Stigma
Today's Weight 177 lbs
*********
My friend's 6 year old great-niece Lizzie is currently undergoing diversity awareness training as part of her school curriculum (I guess they’re never too young to learn!). At the weekend she was telling me all that she had learned about the innate equality of people of different colours, races, sexual orientation and religious beliefs.
She informed me earnestly that we shouldn’t say nasty things about people who are a different colour or who are disabled “because it hurts their feelings”. Nor should we be horrible to people who “want to live together as mommies and mommies or daddies and daddies, instead of as mommies and daddies like most people do, because people can’t help who they fall in love with.”
“Oh, and we mustn’t keep talking about the war all the time and making fun of Germans, either, because they get upset…” she added.
She is being taught about Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as atheism and agnosticism, which is all very laudable since her school is in a culturally diverse area, where most of the religious devotion takes place in the mosques and temples rather than in the Roman Catholic or Anglican churches.
I asked her jokingly if there is any group of people you ARE allowed to be nasty to, and she thought about it for a little while, and said she didn’t think so.
“So nobody gets called bad names or gets bullied in your class then?” I asked.
She shook her head, but without much conviction.
“Are you sure nobody gets bullied?”
She blushed, then blurted out “Well only Morwenna, but that’s just because she’s fat and smelly!”
This gave me pause.
“IS she smelly?” I asked.
Lizzie screwed up her face. “Well no, not really,” she admitted, “but one day she will be, won’t she?!”
I ignored the logic underpinning that argument, and pressed on. “So it’s OK to be nasty to people if they’re fat?” I said.
This time she gave an emphatic nod, as if she was finally sure she was on safe ground. “Yes, silly, because if they’re fat and smelly it’s their own fault…”
* * *
Apart from depressing the hell out of me, this got me thinking.
Is the obesity stigma really that entrenched? Apparently so.
Lizzie has an obese mother and obese great-aunts yet she still juxtaposed the words “fat” and “smelly” as if they were as inextricably linked together as Batman and Robin or Laurel and Hardy. The fat associations were immediate and totally negative.
I hit the internet and came across an article – you can find it here - which suggested that even pre-school children have internalised the negative associations of obesity. This is a quote from the article:
One study documented weight prejudice in 3–5-year-old pre-school children who judged an overweight child to be more mean and an undesirable playmate compared to an average weight child who was ascribed positive attributes. Other work similarly found negative attributions among children as young as age 3 who associated overweight with being mean, stupid, ugly, unhappy, lazy, and having few friends. Kraig & Keel examined weight based stigma among 7–9-year-olds, and found that ratings were most favourable for illustrations of thin children and least favourable for chubby children, regardless of children’s own weight. Other work shows that elementary school age children believe obese children are ugly, selfish, lazy, stupid, have few friends, lie and get teased, whereas average weight targets are considered clever, healthy, attractive, kind, happy, have more friends, and are a desirable playmate. Perhaps most commonly cited is research where school children have ranked obese children last among children with crutches, in a wheelchair, with an amputated hand, and with a facial disfigurement in terms of who they would most like for a friend.
Whew, that’s pretty damning, isn’t it?
All the political-correctness of the past couple of decades seems to have bypassed these anti-fat prejudices entirely. You can find yourselves in hot water (quite rightly) for making racist or homophobic comments, but its open season on fat folks.
Doesn’t it just warm your heart to know that in the eyes of the skinny judgmental majority we overweight folks are ugly, selfish, lazy, stupid, Billy-no-mates and liars – and smelly to boot!
It is depressing. I wonder how ingrained it really is? Even small children are exposed to media in the form of stories and TV. I can just about remember thinking, when a small child, that fat people were probably greedy, but I can\'t remember whether this was an impression I\'d gained from children\'s books (etc) or whether I\'d come up with it for myself. (I can also remember thinking a thin lady on TV was greedy because she said she drank ten cups of tea a day, so it\'s quite possible I did come up with this marvellous theory on my own.)
www.about2getskinny.blogspot.com