack the control to do so, and
that means that they're perceived to be weak or out
of control, and that is just not the case. Yeah.
(19:16):
I mean, there have been plenty of studies that would
take as far too long to cite individually in this
podcast about how overweight and obese people. Plenty of them
do exercise and watch what they eat. It's not so
much an issue of that kind of self controlling stuff
that's impacting their weight. It's probably things going on genetically
or with health condition. She's that doctors might not be
(19:39):
paying attention to because they're too busy fat shaming them. Right, Yeah,
you have no idea what's going on with someone. For instance,
I have a friend of mine who she's beautiful, and
she works out all the time. She does CrossFit, she
does yoga, she does this and that. She watches what
she eats, but she's overweight because she has hypothyroidism. She
I'm like, I don't even know how you have the
(19:59):
time tim in the day to work out as much
as you do, Like, she well, I don't even know
how you do it and have a job at the
same time. But she's she says that, you know, when
people look at me, they just think that I sit
around eating pizza and drinking beer all day long. She's like,
but I'm the furthest thing from lazy and unmotivated and
out of control as you can be. Well, if you
are genuinely invested in someone losing weight, one of the
(20:21):
worst things that you can do to motivate a person
is fat shame them because A March two thousand fourteen
study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that
exposure to wait stigmatizing news articles caused self perceived overweight
women to actually consume more calories and feel less capable
(20:42):
of controlling their eating than exposure to non stigmatizing articles
sort of a self sabotaging effect that takes place when
if you're sitting there and and maybe you want to
lose weight, but you're just being told, well, you know,
you're just a fatty fat fat and you can't do
anything for yourself because you're just lazy. Guess what. It's
going to become a self fulfilling type of prophecy with that, right,
(21:02):
And they were saying that the better way to frame
that is more lifestyle changes that you're doing something. And
this is something that a lot of a lot of
people talk about, which is, you know what, whether you're overweight, underweight,
normal weight, whatever, is framing your life in a more
like healthy way, you know, talking about food in terms
of what it gives you and how it fuels you
instead of don't eat that Hershey bar because it's got
(21:26):
too much fat in it, or only eat those carrots
because they have no fat, blah blah blah, making it
more about having a healthy lifestyle less about the weight
itself exactly. Um And even if weight loss occurs, research
has also found that it does not necessarily erase the
weight stigma. I mean in the same way that you
and I, so many years after the fact, are sitting
(21:47):
here recalling in crystal clear detail times from our childhood
when we felt horrible about our bodies. That stigma does
not magically disappear. Um. This was confirmed by a recent
study out of Clemson University which found that, uh, for
women who had lost weight, they were still attached in
(22:09):
a way to this previous person who had been stigmatized.
It was like almost an entirely different identity that they
had to shed over time, Right, because there's that trauma
that kind of sticks with you. Yeah, you can't just
leave that behind automatically. But we have to talk about
the fat acceptance movement, and this is something that we
we touched on in our Plus Sized Fashion episode. Um.
(22:32):
But this is a movement that has roots in the sixties,
right alongside civil rights and other social movements feminism that
we're happening at the time, we see the emergence of
fat acceptance. UM. In the nineteen sixties, there was a
fat in demonstration in Central Park in which people ate
ice cream while burning photos of thin models. Yeah, this
(22:54):
kind of advocacy that you're seeing more and more and more,
especially via social media, is not a new thing at all,
and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance was formed
in nineteen sixty nine, and then you have the International
Size Acceptance Association beginning as well, and this took off
(23:14):
even more in the era of blogging with what was
termed or is termed I should say, it's not like
it's disappeared, uh, the phato sphere where all of a sudden,
women in particular were Kate Harding is a name that
comes up a lot in these conversations, UM talking about, Hey,
you know what, I am overweight and I am healthy,
and I'm not going to let the media tell me
(23:36):
anymore that I am hideous and should just hide behind
you know, tent like clothing right right exactly. And then
that ties into the whole healthy at Every Size movement,
which is basically what I was just saying about making
your life about being healthy, not necessarily about being a
particular weight, um. And it's based around the whole idea
(23:57):
of honoring your body, treating it well, eating foods that
are good for you and that fuel you, not being
so concerned about what size your pants are. Yeah, and
I mean it's really great that the fat acceptance movements
started and that we are continuing to broaden our acceptance
of what female beauty is and can look like. But
(24:19):
along with criticism of fat shaming, I kind of also
came a bit of thin shaming in its wake. Uh.
There's a two thousand eleven study, for instance, that found
that quote explicit weight stereotypes are curvilinear, especially among women,
and in every day speak, that basically means that not
(24:43):
only is there a weight bias at the larger end
of the spectrum, but also at the smaller end of it. Right,
look at Angelina Jolie when she came out on stage
at the Oscars I think that was two years ago,
and there was the dress with the big split in it,
the leg, the leg. Yeah, and it got its on
too account. But everybody was, like the Internet seemed to
be aghast at her body shape and saying that she
(25:06):
needed to go home and eat imply. Yeah, I mean,
I feel like there's as much schaden freud for looking at, uh,
you know, celebrities overweight beach bodies or not, you know,
perfectly photoshopped beach bodies as there are for extremely thin
beach bodies. We want to point at both of them
and say, oh, that's that's not okay. Um, But there
(25:26):
have also been these Internet memes which, on the one hand,
seemed really empowering for women of like, yes, embrace curvy bodies.
That's great, But the way they're framed is very thin
shamy as well, because there's, for instance, this thing called
the Maryland meme. You've probably seen it if you have
(25:47):
a Facebook account, and it's a picture of Marilyn Monroe
wearing her one piece swimsuit looking all kinds of gorge,
you know, and and having a not super duper thin
and body, and then next to it you have an
image of a super thin celebrity basically pointing out like,
oh look, you know this is this is what real
(26:08):
beauty looks like. Yeah, And then I mean that could
be a whole other discussion about like what is real beauty,
what's a real woman? And and that that's sort of
the conversation that's happening behind a lot of these memes
like the whin did this become hotter than this meme?
Which is awful, and but then it becomes better that
it repairs itself, it redeems itself. When you look at
(26:31):
the memes that are making fun of the whin did
this become hotter than this? Meme, which is like when
did these Japanese body pillows become hotter than you know?
And it's like a regular pillow or something. Yeah. Well,
and along those same lines, you have the whole real
women have curves, which is kind of tied into the
Maryland meme. It's the whole It's it's the same kind
of thing of saying, you know what this is, this
(26:53):
is what a beautiful woman looks like and she's this size,
to which women who might be naturally thinner say, hey, actually,
why are you saying that I'm not a real woman?
