Some Of My Best Friends Are Short
On the body_positive livejournal community, Cynthia posts a video response to the fat rant that asks why there aren’t more pro-petite websites out there?
Why is it that the larger sized people get so much more media attention? Size acceptance websites tend to skew more to the plus than to the petite, and they seem to be very negative (not sure if it’s intentional or not) towares people who are really size zero.
I think that this can definitely be true, and was interested in listening to her thoughts on being more inclusive. Then while watching her video, this caught my ear:
There are tons of people in Hollywood who are my size. Tons of people in the music industry who are my size.
She goes on to complain that they don’t advocate for petites, but unfortunately, no fat person can say “there are tons of people in Hollywood who are my size.” When it comes to fat women, there are a mere handful. When we do see someone of our size, more often than not, they end up losing weight. (Our conversation about Sara Rue and Oprah comes to mind.) And that, I think, is my answer to Cynthia’s question.
Lots more responses in the comments:
My guess is that it’s because petite people don’t go through life having complete strangers call them disgusting, insult them in restaurants, or tell them that their bodies are disgusting. All of those fat positive videos and websites you mention, if they allow open comments, are flooded with comments accusing the fat-positive people of being disgusting, hateful, lazy, even evil. Fat people encounter that every day. It’s true that short people also encounter certain size prejudices, and the fashion industry only caters to a small size range, and that’s problematic and should get fixed. But the problem of fat-positivity is not an issue of fashion or shopping. It’s an issue of hate.
I definitely think that size acceptance should be broad enough to include small people. I try very hard to rid my speech of negative talk about smaller people that sometimes creeps up in forums where people are praising people of size (i.e. referring to smaller/thinner people as “a sack of bones” or things like saying “real” women have curves, etc.). I also consciously choose to use the terms “size acceptance” and “size-positivity” rather than “fat acceptance” because I want to be inclusive.
I have seen small, cute coworkers consistently ignored, have their intellectual and professional contributions diminished, while their male coworkers believed they were treating them well by flattering them for their looks instead of their intelligence and professional skills.
I was trying to figure out how to work in a reference to Angela Kinsey (quite petite) and Phyllis Smith (woman of size) both of whom are on the delightfully inclusive series, you may have heard of it, The Office. But check it out. Aren’t they all gorgeous? My point, obviously, being… um… that show rules. And also, we love short people.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: The Office, TV, Video
Haha, I lovelovelove The Office. Angela and Phyllis are both great. There are definetely more references to Phyllis’ weight (and age) on the show (and remember the fat guy from Stamford?), but it’s true that Angela is often underestimated. It would be interesting to see how weight and height discrimination co-exist in the workplace.
It isn’t true by any means that people who are size zero don’t hear about it on a daily basis. As many times as I’ve been complimented for having a “cute figure,” I HAVE had complete strangers accuse me of having an eating disorder, disgustedly call me bony, and ask me point-blank how much I weigh. I think almost no matter what your body looks like, if you’re a woman, you’re going to hear about it, often.
I think at least part of the reason why you don’t hear as much from petite women about their body issues is because many of us feel like, in light of the positive attention we also get, we’re not supposed to/allowed to HAVE issues.
But really, whatever it is that makes people think it’s OK to say about a fat person “Why doesn’t she just STOP STUFFING HER FACE?” and feel morally superior about it — isn’t that the same thing that makes it OK to say, “Nicole Richie should just EAT A SANDWICH already”?
I take your point, absolutely, but Nicole… I mean, she used to have a normal body (remember when she was “Paris Hilton’s chubby friend”?) and she just got thinner and thinner and now she is emaciated. There is photographic proof that she’s on drugs, so it’s not like she’s a poster child for healthy weight loss, either. I don’t know if this makes it different, but in my head, it does. I don’t think she’s just a naturally thin girl. I think she’s slowly destroying herself.
But, um, throw in Keira Knightley and I will totally agree with you!
