Before last month, I had never heard of the term ‘thin privilege’. I came across it in this article, linked to me by a friend, from Everyday Feminism. ‘Thin privilege’ is part of what the author, Shannon Ridgway calls ‘sizeism’, an attitude within society which sees only thin people as ‘normal’ and thus judges anybody else as abnormal and unacceptable. Sizeism, she writes, is one of the few commonly accepted forms of discrimination in our society.
But let’s go over what we mean by ‘privilege’ here.
Usually, when we talk about ‘privilege’ in the context of discrimination, we are talking about those who are irrevocably immune to discrimination on account of chance and circumstance. ‘Privilege’ is the top prize in the lottery of birth – if you are born white, male and straight into a rich, English-speaking family in a prosperous English-speaking nation then you really have a full house.
For everyone else, however, there are barriers which prevent you from the same life of luxurious comfort. If, for instance, you’re a black man in a predominantly white country, you are much more likely to be convicted in a criminal trial. If you are gay, there are some parts of the world where you will be imprisoned or killed if you are open about who you are, and it’s likely you’ll be bullied and legally discriminated against at some point in your life. And, if you’re a woman… well, you know the rest.
All of these are things that you are given by fate and chance. They are the hand that you were dealt while you grew in your mother’s womb and they are fixed for the rest of your life. But this is rarely the case when it comes to being thin.
I, for instance, am lucky enough to have maintained a rather high metabolism so far in my life. This means that I don’t put on weight as quickly as those with lower metabolisms. This, true, is part of the genetic roulette game, but unlike other benefits it is not a concrete privilege.
For one thing, my metabolism will lower as I get older. Secondly, I can’t just eat whatever I wantand do no exercise without putting on weight – nobody’s metabolism is that good. And thirdly, if I did put on weight, I would have to work to lose it again just like everybody else.
And here’s where Ridgway’s ‘thin privilege’ argument really begins to annoy me. The article accused me of being privileged for being thin in the same way that I’m privileged for being white and male. I just don’t agree that being thin makes you equally as privilege, because weight is a fluid thing that is subject to change.
Indeed, what enrages me most about the article is that, by equating being thin with any other privilege, Ridgway effectively implies that you’re just as unlucky to be overweight as you are to be gay, for example, because both are unprivileged lives subjected to discrimination.
Now, I’m not about to argue that people who are overweight don’t face discrimination and bigotry. A couple of the points in Ridgway’s article are examples of people being insulted by others who can’t accept that some people are happy being overweight and don’t want to change. The shallow comment ‘You’re face looks nice’, is one such example. I agree that it is wrong that some people think it’s okay to insult people like this on account of their weight.
But many of the other complaints on Ridgway’s list are actual harms which stem from obesity, not the malice of other people. Doctors don’t just suspect that your weight may be making you ill for no reason – everybody knows that weight contributes to heart disease and diabetes as well as countless other health problems which a doctor would be unwise not to inspect.
Similarly, shops don’t stock low numbers of XXL clothes because they’re evil. They keep stocks low because the sales for those sizes are usually low. And since the demand is low, not many companies manufacture those sizes, so the price for buying, and therefore selling them, is higher. Both factors encourage small businesses to specialise in larger clothes as alternatives to high street chains, meaning that XXL people end up shopping in those stores rather than the high street. Again, this is not discrimination. In this case, it’s an unfortunate result of supply and demand.
Indeed, usually people want to avoid being overweight because, unlike your race, gender or sexuality, it is actually genuinely harmful for you to be overweight and you can change that. Being gay has no intrinsic health problems or physical issues associated with it, but it does attract a great deal of discrimination (more, I’d argue, than being overweight attracts).
If there was nothing wrong with being overweight, then I’d never encourage someone to change their weight. Indeed, nobody should be forced to change who they are just because somebody else would prefer them to be different. But obese and overweight people don’t usually change for others. They change for themselves; for their own health and their own well-being.
And this is something Redgway seems to have forgotten. Because while it is true that some people are perfectly happy to be overweight and would rather that everybody left them alone and stopped trying to get them to lose weight, others want to change and are able to, even if it is bloody hard work. Simply arguing that the problems faced by these people are all the result of a ‘thin privilege’ conspiracy completely undermines the efforts of those who want to lose weight for their own sakes. It implies that they are giving in to discrimination rather than making a positive, active choice for their own personal benefit. It’s for this reason that ‘thin privilege’ actually betrays overweight people rather than empowering them.
Craybox 