And also using the term real woman is also problematic
when you start looking at since gender versus transgender, because
that's also leaving out a whole group of people too
who don't look like or weren't born looking like Marilyn Monroe.
(27:16):
So it's all sorts of problematic. Yeah, and it doesn't
help anybody at the end of the day. Yeah, it's
like things started to get great, like let's accept ourselves,
you know, starting with fat acceptance and all that stuff,
like the dials moving up to the top of the thing,
and you're like, yes, things are getting great, We're accepting
ourselves were being healthy for health sake, not for the scale,
(27:37):
and then it whoops, it kept going and so now
we're being like, oh, all you other women are gress looking,
and it's like, okay, come on, come on, You've been
fighting against the fat stigma for so long and now
you're turning around and telling another group of women that
they look bad. Right, Because the thing is, it all exists.
I keep saying that that it's a spectrum, because it
(27:58):
really is. You can plot out body shaming along a
spectrum that all revolves around our perceptions of acceptable amounts
of women's control over their own bodies, to where fat
shaming revolves around women not having enough control over it
or not exerting enough control. And then the other end
of it is thin shaming that revolves around accusations of
(28:21):
women exerting too much control. Oh, she cares, she goes
to the gym too much, she watches too much what
she eats, And it's like, well, where is that happy medium,
because then we are going to get into the issue
of well, this is like this is the appropriate female
uniform body and this makes me okay, this means that
I fit in Okay, in the world, and that you know,
(28:42):
all of I'm wearing my politics appropriately. And one reason too,
that we've spent a bulk of this podcast talking about
weight bias in the terms of fat shaming is because
really all of the research is focused on fat bias,
because I don't think that the idea of thin shaming
(29:03):
has even been a topic of conversation until the past
few years. I mean, there was that two thousand eleven
study that it simply acknowledged that it exists. Other than that,
I found no mention of it in research. I feel
like it's only something that's been you know that women
are starting to raise their hand every now and then
saying hey, I really don't like those real women have
(29:25):
curves memes, and I think a lot of a lot
of people, a lot of women come back and say, well,
you'r thin, what do you have to worry about? Like
why what do you so? What do you so? But
heard over the idea of thin privilege, thin privilege. I mean,
I get that the fact of the matter is when
it comes to our Western beauty ideals, thin is more desirable,
(29:47):
But I don't know, it's like, once starting to talk
about thin privilege just starts pitting women's bodies against each other.
And that's not it's just not good for what is
that teaching little girls? That's what I try to that's
my self check a lot of times. Is okay, I
can have these conversations with adult women, that's fine, But
(30:08):
what is all of this teach little girls? What are
they seeing? They're seeing women fight with each other. They're
hearing you know what is best, what is real, what
is right? Rather than you are you? And that's great.
It's almost like how you registered to vote. You've got
to check that box about what you are, Republican, Democrat, whatever.
(30:29):
It's almost like, alright, little girl, now you have to
pick are you going to be slim, slender, thin? Are
you going to be large, curvy and big boned? And
then you've got a pretty much fight for the rest
of your life against the person who's the other body type. Yeah.
And this isn't to say that we don't need a
massive media makeover of the images that we are being delivered.
(30:51):
I mean, say what you will about the Dove Real
Bodies campaign. Some of it is it's it's not all perfect,
but it is good to see more women of different
and various sizes on billboards, in magazines, on television. We
need to see more of that, but we But it
doesn't mean that we just have to throw all of
(31:14):
these thinner bodies under the bus, because I've also talked
to women and heard for many women in response to
doing this topic who were you know, are naturally thin
and have been bullied mercilessly because of it, have been
told go eat a sandwich more times than they can count,
and have been uh, you know, told to the whole
thing of what is it? Ah, real men like curves,
(31:37):
dogs eat bones, which is disgusting. Well, you know, I
mean we we touched on this in our our Thin
Spow fits Bow episode, you know, talking about all those
things that are on Pinterest or Tumbler or wherever they are,
and um, I don't I feel like I feel like
this is such a it's of course it's a touchy subject,
and I feel like in that episode in particular, we
(31:58):
touched a nerve because I think there were a lot
of people who were like, well, if you're being offended
by this stuff, obviously your overweight and unhealthy, and you
don't have a sense of humor and or or um
taking issue that you know, what fits bow and and
what could be perceived as things Bow really gets me motivated.
This actually keeps me healthy, you know, and and gets
(32:22):
me like going jogging whenever I need to. Right, And
I think, like we said in the fits Bow episode,
and I'll say it again here and I kind of
already said it, but I'll say it again. Uh, whatever
motivates you to be the healthy person that you need
to be and that you should be, I don't think
needs to come at the expense of some other person's
(32:44):
body shape or some other person's health or mental well being. Yeah.
There was an article in Shameless magazine about this, and
I felt like they put it so well, talking about
the problem with things like the real women have curves
memes that we see, Uh, they say, quote that's supposed
to be an empowering message to women. You don't have
to be a victorious secret model to be beautiful, but
(33:06):
it's completely undermined by too much older memes divide and
conquer and the male gays essentially saying like all this
is really doing if you really focused in on this
conversation of curvy bodies or what men really want, what
are we doing then we're figuring out the best way
to objectify ourselves. We're trying. Basically, we're conversing about what's
(33:27):
the most palatable for dudes, which is not helping anybody
except maybe guys. I don't know, but I don't. I
don't think i've ever I'm trying to recall a conversation
over hearing a conversation among guy friends body shaming each other.
(33:48):
I can't think of one. I really can't of like,
he should he should go, Bob should really go eat
a sandwich. I don't think I've ever heard that, unless
Bob was like really hungry and talking about how we
really would like to go the sandwich. Yeah, I don't know.
I feel like men's body conversations are more about body
hair and or muscularity. Real men have biceps. Is that
(34:08):
the way that it would Yeah, the way that it
would happen. I mean not to say also not to
discount men's body image issues there, you know there, we
could talk about that for an entire podcast as well.
And guys, if you want to hear about it, if
you want to hear two women talk about male body image,
will do it. But I just I just see it
so often on on the Internet and on social media
(34:30):
where girls spend so much time. And in the same
way that that Delia's image of really thin girls with
really wide thy gaps just kind of transformed the way
I looked at my body. These kinds of images of
real women look like this or this is you know,
(34:51):
this is disgusting, This isn't disgusting. Those kinds of meme
images that are supposed to be empowering can similarly alienate girls.