I’m all for sticking with our slighter sisters – I just hope we’re not the only ones putting “solid” into “solidarity”. I had a one-lass stand-in at Nordstrom’s Rack last week, insisting that if they sold the plus sizes at a higher price than regular sizes (based on material used, cost to transport, etc.), then they should charge less for the smaller sizes. Fair is fair, right? Well, they actually _did_ drop the prices on all of the sizes (not proportionate, but we all saved a few cents) and moved the large bra sizes to the top of the round racks.
And, I loved the pic of you at the exhibition, Mo. Sorry if the humor challenged didn’t appreciate your comment.
I firmly believe that women have body issues because we have it ingrained into ourselves that we must be all to all.
It’s really a matter of perception. We all have things about ourselves that we would like to change.
Telling a fat person to stop stuffing himself/herself or telling a thin person to eat a sandwich is like telling an ugly person to get a nose job.
What is truly sad is that some people out there get their rocks off by making other people feel small.
1. I believe that size acceptance is critical regardless of whether we’re talking about fat people, short people, thin people or even tall people – I’ve known a couple of very tall women who really struggle with their body image and the way they’re treated.
2. Derogatory comments about thin women – as thin women – is just bigotry.
3. The issues of thin women and short women are often inextricable from the issues fat people face – and trivializing these problems isn’t helpful.
4. But still. The issues that fat people face at this point in history are far more severe.
This doesn’t take one jot away from the importance of size acceptance and the stigmatization of thin women or short women.
But fat has been thoroughly politicized in a way that other body sizes haven’t, and fat hatred has become woven into every aspect of the culture. There are layers of intolerance and hatred, abusive and hyperbolic rhetoric and increasingly organized discrimination, which is aggravated by a full-blown global hysteria about fat.
I don’t doubt that I don’t grasp the full panorama of issues that smaller women face – and I shouldn’t be blinded by fat acceptance that I dismiss or trivialize what they have to face. And I always want to learn more.
But I see a lot of short women and thin women who like to pose a sort of neat symmetry between fat phobia and what they’re going through – and it bothers me not because I want to trivialize stigmatization of other body sizes, but because I’m afraid that in their quest for alliance and symmetry, they’re minimizing what’s going on with fat – it’s been singled out for a crusade which has gone far beyond namecalling and body image.
It’s a shame when every woman I know has been told they are too fat, too skinny, too ugly, too disgusting…
It’s not just men either. Girls who think they are perfect and have a right to judge others blatantly open the floodgates and hurl a range of abuse at others – skinny girls and fat girls!
When did the world become a place for others to judge you on your size? Has it always been a ‘sizist’ life…I honestly wonder how long ago in time you can go back before you could be any size you liked and be happy about it…Does anyone know?
fatfu, i appreciate your comments. this conversation actually reminds me, to an extent, of what a conversation about solidarity in regard to race looks like. for example, all people feel stigmatized at certain times and in certain places because of their race…but when a white person (which i am) says “when i have been in a place where i am the only white person, and people have made cracks about me, so i know what it feels like” i have to raise an eyebrow. because at the end of the day, maybe a white person will feel that racial bigotry on a rare occasion…but they still have most of the power in business, politics, and culture.
and i guess that’s how i feel when thin people say “hey, we’re all in the same boat.” because while i do know that almost all women, regardless of size, experience struggle and negativity from the outside–at the end of the day, all the real cultural power is still with the thin people. i don’t think that real solidarity does exist, when that realization isn’t part of it.
Are we using “petite” to mean short or just all-around small? Because I definitely think that short people are on the outside of that “cultural power” mentioned above. Sure, there are some people who have a positive view of tiny women in particular, but it’s a positive view that is not really any better than fat fetishism.
I remember reading a report about a study a while ago that showed that earning power is even more directly correlated to height than it is to gender. A short man earns almost as little (and hits the same glass ceiling) as a woman, and tall women do better than short women.
Short women get patronized in a way that those of us who aren’t short probably don’t even notice. One of my work friends is tiny, and although we are the same age and she already has a kid, it was really eye-opening for me to see the difference in the way she was treated at work during her recent pregnancy, and the way that I am being treated. While I’ve been a little irritated by the dumb, patronizing things that people say to pregnant women, she was treated like a child. It pissed her off, too, but of course when someone who is 4’11” gets pissed off, that’s just adorable, right?
