Since the moment I opened my eyes to the world, I’ve known I was fat. It’s pretty hard not to when everybody incessantly shoves that fact in your face.
When I was seven years old, I remember bawling my eyes out on the back of my mother’s scooter on a foggy morning as we zoomed through the congested roads of Ho Chi Minh City. She was berating me, droning on about how I “made people think of her as a bad mother” for raising a fat child.
Just before, we had encountered an audacious old man who tapped on her shoulders at a red light to scold me for being too fat for my age. Instead of defending her child, my mother apologised to him. At that moment, my jaw and my heart hit the ground. From then on, I had to learn to accept that society was fatphobic. Unapologetically fatphobic.
Thankfully, I also learned to use the Internet alongside the body positivity movement hitting the mainstream. From Sam Smith to Lizzo, these body-positive Western celebrities gave me hope for my future as a fat person, inspiring me by their successes. Despite my fatphobic Asian household and my conservative home country of Vietnam still has a ways to go, I believed that I could see a light at the end of this skinny tunnel.
A few months ago, the Economist published an article about the viral drug of the moment: Ozempic, a diabetic drug that was being touted to “end obesity”.
Why are people injecting diabetes medication to become skinny? I thought we were over this. I thought being fat is accepted now?
I’m starting to believe it may have never been accepted. A study conducted by Harvard University found that while biases toward sexual orientation and race have decreased, unconscious bias against weight actually increased and conscious bias remained stagnant.
You don’t even need to read a report to see it. Lizzo came across a storm of fatphobic comments unrelated to her lawsuit and behaviour. Lana Del Rey, someone who spent her career battling scrutiny into her fluctuating weight, also became a victim of fat-shaming when one Internet user posted a “before & after” comparison and called her weight gain “worse than 9/11”.
I thought fatphobia had been abolished. Turns out, it merely lay dormant.
This increase can be explained by the attitude people have against fatness: that it is a choice. If I had a penny for every time someone told me a variation of the phrase “just eat less and exercise”, I would be able to afford new, non-fatphobic friends. People seem to think being fat means that one is lazy, careless and gluttonous, which makes it acceptable to shame them. In fact, some people don’t even think they’re doing anything wrong when they fat-shame somebody, as they believe they’re acting in good faith out of health concerns.
When I took the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, my high blood pressure nearly disqualified me from getting the jab. I was criticised by the doctor for my size and told to “lose some weight” to lower my blood pressure. Later, I found out that my high blood pressure is actually hereditary and not caused by my weight. This fatphobic attitude runs rampant in medicine, where reports have concluded that a patient’s weight can significantly negatively affect their quality of care. My fatphobia wasn’t just a social concern, I was being medically discriminated against, as were many other fat people.
In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated our fatphobia. Obese people were expressly named as one of the most vulnerable demographics against the coronavirus. As the quarantine was announced, people voiced their fears of fatness loud and clear, as memes mocking quarantine weight gain proliferated on social media. Fat people were treated as expendable weak links who deserved such circumstances due to the perceived carelessness of their health and appearance. In a public health crisis, it became clearer than ever how acceptable and widespread fatphobia continued to be.
Activists everywhere have rebuked fatphobia ad nauseam since the movement began. And yet it persistently haunts us all. The fatphobia in our society simply never went away but has merely adapted and changed to what is happening in the media. Comprehensive efforts need to happen to change people’s perceptions of fatness and rid the world of fatphobia for good. I truly hope that one day, a little fat kid won’t even be able to imagine being scolded by their mother, or even a random stranger, for being fat.
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