But then bringing it all home, we can think about
the brew haha over at targets website where they had
the biggest photoshop fail I oh God. And and for
(35:14):
those of you who don't know what I'm referring to,
basically on targets website, they were selling bathing suits and
they photoshopped a thigh gap on one of the models,
but they didn't stop at the thighs. I don't know
if the mouse slipped out from someone's hand and then
it didn't go through an approval process, but they basically
made a vagina gap as well, a volval gap, not
(35:37):
just the thigh gap. That just kept going and people
were like, um, this is this is getting ridiculous. Now, Yeah,
I mean, basically, it was clear that they had gotten caught,
that they were photoshopping thigh gaps. But the good news is,
I mean, I do think that, partially because of the Internet,
I do think that girls are more media savvy today
in the sense of knowing what photoshop is, knowing the
(35:59):
airbrushing exists. But it's still yes, and and it's still
you're still being presented with certain images all the time,
being bombarded with certain messages all the time. And if
you fall outside of that very narrow space, then on
either side, then you do you you know, it's possible
(36:19):
that you'll feel like a complete outsider, that you'll feel
like you're not as attractive, and people will make you
feel that way. Yeah, I mean, I just think that
whenever these conversations come up, it's so important to pay
attention to whether we are attacking the root of the
problem or just someone who doesn't look like us, you know.
(36:41):
And also, I mean, I think it's important to to
take pause that um, you know, if if you are
if you're talking to another woman about body issues, like
you don't necessarily know what that person has looked like
for the entirety of their lives and what has been
told to them about what their body looks like, whether
it might be a lot thinner than yours or might
(37:03):
be a lot larger than yours. And I mean, I know,
you know plus sized women who have like so much
more body confidence than I ever will. And you know
you can say the same thing about someone who is
much thinner and fitter and has like just a body
made out of made out of muscle. I don't know,
I just I I it's just disheartening to see these
(37:26):
conversations so often spiral into women attacking other women rather
than really taking a look at how to kind of
make life better for future girls by focusing on the
roots of the problem. How do we do that, Caroline?
How do we how do we route this stuff from
the source? I don't know, Man, just loudly support our
(37:49):
sisters so that girls can hear. Yeah, I mean, remembering
in those studies that women are as complicit and wait
bias as men are. This isn't an attack against men.
We are just as guilty. We gotta stop it. So
I'm sure that this has sparked a lot of thoughts
in our listeners and guys. I know this conversation has
(38:10):
been largely focused on women, but we we do not
want to exclude you. We want to hear from you
as well. So all of your thoughts on this. Have
you experienced wait bias, whether it's fat shaming, thin shaming,
and do you have ideas as to how we stop
this and perhaps save future girls from body hate? Let
(38:32):
us know. Moms Stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can email us. You can also tweet us and
mom Stuff podcasts or messages on Facebook, and we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now. Okay, well,
I have a message here from a fellow Kristen Kristen
Um about online dating. She says, I wanted to share
(38:55):
my new online dating success filled life. Currently, I'm engaged
to someone I met on okay Cupid. Both of my
fiance's brothers met their current partners on okay Cupid. One
is getting married before us and the other just started
dating an awesome woman. Two of my best friends are
either married or getting married next month to people they
met on okay Cupid. Apparently we're all too cheap to
(39:17):
pay for dating sites, but we seem to be having
really good luck. So thank you, Kristen and Uh, you
are you and pretty much everybody in your life is
a great success story. Well, I've got an email here
from Sarah and she wrote us about our women in
Science episode and also our a d h D episode,
And I just want to focus in on her conversation
(39:39):
about a d D medication because we talked about adderall
and we referred to it as a wonder drug a
number of times, and we're sort of talking about it's
abuse among people who don't have a diagnosis for a
d h D. Just want to clarify that because she
brings up a good point about how she writes being
on medication and just brings me up to where most
(40:02):
people normally operate. It doesn't give me any sort of superpowers.
In college, it still felt like I had to work
way harder than my classmates to study and to get
things done on time. But at least I had the
drive to do well. My mind still wanders, which can
be helpful in looking at issues from a different angle
than they have been considered before, but it can also
wig out the spouse with how incredibly random I am.
(40:23):
Like the other day, he showed me a picture on
Facebook of a little boy with his head being slobbered
on by a camel, and my reply was, huh, I
wonder if giraffes are ruminants. My brain. Camels have no
top teeth at the front of their upper palette classified
as ruminants, as our lamas, which are South American camelids
but aren't really ruminants like goats and cheap etcetera, etcetera.
(40:43):
And this goes on and on and on. She says,
all this happened in about three seconds, and and for
the record, giraffes are the tallest ruminants on Earth. In search,
Shooting Star, your Lovely Heart, music, and the words, the
more you know. In the years since, the notion that
ad D is overdiagnosed has led to some of the
people close to me to try to convince me that
(41:04):
I don't actually need the medication that I take, and
I just want to punch these people in the throat
because I was diagnosed on the later side. I've developed
coping mechanisms to get by, but it was such a
struggle and it continues to be an uphill battle to
wrestle my brain into getting organized. Just as I wouldn't
deny corrective lenses to those who can't see properly, Nor
would I deny insulin to a diabetic. Telling someone who
(41:25):
really has a d D to go without medication is unhelpful.
I could write more, but I just noticed something shiny
and must investigate. So thank you Sarah for not only
your insights but also your hilarity, and thanks to everybody
who's written into us. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is where you can send us your emails, and we'll
also have up all of the study citations from all
(41:48):
the research that we talked about in our body shaming episode.
