Wednesday Open Thread
Here’s your open thread, with a tidbit to kick off discussion:
One lovely girl whose weight was normal told us: “I don’t like my body shape because I think I look really fat”, and a lot of girls wanted to look like the most underweight child on the chart… Pointing to the picture of an obese child, we were told “because she is fat she will be nasty” and that “nobody really likes fat people”. This isn’t the first time that these opinions have been aired by young children. I witnessed an experiment in which a class of 30 ten-year-olds were asked to comment on pictures of a thin, medium and fat child. Almost without exception the children said that the fat child would be the nastiest and loneliest, while the thin one was the nicest, surrounded by friends.
Here’s the link. Feel free to discuss this story or anything else in the open thread! Regular posting will resume next week.
Posted by mo pie
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A generalization, if you will:
Guys call other guys gay, an insult that usually elicits a passionate response of I AM NOT GAY.
Girls call other girls fat, an insult meant to degrade, humiliate, and dehumanize.
How do we, as a society, remove the stigma from words that aren’t bad?
Speaking of the word ‘fat’, did anyone see on Bones last week when Brennen corrected the guy who was talking about “Fat Pam” and how ‘fat’ is a deposit of…whatever, under the skin? Bwahahaa! It made me cackle.
ACK! (that’s all I can think to say…)
Ugh. That’s terrible. But, sadly, too true.
I’m an EFL teacher, and a few days ago some of the students at the school I teach at had to put on skits. Most of the skits were funny take-offs on fairy tales. One was about how to ‘get fit’. The gist of the skit, stated outright, not implied, was: if you are overweight, you are greedy and have no friends. If you lose weight by not eating and exercising all day, every day, then you will automatically be popular. And these were 13-14 year-old kids. I was horrified.
What do we expect, y’all? I mean, really…..fat hatred….any kind of hatred of anything that is “different”….is indoctrinated in children very early…..
Not to lump them together in any way, shape or form, but let’s use racism as an example (and yes, I AM a POC)….no one is BORN a racist, but you can LEARN to be one…..just as you can LEARN to hate any “differentness”….for example, fat bodies….
These kids have had the fat = bad message pounded into their heads from all sides (home and school, thus far)….let’s not even start with the media….
Oddly enough, for those of us who are fat, it’s the skinny people who are mean, so for our demographic, the results of the “test” would be different. At least, for me it would be. For fat people who still hate their bodies, the results would probably be similar to those cited in the article. :-(
Why can’t people be people? Because it’s in our nature to put people in categories. :-/
Lots of studies have been done on this, even with babies and determining how long they look at pictures on a TV screen, they look at the “conventionally” pretty people longer than those that would typically be seen as not as attractive.