THE SHAME GAME
Fat, thin, short, tall, disabled ... none should be tormented, writes Andrew Dickens, who has borne the brunt of people’s taunts all his life
Fat, thin, short, tall, disabled ... none should be tormented, writes Andrew Dickens, who has borne the brunt of people’s taunts all his life
In recent weeks the first evictee from
New Zealand Survivor complained she was given the boot just because she was a big girl. “Fat Shaming!” screamed the headlines. Last month, a
Playboy model was sentenced for fat shaming an elderly woman in a LA locker room after posting a picture her on Snapchat with the caption: “If I can’t unsee this, then you can’t either.” Even the Pope has been accused of fat shaming after asking Melania Trump what she fed Donald.
Shame a fat person, particularly if you have even a smidgeon of fame, and all hell breaks loose. Ask Kiwi actor KJ Apa. Our media is full of it.
Fat shaming happens regularly, despite a mountain of press highlighting the problem and a litany of larger people writing about the shame they constantly receive. It’s a blight on our society but I’ll be honest: my sympathy is limited.
Here’s my issue. I’m a 1.87m-tall man who weighs just over 60kg. Yep, I’m freaking skinny. I’m the same weight at 54 as I was at 17. But I’m happy with the way my body serves me. I’ve competed at national level in athletics, I can ski all day and you’d be hard pressed to keep up with me when I ride my bike uphill (ask George Bennett, the cyclist, who’s the same weight as me: skinny people are good climbers). But while I’m okay with it, most people seem to have a problem with my body.
THE OTHER day I went to the bank to change my KiwiSaver plan. A very nice man sorted me out. But as I made to leave, he told me he had to pass on a message from one of the tellers behind me, which made me realise he wasn’t nice at all.
“My teller asked me to tell you that you’re too skinny and she wonders, do you eat enough?”
I told my adviser to tell his teller that I’ve always been this skinny, that I eat heaps and, finally, to tell her that skinny shaming is just as bad as fat shaming. I left, shooting a dagger from my eyes, and regretted not taking up the issue with the teller who’d seen fit to ask a colleague to pass on an insult.
I was gobsmacked that a complete stranger could judge me so harshly. My adviser obviously didn’t see the insult and had no hesitation passing the comment on. The bank workers seemed to have no shame about their shaming.
Actually, it didn’t surprise me at all. My whole life I’ve been getting it. Daily. “For God’s sake, eat a pie”. “Mate have you got cancer?” “Do you break bones often?” My boss, who has known me for nearly 30 years, did it the other day in reception. A nationally famous broadcasting treasure who saw me in shorts, told me I looked like I’d just stepped out of Belsen. At least he was truly contrite when I told him off, saying, “What part of that did you think was acceptable to say?”
For here’s the truth. While people may think twice before passing comment on fat strangers they seem to have no guilt about shaming a skinny man. Gender does have something to do with it. People will think twice about commenting on a skinny woman for fear that she may be battling an eating disorder. But skinny males appear to be fair game.
Talking with some of my plumper female friends, they admit that they get shamed from time to time but when they hang out with me they are truly shocked at the level of abuse that comes my way.
So who’s standing up for me? No one. Our newspapers, airwaves and magazines are awash with commentary against fat shaming and nothing about other types of body shaming. It occurs to me that the fatties are not only hogging all the pies they’re also hogging all the headlines. Day after day a fat person rails against the abuse they receive but, in their desperate pleas of sympathy for their self-esteem, they miss the bigger picture. It seems that they’re campaigning for the normalisation of fat rather than the abolition of body shaming.
With obesity now considered an epidemic and 67 per cent of the New Zealand population considered overweight, the skinny are now the minority. The normalisation of fat means the skinny among us become the freaks and don’t we know about it. We even seem to be portrayed as the enemy. Furthermore, we’re not supposed to complain about it, because the overweight think we’re the lucky ones. A male point of view isn’t even considered.
For example, Melissa A. Fabello is the editor of the popular magazine and website, Everyday
Feminism. In a recent article she admitted that thin people can hate their self-image but she argues it’s not on par with the self-loathing of fat people, as a thin person is the only one worrying about it.
“When you’re not thin, other people on the
People will think twice about commenting on a skinny woman for fear that she may be battling an eating disorder. But skinny males appear to be fair game.