And to find that, as well as all of our
social media links, videos, and blog posts, head on over
to stuff and I've Never Told You dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how stup
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we're talking about body shaming,
which is going to be an umbrella term for both
fat shaming and thin shaming. Because a few months ago,
(00:26):
over on stuff I've Never Told You the YouTube channel,
a viewer asked whether or not skinny shaming or thin
shaming exists, and so I did a video talking about
it and how yes, you know, I think that there's
a you know, a spectrum of body shaming, and not
to pit one against the other, I e. Pit fat
(00:49):
shaming against thin shaming, saying which is worse, which is better,
because that's not the point. And it generated a lot
of conversation, and we asked in the podcast whether or
not we should talk about this topic as well heard
from a lot of you, and so here you go,
let's talk about body shaming because I feel like this
is such an important issue for women to really really
(01:12):
pay close attention to, yah because we're not careful in
the I think there's a lot of good intentions of
wanting to encourage girls in particular to have a healthy
body image, and in the process we end up shaming
women who look like what we don't think they should
(01:34):
look like, whether that is larger or smaller, right, exactly, Well,
so why do we have these views? Why do we
have these views of what's too big or too small? Yeah, well,
a lot of the research is focused on weight bias
in the sense of fat shaming weight bias, and there
are a lot of theories as to why it exists,
(01:54):
because it is once you start digging into the literature,
there is I mean, it's so persistent and it's long
standing and astounding how early those biases develop in us. So,
for more of an evolutionary perspective, there's this idea that
a weight bias exists because it's humans pathogen avoidance mechanism
at work. Basically, this inborn response to us seeing someone
(02:19):
that doesn't look like us, you know, and us being
you know, like a a middle weight person and having
some evolutionary response of like, oh, well, you must have
some kind of disease or something that I need to
stay away from. Right. And there's also the idea, and
this could stretch back all the way to our puritan
(02:39):
early American ancestors who considered over indulgence and actual moral
failing that if you over indulged in food or alcohol
or anything like that, that you clearly had something wrong
with you. Yeah, because today a lot of fat shaming
involves just assumptions that, well, these people just have no
self control whatsoever. Um, which we'll talk about more and
(03:02):
how that is a total myth. Um. But there also
might be some feminism tied up in this, not in
the sense of feminism promoting way bias, but perhaps weight
bias being a reaction to it. For instance, Naomi Wolf
in the book The Beauty Myth, she talks about how
urging women to be thin has noticeably spiked during the
(03:24):
suffrage movement and second wave feminism, and she writes, what
are the implications of advocating thinness for women at times
when these women begin to take up more space and
hold more power? Right, So, women are are leaving the
home and suddenly they're outside. Oh my god, there's there's
women outside and they're on the bus and they're going
to work. You know, we we have to take them
(03:45):
down a peg, you know, like like we're we're taking
you down a peg so that you won't be as
threatening and that involves judging you for all of the
fact that you do or don't have on your body, um,
instead of you know, letting you prove yourself as a
skilled worker or what not. Yeah, And a lot of
weight bias research does focus on women because, let's face it,
(04:10):
women are often judged more harshly for not meeting normative
attractiveness standards. Yeah, and like that's the only thing, Like
I mean, you know, not in a fat shaming or
thin shaming sort of way. But I think Hillary Clinton
is an excellent example of that. It's like, really, that's
all you have to judge her on the fact that
she wore that suit or did her hair that way.
(04:31):
You know, I think, you know, her peers in government
do not her male peers in government do not face
the same focus. And that's something that women just have
to deal with. And and we just happened today to
be talking about the weight aspect. Yeah. And and the
wight bias has been just kind of peddled to us
over and over again through media messages, imagery, photoshop. I
(04:54):
think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I
clearly remember being around all of years old and for
the first time really becoming aware of what my thighs
looked like because I was flipping through a Delia's catalog
and it had, you know, bikini shots, and these girls
had very thin thighs. I did not have very thin thighs.
(05:18):
When their legs, you know, when their feet were together,
their thighs didn't touch mine did. And it was all
of a sudden it just set off as domino effect
in my brain that oh, my god, I have massive
fat thighs. This is awful. I don't look like that. Yeah,
I was. I was watching a show the other night
and you know, had all this this research in my brain,
(05:39):
and I was looking at all the characters on the
screen and it was just like a general shot of
the main character at an airport, and so there's a
million people around and not a single one of them
was over a normal or average weight at all. They
were all very slim, slender, and I it just occurred
to me like, oh, well, we're getting this this universe
presented to us every day all day long, of the
(06:02):
fact that the only people who exist who are worth
being on screen or who are worth thinking about are
people who look one specific way, and if you're smaller
than that or if you're bigger than that, then obviously
like something's wrong with you. Yeah. I mean the very
fact that Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling's Wait, for instance,
which are pretty much average for American women, The fact
(06:24):
that their bodies are such constant topics of conversation, as
though it's revolution that they're even on screen right, speaks
so much to where we are with this issue. Um So,
what we know also about weight bias from these studies
is that it starts very early. It's also more predominant
among white women in particular, and it has been on
(06:48):
the rise in recent years. Um So, as for that
age issue, this was startling to me. A two thousand
seven study found evidence of a weight bias and in
that sense, an anti fat bias. They found evidence of
it by age five age five, and these are the
This is the same time when, as we've talked about
many times in the podcast to Caroline, that we're forming
(07:09):
our earliest gender schema, kind of getting a sense of
the world and who we are, and along with that,
this wait bias comes in. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean,
is it coming from parents, is it coming from peers?
I think it's coming from parents, peers, coaches, teachers, what
they're seeing on television, what they're hearing how probably have
(07:31):
you know a lot of how they hear people talking
about other people. Um And in studies, children perceive obese
peers as lazy, stupid, and undesirable. I mean, these are
the kinds of things that kids are reporting about kids
their own age. I don't I don't remember when I
first thought I was fat, but I remember distinctly, like
(07:53):
I remember it crystal clear, being in fourth grade and
squatting down on the ground in front of my cubby.
And you know how when you squat down and your
thigh broadens out, And I remember looking down at that
area like lower thigh, upper knee area and being like, look,
how big my leg is? How old are you in
(08:14):
fourth grade? You're what like nine? So self aware? Yeah,
I also distinctly remember when and I was a tall child,
but I was also a pretty as my grandfather told me,
I was a pretty husky child. And I also distinctly
remember a boy calling me fat and it just like
(08:35):
shattered my world. Yeah, I had the same thing happened
to me. I went on a retreat. I can't remember
what grade this is, in. But we went on like
a class retreat and we had to do a trust
fall and when I got up when it was my turn,
the boy that I had a crush on in the
back of the line was like, great, here comes Fatty.
Hope we can catch her. Things like that stick with people,
and like, uh, you know, shame on their parents for
(08:58):
not telling them to keep their traps shut. But I
wonder that. I mean, it's so pervasive. Even if they
don't hear it from their parents, they're probably going to
hear it from somebody else. Um. But let's talk for
a second about these ethnic differences as well, because there
is a study that we found looking at the intersection
of ethnicity and the stigma of obesity and the engagement
(09:20):
with a thin ideal to put it in very clinical terms,
and found that it was more predominant among white women
compared to African American women. So there might be a
bit of cultural differences coming in there as well. So
looking at a bunch of different studies, and this is
coming out of the Red Center, but they set that
between and two thousand and six there was a sixty
(09:43):
six percent increase in weight bias, which was calculated based
on the number of people who reported experiencing it, and
so what are the real world effects of these weight biases.
