If we could make a wish, perhaps we wouldn’t hope to be thin, but that fatphobia will disappear so that we can all and all live freely in our bodies!
Freely, however, doesn’t mean thinking only of self-esteem or having a positive body image. Yes, this is important on a personal level, but if we only considered the relationship with our body, we would ignore that today we continue to consider certain bodies more beautiful and worthy of life, care, space, culture and history. And this reinforces not only beauty standards, but also other oppressive standards such as abilist, racist, or transmisogenic. So does it make sense to aim to feel good if we don’t fight all this too, if we don’t avoid leaving other people behind who are not like us?
Fatphobia: is it right to defend ourselves by mocking us?
Although we often feel marginalized because of the body, it happens to laugh at ourselves for our body using the same jokes, judgments or insults that marginalize us. This denies us access to feeling good about our body, because although we say those things to ourselves, they don’t hurt us any less.
We just feel more protected because we have control on our body.
However, we can no longer underestimate ourselves for our body; we don’t want this to distract attention from how others treat us. I know it sounds strange because we live in a society where mocking means “not taking yourself seriously” and it is always better to be humble than arrogant. But for this reason, although jokes, judgments or insults are something that we wouldn’t reserve for ourselves (given the pain they cause us), the freedom to continue to do it remains to us: no one can believe to have the right to do it for us.
