Yame
New member
Terms like "walking skeletons," "repulsive," "clothes hangers," "pubescent teen" were thrown around.So who is putting thin people down? The general consensus of the posters on this thread seems to be health is valued above body shape and all natural body shapes are acceptable.
Comments about how people should look at thin women and feel bad for them if they look smaller than what would be a "realistic" size.
Plus the photos and drawings of very thin or very muscular women being compared with thicker or "softer" women as if to imply the latter should be the ideal over the former. As if people could not simply appreciate that women come in ALL the above shapes and sizes?
I appreciate that the discussion has remained mostly positive and that most people have a pretty open-minded and realistic attitude towards body image on this board, but if all of the above examples had been reversed (people referring to obese women as "walking pieces of lard" or saying we should assume they are unhealthy and feel sympathy towards them, or throwing around photos of Victoria's Secret models vs. "real women" and implying that the former are more beautiful), we would be up in arms, and with very good reason.
I just don't think it's okay to have a double standard and nothing you said justifies that double standard.
Your doctor's attitude was horrible and I'm sorry you went through that. Sadly, doctors are hardly the experts on good nutrition, and sometimes have no idea how to have tact, either. Receiving comments like that from someone in a position of authority like that, at that age, must have had a really negative impact on your self-esteem, but I hope you didn't listen to him at the time. What an idiot.When I was a teen, I went to a doctor about my weight, explained I was only eating once a day, and was still having trouble losing weight. The son of a bitch sneered at me and said he knew people who only ate every third day in order to lose weight. And there I had medical advice to starve my body into submission.
Listen, I understand that at this moment in time, in this part of the world, people who are overweight (especially women) are at a severe disadvantage and suffer all kinds of prejudice, MUCH MORE than women who are underweight. I'm not arguing that "model thin" women have it worse, by any means, because they don't. The amount of fat-shaming that I see when people talk about others behind their back, or when they talk about celebrities, or people they see on the street, is alarming.
With that said though women who are very thin also get bullied, teased, and insulted. And even if it happens to a much lesser scale, in a lot of cases nowadays while it is politically incorrect to make comments about a person's weight to their face if they are "too fat," many people still think it's okay to make the same sorts of comments if the person is "too thin," as evidenced by this thread for example.
So the answer is not to transfer those very same prejudices and disadvantages onto thin women. The answer is to embrace the fact that we are NOT just bodies, and to embrace variety in our body types and shapes when we do talk about our bodies.
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