I wish I had a videocam so that I could post a reply to this. Because it is *so* not just an issue of clothing size. In the past I have been as large as a 14p (at an “obese” bmi), now I am around a 4p, although in non-petite sizes I sometimes wear a 0. In my life I’ve now run the gamut. I’ve been invisible because of my size. I feel I’ve lost jobs when I walked into interviews uncomfortable because I couldn’t afford a good suit in my size. Cheap business clothes just don’t look good when you’re a 14… especially when no cheap stuff exists in a 14p, so it’s tight but too long. :-/
However, it’s not all so rosy once you’re small either. You get the short end of all these debates about how the mere existence “size 0” is bad for teenagers. People hint that you have an eating disorder (no, I have a binge eating disorder and I still have to deal with it all the time). New colleagues assume that you’re an intern, though you’re on the other side of 30 with a master’s degree. You get people who literally smash you against the back of an elevator or spill beer on your head in a bar because they don’t see the short girl and I’m no longer big enough that they have to avoid the invisible fat girl.
Let’s face it. Sizism sucks in all forms.
No. Not only are you completely wrong, but you are astoundingly ignorant.
“My guess is that it’s because petite people don’t go through life having complete strangers call them disgusting, insult them in restaurants, or tell them that their bodies are disgusting.”
Do you have any idea what it is like to be a small size? Do you have any idea how much hate there is in the media towards these girls? Even look at posts such as yours, they critisize people for liking these types of girls rather than accepting the obese – which turns into these types of girls constantly, and I mean constantly being ridiculed.
No public comments? I’ve had a lot of people insult me on the street while passing by me. Family members have tossed the anorexic comments. Strangers have tossed the bulemic comments.
People like you, who seem to think they’re the optomistic ones looking out for the overweight but are actually putting down everyone else, are the ones who are most sizist of all.
Settle down, Rachel. It was a guess, and sometimes guesses are wrong. It’s okay to be wrong, as long as one’s willing to listen to reasonable arguments and reconsider her opinion accordingly. Certainly some of the responses to this post have made me reconsider my feelings on the matter [though I still fundamentally agree with fat fu and bethany].
Name-calling is not reasonable. It’s not constructive. It’s rude, and you should stop it.
fatfu, I completely agree with your comments.
I try to keep an open mind about body issues and how they impact people’s lives who don’t look like me. A trivial example is that I didn’t know until my senior year of high school that my thin friends found the term “skinny” insulting. I thought it was a compliment (or at the very least an expression of jealousy) and though I hadn’t been using the word myself, I filed that away and tried to be more empathetic. I hope I am still trying to learn and expose my own assumptions and prejudices about people (and especially women) of all sizes, because I certainly don’t want to be sizist against anybody.
However, 90% of the people who would call my thin friends “skinny” probably really were reacting out of jealousy, not objective hatred of thinness (keep in mind we were in HIGH SCHOOL. Very few high school girls hate thinness). Sizism directed at thin women seems more “superficial” and is sort of a form of fat hatred anyway: I’m a woman, therefore I hate my body and its perceived fatness, therefore I’ll lash out at you because I’m jealous of you. I could be wrong, but although I do see some inappropriate and unnecessary meanness toward thin women in the media–possibly that jealousy thing again, or a form of “taking back the word” e.g. “real women have curves”–I certainly don’t see HATE the way hatred for fat people pervades our society.
I guess I feel that, on the one hand, the “ew, size 0 is anorexic” or “I hate you for being able to eat like that”; and on the other, the infantilizing of small/thin women as described by thatgirljj, are two separate issues. The first types of comments strike me as mainly tactless and mean (and although I realize there is some complexity there in terms of how girls and women relate to one another… frankly I don’t think stuff like this is even in the same league as true fat hatred).