Not surprisingly, it's a lot of terrible stuff. Um. Just
for for one snap shot, there was study which I
realized is kind of dated, but there's a study looking
(10:06):
at this and they found that in this this was
among college students. They found that students considered obese people
being the fifth lowest on a ranking of desirability, preferring
quote to marry an embezzler, cocaine user, ex mental patient, shoplifter,
(10:26):
sexually promiscuous person, communist, blind person, atheist, or marijuana user
before wanting to marry an obese person. Interesting, you would
rather marry a shoplifting coke addict. I mean, that's that's
some pretty communist shoplifting coke at I know, it's it's
it's it's a little bit dated, Sarah, Yeah, even though
(10:50):
still so. I mean that right there speaks to how
kind of deep this is. But the Red Center, as
we mentioned, which is out of Yale University, has really
focused a lot on looking into the weight bias and
its real world effects and has conducted a lot of
research on it, and they've identified all sorts of ways
(11:11):
in which this weight stigma impacts people's day to day lives,
starting with workplace discrimination, which is a massive problem and
does affect overweight and obese men and women, but women
are more likely to experience it compared to men. Right,
the National Survey of Midlife Development in the US did
find that women are sixteen times more likely to report
(11:33):
weight related employment discrimination than men, and a separate survey
that studied overweight and obese women found that twenty five
percent of those women reported experiencing job discrimination and reported
weight stigma from employers or supervisors. And in the European Union,
there was a similar study that found that a ten
(11:55):
percent increase in one's b m I correlated to a
three point three percent drop in wages for women compared
to a one point nine percent drop in wages for men.
Um And even when people leave work and for instance,
go to the doctor, wait, bias still crops up there
a lot too, especially for women. There was one study,
(12:17):
for instance, which found that women, compared to men, were
more likely to agree with this statement, Nobody looks into
why I'm overweight. They just put me on diets. Yeah,
and I mean this, uh, not to go off totally
on a tangent, But that that quote really kind of
jumped out at me because of the whole Hashimoto's thing.
You know, when I was uh, gaining a surprising amount
(12:38):
of weight and not being able to lose it in
a very surprisingly short amount of time. You know, I
got weighed at the same doctor that I've been going
to for eleven years, and I'm like, you're not You're
not gonna ask me anything about the fact that I've
all of a sudden put on all this weight. It
was like up to me to then go to a
different doctor and be like, Hey, something is up with
(12:58):
my body. Can you fix me? Can you help me
and tell me what's going on? And not not that
I am walking the same path as someone who is
maybe fifty two hundred pounds overweight, but still, when something's
going on with your body, you want to be able
to rely on healthcare professionals to both be sympathetic and
be proactive and helping you figure it out. But yeah,
(13:20):
a lot of these people that were in the study
were saying, like, I just didn't get the medical attention
that I needed for for this this thing that's affecting
my life. They just sort of thought, oh, well, you're
fat and lazy. Yeah, you should probably just go to
the gym. And as a result, some women and men
alike will avoid going to the doctor altogether just so
(13:41):
they don't have to deal with that kind of weight stigma. Because,
I mean having to deal with weight stigma on top
of just the awkwardness of sitting in a in a
gown waiting, you know, in the tiny little exam room.
It can't be that can't be easy to deal with, right,
And if you look at schools, the Red Center found
at of overweight and obese women reported experiencing weight stigma
(14:04):
from a teacher or a professor and had experienced it
more than once or multiple times. Similarly, there was a
Swedish study that found lower educational attainment for overweight and
obese women partially explained by not being popular in school. Yeah,
I mean it leads to social isolation a lot of times.
Because again, these biases are not something that just magically
(14:28):
emerge in adulthood. Um. But in terms of the real
world impacts of it, the area that jumped out the
most to me was how weight stigma impacts relationships, because
this has overwhelmingly such a disproportionate effect on women. This
is a quote from that Rudd meta analysis finding that
(14:48):
weight stigma may have an especially negative impact on dating
prospects for obese women. UM, citing a study, for instance,
that found that both men and women negatively rated a
dating profile of a woman described as fat, overweight, or
obese compared to a dating profile that might have used
euphemistic terms like full figured, or a dating profile describing
(15:10):
a woman who had a history of drug abuse. Would
rather date a woman with a history of drug abuse
than an obese woman. Yeah, and it made it makes
me think of the whole um the sitcom problem that
we we seem to have, which is that we're we're
Also it's reinforced every night at dinner time for those
recurring sitcoms that the funny fat man is okay, and
(15:35):
he's a desirable husband and you love him and he's
a big bear. Um, but he always has the skinny,
like super made up, dolled up, big hair, gorgeous, high
healed woman for a wife. And so that's just something
that gets reinforced and it's a terrible cycle. Um. There
was a study that showed that both men and women
(15:56):
ranked an obese potential partner lower than those with mint
illness or a history of s t I S. Although
men ranked the obese women significantly less preferable than women
ranked the obese men, which goes back to that whole
sitcom Divide Too, I feel like, but also for this conversation,
because we're really focusing on I think a lot on
(16:17):
on women body shaming other women, it's notable that in
all of these studies that include male and female participants,
that women are just as shaming towards overweight now as
the men are. It's not like, oh, we're just one
like massive group of female solidarity rooting for each other. Nope,
we we are exercising these biases as well. And when
(16:41):
when there's one study looking at the source of fat
shaming within families, the most prominent shamer of all was
the mom. See it was it was opposite in my house.
My mother was like, eat a whole turkey, you're beautiful. Here,
have all of the sweets and chips. I want you
(17:01):
to finish the ice cream, which who knows what was
going on there. But my father was the one who
would like make a clucking noise anytime I like went
for the downut. Yeah, that kind of stuff makes me
so trepidacious about the prospect of ever being a parent,
because similarly, those are the kinds of things that also
(17:21):
stuck in my childhood brain of you know, some tisking
disapproval during my hushky days if I were to reach
for a snack or I mean, I love, I love
my mom. But she was also very proud of her
petite figure, and that was something that I mean, it
was just very much present in my formation of what
(17:45):
an attractive woman should look like or a girl should
look like, you know, because she would talk a lot
about how, you know, when she was younger, when she
was my age, she dated a lot, and then I
would look at photos of her and she was much
smaller than I was, and you you know, you start
building those bridges in your your little little child brains. Yeah,
I know that makes me sad. Well, let's talk about
(18:07):
some good news and do some weight stigma myth busting,
and also talk about some thin shaming on the other
end of this body shame spectrum when we come right
back from a quick break. Now back to the show.
