Fat Chicks Rule

No post, positive picture

Different Worlds

No Blog post next week. Second vacation coming up!

 

While doing research on plus size shopping for my book, I walked into a store looked at the outrageous prices, saw the look the sales woman gave me, the What the fuck is this fat woman without trimmed eyebrows doing in my store? and walked out. I hadn't been savvy yet of recognizing places by sight that don't have plus sizes. I'm sure if I had been buying something for a thin friend the sales clerk would have rather listened to nails on a chalk board than serve me.

 

Recently Oprah Winfrey,, who most of the planet knows, for some reason was not recognized in a store in Zurich. Oprah was looking at handbags, asked for a pricy one, when a clerk insisted she look at cheaper items. 

 

If I was ever mega wealthy, I wouldn't shop in stores that wouldn't have given me the time of day now and I would never buy a $38,000 dollar handbag unless it was an actual Bag of Holding (For non-gamers the bag of holding can hold large amounts of heavy items including swords, foods, mounts, potions, gold etc,).

 

Oprah felt that this slight was racial bias; Heidi Moore of the Guardian felt it was also due to her size.

Race is tied with socioeconomic status struggles; so is weight. There have been some studies of a link between a woman's size and her socioeconomic status, showing that women with low incomes tend to be of higher weight. There are many theories on this – because of unsocial working hours, lower availability of healthy food in poor neighborhoods, and other factors that may affect food choice and metabolism.

 

I think that these attitudes towards fat people aren’t necessarily poor food. If I was looking for a retail job, who do you think would hire me? The high end boutique or Walmart? Oprah’s talented, smart, beautiful, sand avvy, but she cannot be the only fat  black American woman who is. (She is the only black face in Forbes' Richest Americans list coming in at 152.)  As Moore points out:

 

Oprah was looking to buy a handbag, which has no size measurements, but the product is not the point: in an upscale boutique, all buyers are judged, in part, by their weight.

You are all beautiful

Written on a bathroom wall.

What's in a name?

Short post today and none next Monday since I will be on vacation.

I usually don't like to criticize the fat acceptance movement in my blog. I feel that these are internal issues we can sort out ourselves. 

However, an important issue has come up that I feel I must comment on. NAAFA is considering a name change because of the negative connotations of the word fat. I don't know if they are going to change the name completely or keep the acronym and not say what it stands for. Two reasons have been given for the name change. The first I disagree with but understand and that is calling yourself fat brings out all the 7th grade mentality of critics. Some fat people may be uncomfortable using the word fat or might see it is an insult.

It is the second reason that gives me pause. The word FAT is not getting NAAFA the corporate sponsorship it needs.

Of course it isn't. A grassroots movement meant to change how fat people are viewed does not need corporate money dictating its agenda or memberhip. 

I'm a member of two size positive groups, The Association for Diversity and Health in Size(ASDAH) and the National Association to Advanced Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). The reason why I am a member of both is because they are two different groups with distinct and different goals. ASDAH is the group I rely on the spread the HAES message. To make sure that fat individuals  aren't judged solely on their weight and that healthy people come in a variety of sizes. 

NAAFA was my group that told me it was okay to call myself fat. 

In the NAAFA newsletter section about the name change is this quote:

We cannot continue to bury our heads in the sand and believe this problem will resolve itself. For us to affect change, we must be taken seriously.

Writing this blog I get a lot of trolls. Most of them outright insult me, or tell me stop eating but a large portion of them tell me I'm delusional because I think it's okay to be fat. 

Read more here, here & here.