The second is more of a significant issue that I think can get obscured by fixating on the eating disorder comments and such, and debating whether calling someone “fat” is worse than calling them “skinny,” or what have you. I look at the descriptions of being passed over for promotions, or being treated like a child (or not having one’s anger or opinions taken seriously), or of how terribly short men are treated in business, and it is really troubling. Like so many topics in this sphere, it seems you don’t have to scratch very far below the surface to feel like we still live in the stone age where gender issues are concerned.
Or maybe it’s all just part of the same thing and all equally significant. I’m not sure. It is a difficult issue. To be totally honest I’m pretty sure I’d still trade my fat body for a thin one–even a little “too” thin–and be more than happy to trade the issues of a fat girl for those of a thin girl. But maybe I’d be sorry later.
I read this blog pretty much every time there is a new post, but I haven’t felt the need to comment until now.
I weigh in at 196 pounds right now but at 5 feet 10 inches, I’m often told, “Wow, you don’t look that fat!” Because I wear a size 14/16, I’m on the fence clothing store-wise since a lot of so called regular stores sell clothing up to that size and most plus size stores start around that size. However, I have found that I’m not actually welcome in either, and a nice example of that happened about an hour ago. I was so upset I had to come home and blog about it: http://mollybaldy.blogspot.com/2007/06/prejudice.html
I’ve been skinny and I’ve been fat, and In my opinion they both suck. I’d rather not wear clothes at all, at this point.
I’m the person who created the video. I created it because yes, I do feel that thin people, short people and especially those who are both face the size discrimination not different from those who are plus sized. We constantly hear people say that women who are smaller than, say, size six are “curvier” and they question why size 14 is a “plus size” (my personal theory: generally, women’s clothing sizes have a ten inch difference between the waist and hips (aka WHR or waist-to-hip ratio). As the sizes get “bigger” the waist to hip ratio actually gets smaller. For example, a size 4 with a 25 inch waist and 35 inch hips works out to a 0.706 WHR while a missy 14 would be 35 waist; 45 hips, working out to 0.777 WHR! A plus 14 would probably be 35 waist, 46 hips, working out to 0.76, making the 14 plus a curvier size). It sounds very insulting to us. It makes us feel like children and unworthy. As other posters here have said, we are often treated that way professionally. Personally, I feel that I may have lost opportunities because of my size. When I was looking for work, I often had up to three or four interviews a week, yet I didn’t get a job for several months (I *KNOW* that my rejection has nothing to do with my ethnicity because my last name is very obviously NOT WASP or even white). It had much more to do with my size. I didn’t “look grown up” enough to be working in anything better than an internship. As for our (male) partners, I have heard stories about boyfriends/husbands of being reported as child molesters in extreme cases.
Pro-petite websites? Great idea! Bring ’em on, to add to the pro-petite movies, TV, billboards, magazines, news media, fashion ads–sorry, entire industry–say, come to think of it, the internet is already top-heavy with sites that are ALL ABOUT the ‘petite’ female form. It’s called porn!
What a ludicrious notion. I’m a straight, WASPy male of average weight. I’ve been in the cultural crosshairs for going on 40 years now but you don’t hear me whining about it because 99% of people with power and money look like me (side question: where’s my power and money?). Sorry, but when you’re the majority, you gotta take your lumps.
(I mean as a group, not as an individual. If you’re a skinny thing and your drunk Uncle Charlie calls you anorexic, full permission to drive your boney elbow into his larynx.)
Andrew
blog.dynamicfitness.us
Andrew,
Please watch my video and read the psots carefully. Petite is about height. You can be plus AND petite. With the exception of a few actresses and singers who act as spokesmodels for products, models are NOT petite, even if they wear a size 00. They are TALL.
Thanks
I think spacedcowgirl has a great point:
“Sizism directed at thin women seems more “superficial” and is sort of a form of fat hatred anyway: I’m a woman, therefore I hate my body and its perceived fatness, therefore I’ll lash out at you because I’m jealous of you.”
I think I can safely say that anyone who has expressed disgust towards me personally would rather be carrying my girth around.
ugh. I meant that anyone who has expressed disgust towards me personally would NOT rather be carrying my girth around.