So I think we pretty clearly established that weight bias exists.
(18:32):
We have experienced it in our own lives, Caroline. Um,
But let's do some myth busting. Let's spread some good
news to balance out all the terrible news of how
persistent fat shaming and weight bias in general is in
our society. Right. One of those myths is that people
who are overweight have a complete lack of control, that
(18:54):
that whole puritanical moral control issue. There was a literature
review you published in the journal Sex Roles that found
that fat women are deemed that they could be attractive,
but that they lack the control to do so, and
that means that they're perceived to be weak or out
of control, and that is just not the case. Yeah.
(19:16):
I mean, there have been plenty of studies that would
take as far too long to cite individually in this
podcast about how overweight and obese people. Plenty of them
do exercise and watch what they eat. It's not so
much an issue of that kind of self controlling stuff
that's impacting their weight. It's probably things going on genetically
or with health condition. She's that doctors might not be
(19:39):
paying attention to because they're too busy fat shaming them. Right, Yeah,
you have no idea what's going on with someone. For instance,
I have a friend of mine who she's beautiful, and
she works out all the time. She does CrossFit, she
does yoga, she does this and that. She watches what
she eats, but she's overweight because she has hypothyroidism. She
I'm like, I don't even know how you have the
(19:59):
time tim in the day to work out as much
as you do, Like, she well, I don't even know
how you do it and have a job at the
same time. But she's she says that, you know, when
people look at me, they just think that I sit
around eating pizza and drinking beer all day long. She's like,
but I'm the furthest thing from lazy and unmotivated and
out of control as you can be. Well, if you
are genuinely invested in someone losing weight, one of the
(20:21):
worst things that you can do to motivate a person
is fat shame them because A March two thousand fourteen
study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that
exposure to wait stigmatizing news articles caused self perceived overweight
women to actually consume more calories and feel less capable
(20:42):
of controlling their eating than exposure to non stigmatizing articles
sort of a self sabotaging effect that takes place when
if you're sitting there and and maybe you want to
lose weight, but you're just being told, well, you know,
you're just a fatty fat fat and you can't do
anything for yourself because you're just lazy. Guess what. It's
going to become a self fulfilling type of prophecy with that, right,
(21:02):
And they were saying that the better way to frame
that is more lifestyle changes that you're doing something. And
this is something that a lot of a lot of
people talk about, which is, you know what, whether you're overweight, underweight,
normal weight, whatever, is framing your life in a more
like healthy way, you know, talking about food in terms
of what it gives you and how it fuels you
instead of don't eat that Hershey bar because it's got
(21:26):
too much fat in it, or only eat those carrots
because they have no fat, blah blah blah, making it
more about having a healthy lifestyle less about the weight
itself exactly. Um And even if weight loss occurs, research
has also found that it does not necessarily erase the
weight stigma. I mean in the same way that you
and I, so many years after the fact, are sitting
(21:47):
here recalling in crystal clear detail times from our childhood
when we felt horrible about our bodies. That stigma does
not magically disappear. Um. This was confirmed by a recent
study out of Clemson University which found that, uh, for
women who had lost weight, they were still attached in
(22:09):
a way to this previous person who had been stigmatized.
It was like almost an entirely different identity that they
had to shed over time, Right, because there's that trauma
that kind of sticks with you. Yeah, you can't just
leave that behind automatically. But we have to talk about
the fat acceptance movement, and this is something that we
we touched on in our Plus Sized Fashion episode. Um.
(22:32):
But this is a movement that has roots in the sixties,
right alongside civil rights and other social movements feminism that
we're happening at the time, we see the emergence of
fat acceptance. UM. In the nineteen sixties, there was a
fat in demonstration in Central Park in which people ate
ice cream while burning photos of thin models. Yeah, this
(22:54):
kind of advocacy that you're seeing more and more and more,
especially via social media, is not a new thing at all,
and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance was formed
in nineteen sixty nine, and then you have the International
Size Acceptance Association beginning as well, and this took off
(23:14):
even more in the era of blogging with what was
termed or is termed I should say, it's not like
it's disappeared, uh, the phato sphere where all of a sudden,
women in particular were Kate Harding is a name that
comes up a lot in these conversations, UM talking about, Hey,
you know what, I am overweight and I am healthy,
and I'm not going to let the media tell me
(23:36):
anymore that I am hideous and should just hide behind
you know, tent like clothing right right exactly. And then
that ties into the whole healthy at Every Size movement,
which is basically what I was just saying about making
your life about being healthy, not necessarily about being a
particular weight, um. And it's based around the whole idea
(23:57):
of honoring your body, treating it well, eating foods that
are good for you and that fuel you, not being
so concerned about what size your pants are. Yeah, and
I mean it's really great that the fat acceptance movements
started and that we are continuing to broaden our acceptance
of what female beauty is and can look like. But
(24:19):
along with criticism of fat shaming, I kind of also
came a bit of thin shaming in its wake. Uh.
There's a two thousand eleven study, for instance, that found
that quote explicit weight stereotypes are curvilinear, especially among women,
and in every day speak, that basically means that not
(24:43):
only is there a weight bias at the larger end
of the spectrum, but also at the smaller end of it. Right,
look at Angelina Jolie when she came out on stage
at the Oscars I think that was two years ago,
and there was the dress with the big split in it,
the leg, the leg. Yeah, and it got its on
too account. But everybody was, like the Internet seemed to
be aghast at her body shape and saying that she
(25:06):
needed to go home and eat imply. Yeah, I mean,
I feel like there's as much schaden freud for looking at, uh,
you know, celebrities overweight beach bodies or not, you know,
perfectly photoshopped beach bodies as there are for extremely thin
beach bodies. We want to point at both of them
and say, oh, that's that's not okay. Um, But there
(25:26):
have also been these Internet memes which, on the one hand,
seemed really empowering for women of like, yes, embrace curvy bodies.
That's great, But the way they're framed is very thin
shamy as well, because there's, for instance, this thing called
the Maryland meme. You've probably seen it if you have
(25:47):
a Facebook account, and it's a picture of Marilyn Monroe
wearing her one piece swimsuit looking all kinds of gorge,
you know, and and having a not super duper thin
and body, and then next to it you have an
image of a super thin celebrity basically pointing out like,
oh look, you know this is this is what real
(26:08):
beauty looks like. Yeah, And then I mean that could
be a whole other discussion about like what is real beauty,
what's a real woman? And and that that's sort of
the conversation that's happening behind a lot of these memes
like the whin did this become hotter than this meme?
