My Body Liberation

It’s time for me to talk about oppression. I’ve been wanting to talk about it for a while now but I have to confess that I have been a bit scared to alienate someone. It’s time to speak up because I can’t keep talking about body acceptance without mentioning the roots of the problem. It takes body acceptance out of its context, distorts the conversation and it does a big disservice to our effort to reclaim our true selves.

When I first learned that my own struggle with my body is not personal and that there are many systems in place to ensure that I experience body shame, it was not only a relief to understand that I am not at fault but it also made me realize that this is an issue larger than myself, that this is a human liberation issue. I realized that by deciding to stop dieting and by figuring out how to accept and love my body I am not only practicing self-compassion but I’m also taking a stab at dismantling societal oppression.

Every time we find ourselves suffering from a problem that is not unique to us, it has to be a result of oppression. One of the characteristics of oppression is that the excuses for mistreating people tend to be ridiculous beyond any measure and quite random too.

Oppression existed from the beginning of time and since we’ve been living under oppressive conditions from the moment we got here, it can be hard to notice how ridiculous and random the reasons for our own oppressions are.

When I think about why I struggle with accepting my body I often forget that in our society people are mistreated based on their weight: that Weight Stigma is a real thing.

My current reading reinforces that:

“According to the National Eating Disorders Association weight discrimination occurs more frequently than gender or age discrimination” moreover, “The incidence of weight stigma has escalated to 66 percent with the rise in public health campaigns to prevent “obesity” (Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch).

Feel free to ask me why the word “obesity” is under quotation marks. I won’t get into it now, except to say that it has everything to do with Weight Stigma.

And what do you think is driving Weight Stigma? It’s Fatphobia. Yes, Fatphobia is very real too!

I don’t think I need to tell you that everybody in our society has very strong feelings about people with larger bodies. When you think about it logically, it doesn’t make sense, just as much as it doesn’t make sense to not like someone based on their shoe size, but that’s exactly the thing that drives any oppression: it’s irrational and it’s automatic. The oppressive messages get passed on subconsciously from one generation to another and they get implanted in our minds against our best intentions from very early on. It’s so insidious that we can’t even see it. It’s like the air we breathe.

We are not at fault for having oppressive thoughts and for internalizing oppressive messages. We live in an oppressive society.

Oppression is driven by the need to keep people separate so some people can benefit and make a profit over others. It serves to perpetuate inequality. As long as we think badly of each other based on random reasons we will not unite and fight to make things better for everyone which is why it’s so true that the liberation of all people is dependent on the liberation of each group in our society.

What can we do against oppression? One thing is to remember that on different issues we might be on different ends of oppression and that some of us carry more oppressed identities than others.

When we are on the oppressive end we must acknowledge that we are mostly unaware of how oppressive we can be and we have to listen to those who are feeling oppressed when they tell us that we are being oppressive rather than trying to defend ourselves, which can often add insult to injury.

When we are on the oppressed end we get to acknowledge that when we hear oppressive messages we internalize them and we get to look at the effects of the internalized messages, like believing the message that we should dislike our body unless it looks a certain way. We get to fight as hard as we can against these messages whenever we can notice they are holding us hostage.

Going back to the oppression of fat people, fat people suffer from discrimination in very big ways, including not getting proper medical treatment that a smaller-bodied person in the same situation would get because every problem is attributed to their weight. This is one way, out of many, that being thin is a privilege in our society. Thin people often get better medical care.

Fatphobia affects everyone in our society, including thin people because it creates the fear of becoming fat. It’s what makes most of us struggle with liking our body and it’s what makes some of us suffer from eating disorders and get very sick from them.

One thing that exemplifies how fatphobia can be played out in our society often without intention is when we simply compliment someone for losing weight. When we do that we reinforce the idea that being smaller is better, never mind the fact that we don’t know why they lost weight: maybe they are sick, maybe they are suffering from an eating disorder and the last thing they need is to be complimented for is losing weight.

When I was a pre-teen I was pretty thin and then I became a little fuller. Before I became fuller I remember receiving a lot of compliments on my body, especially in dance class. At the time it felt so good to be noticed but in hindsight, I know how damaging these comments were. This is what in part set me up to engage in disordered eating. I was devastated when my body changed and I could no longer hold on to the status of having a “great” body. It made me want to do everything I could to get it back.

There is so much more to say about body liberation, including how it intersects with other oppressions like sexism, racism, and ableism but I think I already shared enough information to get the conversation started. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. If you’d like to learn more about body liberation I highly recommend following Sonya Renee Taylor and reading her book The Body Is Not an Apology. I would love to leave you with a quote from her:

“Living in a society structured to profit from our self-hate creates a dynamic in which we are so terrified of being ourselves that we adopt terror-based ways of being in our bodies. All this is fueled by a system that makes large quantities of money off our shame and bias. These experiences are not divergent but complementary.”