Perception of Fatness

I normally associate the word fat with words like bad, gross, unacceptable, and unwanted. These associations are horrible and discriminative, but can you blame me? I have grown up with the media pumping ideas into my head that fatness is bad and something no one wants. With all the media’s influence on how our bodies should be thin and small, how could fatness ever be accepted as something good? Individuals who are looked at as fat are automatically judge, ridicule and label as unwanted or inferior. In Farrell’s book Fat Shame, she states that America is an “extraordinarily ‘fat aware’ culture” and that we often do not recognize the “cultural meanings attributed to fatness or the fat person” (3). Our culture tells us that being fat is wrong and we must do what is necessary to stay thin. The media markets diets, workout routines and machines to help us reach the cultural goal of being thin. In this culture of extreme dieting and fat hatred, what would a person who is label as fat say about their experience in America? The problem with America is that we do not ask these questions. We listen to what the media tells us—that being fat is wrong and those considered fat should be harshly criticized.

Americans tend not to acknowledge the true reason why a person is fat, whether it may be due to genetic, economic, cultural or lifestyle reasons. We assume fat people are lazy and irresponsible because they refuse to take care of their bodies. The media plays a large role in how we perceive what is fat and what is thin. Have we always been this discriminative toward fat people? This made me wonder about how other generations perceive fatness. Are people growing up in different decades, without much media influence, aware of fatness?

Throughout history there are been different cultural and social constructions of what it meant to be fat in society. Farrell discusses the background and cultural development of the negative view of fatness. Fatness was once looked at as a symbol of wealth and an improvement in class status. People of the upper classes, particularly those who had recently risen in class status, were able to afford more food and their fat bodies “revealed an inability to handle that new wealth” (27). As the 19th century progressed, fatness came to represent greed and corruption in multiple politic cartoons and magazines. In today’s society, fatness is still viewed negatively but for different reasons. Fatness is assumed to strike only those individuals that are in the lower classes, those who can only afford to eat fast food and who lack health care. They are viewed lower in society because of their fatness and their reasons for being fat are not taken into consideration. Thinness is what our society aspires to be because it is what the media portrays as being beautiful and “normal.” If you don’t meet the cultural expectations of the perfect body then you are viewed as lazy and irresponsible. The upper classes are thinner because they can afford to eat healthy food and have access to health care. This is a dramatic switch from 19th century concepts of fatness: those in the lower class used to want to be fat as a signal of wealth and now they are ridiculed for being so because they lack money. No matter the time period or definition, fatness has always come to represent something negative and unwanted.