The thing is: when someone calls you too skinny, that hurts. It’s inappropriate, hurtful, and makes you self conscious. But at the end of the day, you pick up a magazine, you turn on the TV, you go on the internet on a gossip site - what do you see? Women who look like you. Women who have a body that recalls yours, women who are considered the standards of beauty to which all must follow to be considered beautiful. You go to a store, and odds are you can find clothes that are in your size. Odds are you don’t have go to stores dedicated to people your size, clothes that might not be as cute and are definitively more expensive.
When you’re fat, not only does it hurt, but society just confirms it day after day. You flip on TV, you read a magazine, and there are no women in your size. Nobody with a body like yours, nobody modeling clothes or being called gorgeous. You go to a store, and you can’t find clothes that fit you - and even if you do find things in larger sizes, they still don’t LOOK right, don’t fit right, cause they were designed for thinner girls in mind, and making these clothes in larger sizes doesn’t mean it’s going to look good on your body. You’re told you’re ugly by a piece of shit and basically the world you live in says back, well, yeah, that’s true.
That’s the difference. No, people making comments about your body are ALWAYS unwelcome and gross, but a thin person and fat person still live in the same society that caters and upholds thinness as a standard of beauty. That doesn’t change, and that’s why it’s not the same.
On why skinnyshaming isn’t the same as fatshaming, crystalzelda (via crystalzelda)
I stood by this when I posted this, and I still do. You can keep your tl;dr musings and your anecdotal evidence of how once someone told your thin friend to eat a salad equals to the societal and systemic beauty standards that call for women to be as thin as possible and cater to a very select and limited body type. This post isn’t endorsing the misogynistic practice of commenting on women’s bodies like they were public property, which is part of the patriarchy, it is laying out why saying “thin women have it hard too” is a false equivalency and utterly derailing. You’re mad someone told your friend to eat a burger? Go talk about patriarchal and sexist values that let people feel comfortable policing women’s bodies instead of hijacking posts about the damage fat shaming does to women all over the world.
