26/02/2020
Posted this on my personal account but this warrants a public :
I started following a couple of years ago because I was drawn to her sense of self-worth, her love for dressing up, her articulateness and her quirkiness, amongst other things. I wished to be more confident in my own skin, and Aarti and her body positive community have inspired me to love myself more.
Then there’s being a role model to my three girls — I hope that they will always love themselves unconditionally, just like they love their mum with the staring eyes and jiggly bits. I hope for them to be kind, inclusive, open and to stand up for those who are in less-privileged positions than themselves.
Though we have yet to meet irl, I consider Aarti a friend. I see that this furore has hurt her and her friends. So while a part of me doesn’t wish to add further to the controversy (which in fact has mostly died down), I wish even less to remain complicit in my silence over this body-shaming fiasco. It is personally important for me to put my thoughts on record:
• Having a BMI of 50 or more doesn’t necessarily mean living an irresponsible life. You simply can’t tell just from a photo. What’s irresponsible is making sweeping statements about the “morbidly obese”, and following one unprovoked and unfair allegation with another judgemental insult.
* Having a BMI of 50 or more doesn’t necessarily mean living an irresponsible life. You simply can’t tell just from a photo. What’s irresponsible is making sweeping statements about the “morbidly obese”, and following one unprovoked and unfair allegation with another judgemental insult.
* Why is placing an anorexic/bulimic person on the cover of a mag glorifying the disease, but featuring a fat person considered representation?
A) Because we should not conflate being fat with having a body dysmorphic disorder.
B ) In a society that overwhelmingly views thin as worthy and rewards it, the fat cover model symbolises overcoming that discrimination. And until we move away from fat-shaming, the anorexic/bulimic model cannot escape from signalling a perpetuation of this problematic value statement.
• On a related note: you can tackle the issue of obesity without being derogatory towards the person who is obese. You can discuss the socio-economic, political, educational, geographic or cultural factors that influence obesity rates across the world — any one of these would be more constructive than throwing shade at another human being on the basis of their weight and appearance.
• Yes, beauty is subjective but no, Instagram’s feature on La’Shaunae Steward isn’t about her beauty. It’s about being inclusive. It’s about visibility. It’s about being worthy of having dreams, aspirations and achievements regardless of how you look.
• Fat people remain fat/get fatter because they know they will stop getting attention if they are no longer fat? I find it hard to buy this line of logic, because in my reality weight loss is celebrated far, far, far more than being fat.
It is too easy to judge someone and cast stones at them just because they are not like “us”. I’m sometimes guilty of it too. And I’m still learning to love my body and about . (I owe some of my fat friends apologies for judging them in the past.) But if we don’t learn to retrain our knee-jerk responses, rethink our ingrained societal constructs, and uproot our deep-seated prejudices, how are we to make progressive strides as a society?
Often, when we make the effort to learn and understand the “other”, we’ll realise that this otherness exists more in our heads, and that we’re actually more similar than we thought. The bottom line is: fat people are people too. For that matter, people with disabilities are people too. People with mental issues are people too. People with chronic illnesses are people too. Old people are people too. You get my drift. People have feelings and deserve to be treated with basic human decency i.e. respect. That’s it. Full-stop.