Which is awful, and but then it becomes better that
it repairs itself, it redeems itself. When you look at
(26:31):
the memes that are making fun of the whin did
this become hotter than this? Meme, which is like when
did these Japanese body pillows become hotter than you know?
And it's like a regular pillow or something. Yeah. Well,
and along those same lines, you have the whole real
women have curves, which is kind of tied into the
Maryland meme. It's the whole It's it's the same kind
of thing of saying, you know what this is, this
(26:53):
is what a beautiful woman looks like and she's this size,
to which women who might be naturally thinner say, hey, actually,
why are you saying that I'm not a real woman?
And also using the term real woman is also problematic
when you start looking at since gender versus transgender, because
that's also leaving out a whole group of people too
who don't look like or weren't born looking like Marilyn Monroe.
(27:16):
So it's all sorts of problematic. Yeah, and it doesn't
help anybody at the end of the day. Yeah, it's
like things started to get great, like let's accept ourselves,
you know, starting with fat acceptance and all that stuff,
like the dials moving up to the top of the thing,
and you're like, yes, things are getting great, We're accepting
ourselves were being healthy for health sake, not for the scale,
(27:37):
and then it whoops, it kept going and so now
we're being like, oh, all you other women are gress looking,
and it's like, okay, come on, come on, You've been
fighting against the fat stigma for so long and now
you're turning around and telling another group of women that
they look bad. Right, Because the thing is, it all exists.
I keep saying that that it's a spectrum, because it
(27:58):
really is. You can plot out body shaming along a
spectrum that all revolves around our perceptions of acceptable amounts
of women's control over their own bodies, to where fat
shaming revolves around women not having enough control over it
or not exerting enough control. And then the other end
of it is thin shaming that revolves around accusations of
(28:21):
women exerting too much control. Oh, she cares, she goes
to the gym too much, she watches too much what
she eats, And it's like, well, where is that happy medium,
because then we are going to get into the issue
of well, this is like this is the appropriate female
uniform body and this makes me okay, this means that
I fit in Okay, in the world, and that you know,
(28:42):
all of I'm wearing my politics appropriately. And one reason too,
that we've spent a bulk of this podcast talking about
weight bias in the terms of fat shaming is because
really all of the research is focused on fat bias,
because I don't think that the idea of thin shaming
(29:03):
has even been a topic of conversation until the past
few years. I mean, there was that two thousand eleven
study that it simply acknowledged that it exists. Other than that,
I found no mention of it in research. I feel
like it's only something that's been you know that women
are starting to raise their hand every now and then
saying hey, I really don't like those real women have
(29:25):
curves memes, and I think a lot of a lot
of people, a lot of women come back and say, well,
you'r thin, what do you have to worry about? Like
why what do you so? What do you so? But
heard over the idea of thin privilege, thin privilege. I mean,
I get that the fact of the matter is when
it comes to our Western beauty ideals, thin is more desirable,
(29:47):
But I don't know, it's like, once starting to talk
about thin privilege just starts pitting women's bodies against each other.
And that's not it's just not good for what is
that teaching little girls? That's what I try to that's
my self check a lot of times. Is okay, I
can have these conversations with adult women, that's fine, But
(30:08):
what is all of this teach little girls? What are
they seeing? They're seeing women fight with each other. They're
hearing you know what is best, what is real, what
is right? Rather than you are you? And that's great.
It's almost like how you registered to vote. You've got
to check that box about what you are, Republican, Democrat, whatever.
(30:29):
It's almost like, alright, little girl, now you have to
pick are you going to be slim, slender, thin? Are
you going to be large, curvy and big boned? And
then you've got a pretty much fight for the rest
of your life against the person who's the other body type. Yeah.
And this isn't to say that we don't need a
massive media makeover of the images that we are being delivered.
(30:51):
I mean, say what you will about the Dove Real
Bodies campaign. Some of it is it's it's not all perfect,
but it is good to see more women of different
and various sizes on billboards, in magazines, on television. We
need to see more of that, but we But it
doesn't mean that we just have to throw all of
(31:14):
these thinner bodies under the bus, because I've also talked
to women and heard for many women in response to
doing this topic who were you know, are naturally thin
and have been bullied mercilessly because of it, have been
told go eat a sandwich more times than they can count,
and have been uh, you know, told to the whole
thing of what is it? Ah, real men like curves,
(31:37):
dogs eat bones, which is disgusting. Well, you know, I
mean we we touched on this in our our Thin
Spow fits Bow episode, you know, talking about all those
things that are on Pinterest or Tumbler or wherever they are,
and um, I don't I feel like I feel like
this is such a it's of course it's a touchy subject,
and I feel like in that episode in particular, we
(31:58):
touched a nerve because I think there were a lot
of people who were like, well, if you're being offended
by this stuff, obviously your overweight and unhealthy, and you
don't have a sense of humor and or or um
taking issue that you know, what fits bow and and
what could be perceived as things Bow really gets me motivated.
This actually keeps me healthy, you know, and and gets
(32:22):
me like going jogging whenever I need to. Right, And
I think, like we said in the fits Bow episode,
and I'll say it again here and I kind of
already said it, but I'll say it again. Uh, whatever
motivates you to be the healthy person that you need
to be and that you should be, I don't think
needs to come at the expense of some other person's
(32:44):
body shape or some other person's health or mental well being. Yeah.
There was an article in Shameless magazine about this, and
I felt like they put it so well, talking about
the problem with things like the real women have curves
memes that we see, Uh, they say, quote that's supposed
to be an empowering message to women. You don't have
to be a victorious secret model to be beautiful, but
(33:06):
it's completely undermined by too much older memes divide and
conquer and the male gays essentially saying like all this
is really doing if you really focused in on this
conversation of curvy bodies or what men really want, what
are we doing then we're figuring out the best way
to objectify ourselves. We're trying. Basically, we're conversing about what's
(33:27):
the most palatable for dudes, which is not helping anybody
except maybe guys. I don't know, but I don't. I
don't think i've ever I'm trying to recall a conversation
over hearing a conversation among guy friends body shaming each other.
(33:48):
I can't think of one. I really can't of like,
he should he should go, Bob should really go eat
a sandwich. I don't think I've ever heard that, unless
Bob was like really hungry and talking about how we
really would like to go the sandwich. Yeah, I don't know.