OFF TOPIC: My second post to Andrew was meant posted AFTER his, yet it’s timestamped before? WEIRD
Ok…back to our regularly scheduled program
Just echoing what others have said, above – we short people need a little love, too. I am short and round, and people used to pat me on the head and call me cute, at work. I left that line of work, for other reasons, and now that I work in a female-dominated field, it doesn’t happen any more, probably because enough of us are short that it would be totally unacceptable to the majority.
I’m pretty sure it’s not fair to compare height to weight in terms of needing support, though, because short people can’t really hate themselves the same way for not changing themselves to be tall that fat people can self-loathe. That’s not to say that our culture isn’t really shit-headed to short people, but nobody can get away with saying, “You shorties whine a lot – I gained four inches and kept them on for five years, what’s stopping you?” the way some people do with fat.
(thatgirljj – try Talbot’s Petites – their 14P business clothes are basicaly the same as their standards, and if you need a more generous cut they even have Women Petite sizes starting at 12WP. They are definitely the exception, though.)
Is short man much smart than larger one?My mum always believe it.But i don’ t think so.I still love someone who is tall^^
Cynthia, I fixed the timestamp issue.
Cynthia,
I have a grandma and cousin both under 5 feet tall (and thin). It is hard. People all but pat you on the head and say they want to put you in their pocket, and such. And it’s hard to buy clothes. Also, short men? They have it tough, really tough. So, I hear ya.
…maybe it’s me, but isn’t petite a descriptor of height? Thus shouldn’t the petite be banding together in oppression with the super-tall? I mean, the question of size-ism on both ends of the spectrum is there, and it’s an important discussion to have. I just feel like conflating “petite” with “thin” is confusing the issue, as seen in some of the comments here.
(Cynthia, if you answer this in your video, forgive the dumb question – my computer is so old it won’t play videos anymore.)
Thought you ladies might get a kick out of this pic, allegedly, of Clive Owen’s wifey. Definitely large and in charge.
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I have to say (slightly late to the party) how much I’ve loved this conversation. Awesome comments, and a lot to think about.
I think the fashion Industry is absurd. Models look like they are on crack and do not look good, half the men in the industry are gay anyway and being bias about height is awful. If they are going to be hash to short woman, then they deserve these comments. You can still be elegant if you are petite. Look at Kylie she is elegant, is she not?
I am 5″3 a creative type and studying BA Illustration, in a specialized art school where there are also fashion degrees going on. Having been involved in the artistic industry has really opened my eyes, to how much woman physical attributes are obscured Woman cannot do anything right. We are either flicking through airbrushed images of models in fashion magazines or magazines picking Britney Spears to pieces, only the other week a magazine like heat penalized her for wearing pants on beach, she was just being a normal human being. It does anger me, because I feel that people should not try and look like someone else or why is it important to look taller. Why not be artistic and creative make yourself into an interesting person. Create something unique and different, what if you are talented. That can make someone attractive; it’s not all about physical attributes. Or what about that special twinkle in your eye, or that infectious laugh, camera cannot always capture all these other qualities of an individual,
It’s not about sitting in the corner picking over every calorie. Enjoy life; get out, even if it’s just for a walk. It’s not a crime to enjoy the simple things in life and if people attack you for being normal then toughen up to it until they except you for being a normal human being.
The media just loves to bully people and give ppl hang ups. If you’re to skinny its wrong, if you body shows a slightest sign of cellulite it’s also wrong.
In today’s society people have become so obsessed with perfection, we live in this obscured fantasy word where people cannot except the norm anymore, its really sad that people cannot just let themselves go and enjoy life we have to watch every morsel that enters our mouth with the fear of ‘oh No putting weight’ cause we do not want to look bad for the camera. Loads of beautiful woman in the media between 5” and 5”4 such as:
Shakira (5”1)
Britney Spears (5”4)
Dita Von Teese (5”3)
Amy Winehouse (5”3)
Jessica Simpson (5”3)
Kylie Minogue (5”1)
I could go on for a long time listing celebrities that are small and they look fab.
Obviously it comes down to choice, of the individual…..
Most of it’s an illusion, its amazing what can be done on programmes like Adobe project ‘Photoshop’
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