I feel like men's body conversations are more about body
hair and or muscularity. Real men have biceps. Is that
(34:08):
the way that it would Yeah, the way that it
would happen. I mean not to say also not to
discount men's body image issues there, you know there, we
could talk about that for an entire podcast as well.
And guys, if you want to hear about it, if
you want to hear two women talk about male body image,
will do it. But I just I just see it
so often on on the Internet and on social media
(34:30):
where girls spend so much time. And in the same
way that that Delia's image of really thin girls with
really wide thy gaps just kind of transformed the way
I looked at my body. These kinds of images of
real women look like this or this is you know,
(34:51):
this is disgusting, This isn't disgusting. Those kinds of meme
images that are supposed to be empowering can similarly alienate girls.
But then bringing it all home, we can think about
the brew haha over at targets website where they had
the biggest photoshop fail I oh God. And and for
(35:14):
those of you who don't know what I'm referring to,
basically on targets website, they were selling bathing suits and
they photoshopped a thigh gap on one of the models,
but they didn't stop at the thighs. I don't know
if the mouse slipped out from someone's hand and then
it didn't go through an approval process, but they basically
made a vagina gap as well, a volval gap, not
(35:37):
just the thigh gap. That just kept going and people
were like, um, this is this is getting ridiculous. Now, Yeah,
I mean, basically, it was clear that they had gotten caught,
that they were photoshopping thigh gaps. But the good news is,
I mean, I do think that, partially because of the Internet,
I do think that girls are more media savvy today
in the sense of knowing what photoshop is, knowing the
(35:59):
airbrushing exists. But it's still yes, and and it's still
you're still being presented with certain images all the time,
being bombarded with certain messages all the time. And if
you fall outside of that very narrow space, then on
either side, then you do you you know, it's possible
(36:19):
that you'll feel like a complete outsider, that you'll feel
like you're not as attractive, and people will make you
feel that way. Yeah, I mean, I just think that
whenever these conversations come up, it's so important to pay
attention to whether we are attacking the root of the
problem or just someone who doesn't look like us, you know.
(36:41):
And also, I mean, I think it's important to to
take pause that um, you know, if if you are
if you're talking to another woman about body issues, like
you don't necessarily know what that person has looked like
for the entirety of their lives and what has been
told to them about what their body looks like, whether
it might be a lot thinner than yours or might
(37:03):
be a lot larger than yours. And I mean, I know,
you know plus sized women who have like so much
more body confidence than I ever will. And you know
you can say the same thing about someone who is
much thinner and fitter and has like just a body
made out of made out of muscle. I don't know,
I just I I it's just disheartening to see these
(37:26):
conversations so often spiral into women attacking other women rather
than really taking a look at how to kind of
make life better for future girls by focusing on the
roots of the problem. How do we do that, Caroline?
How do we how do we route this stuff from
the source? I don't know, Man, just loudly support our
(37:49):
sisters so that girls can hear. Yeah, I mean, remembering
in those studies that women are as complicit and wait
bias as men are. This isn't an attack against men.
We are just as guilty. We gotta stop it. So
I'm sure that this has sparked a lot of thoughts
in our listeners and guys. I know this conversation has
(38:10):
been largely focused on women, but we we do not
want to exclude you. We want to hear from you
as well. So all of your thoughts on this. Have
you experienced wait bias, whether it's fat shaming, thin shaming,
and do you have ideas as to how we stop
this and perhaps save future girls from body hate? Let
(38:32):
us know. Moms Stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can email us. You can also tweet us and
mom Stuff podcasts or messages on Facebook, and we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now. Okay, well,
I have a message here from a fellow Kristen Kristen
Um about online dating. She says, I wanted to share
(38:55):
my new online dating success filled life. Currently, I'm engaged
to someone I met on okay Cupid. Both of my
fiance's brothers met their current partners on okay Cupid. One
is getting married before us and the other just started
dating an awesome woman. Two of my best friends are
either married or getting married next month to people they
met on okay Cupid. Apparently we're all too cheap to
(39:17):
pay for dating sites, but we seem to be having
really good luck. So thank you, Kristen and Uh, you
are you and pretty much everybody in your life is
a great success story. Well, I've got an email here
from Sarah and she wrote us about our women in
Science episode and also our a d h D episode,
And I just want to focus in on her conversation
(39:39):
about a d D medication because we talked about adderall
and we referred to it as a wonder drug a
number of times, and we're sort of talking about it's
abuse among people who don't have a diagnosis for a
d h D. Just want to clarify that because she
brings up a good point about how she writes being
on medication and just brings me up to where most
(40:02):
people normally operate. It doesn't give me any sort of superpowers.
In college, it still felt like I had to work
way harder than my classmates to study and to get
things done on time. But at least I had the
drive to do well. My mind still wanders, which can
be helpful in looking at issues from a different angle
than they have been considered before, but it can also
wig out the spouse with how incredibly random I am.
(40:23):
Like the other day, he showed me a picture on
Facebook of a little boy with his head being slobbered
on by a camel, and my reply was, huh, I
wonder if giraffes are ruminants. My brain. Camels have no
top teeth at the front of their upper palette classified
as ruminants, as our lamas, which are South American camelids
but aren't really ruminants like goats and cheap etcetera, etcetera.
(40:43):
And this goes on and on and on. She says,
all this happened in about three seconds, and and for
the record, giraffes are the tallest ruminants on Earth. In search,
Shooting Star, your Lovely Heart, music, and the words, the
more you know. In the years since, the notion that
ad D is overdiagnosed has led to some of the
people close to me to try to convince me that
(41:04):
I don't actually need the medication that I take, and
I just want to punch these people in the throat
because I was diagnosed on the later side. I've developed
coping mechanisms to get by, but it was such a
struggle and it continues to be an uphill battle to
wrestle my brain into getting organized. Just as I wouldn't
deny corrective lenses to those who can't see properly, Nor
would I deny insulin to a diabetic. Telling someone who
(41:25):
really has a d D to go without medication is unhelpful.
I could write more, but I just noticed something shiny
and must investigate. So thank you Sarah for not only
your insights but also your hilarity, and thanks to everybody
who's written into us. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is where you can send us your emails, and we'll
also have up all of the study citations from all
(41:48):
the research that we talked about in our body shaming episode.
And to find that, as well as all of our
social media links, videos, and blog posts, head on over
to stuff and I've Never Told You dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
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