Fatphobia: the hatred and contempt for obese people.

A bias used to discriminate against people (especially women) perceived as "fat".

In 2005, psychology professor and researcher Kelly D. Brownell, along with Rebecca Puhl, Marlene Schwartz and Leslie Rudd published a book called Weight Bias: Nature, Consequences and Remedies.

In this work they put forward an idea that in recent years has been taken up by many social movements: although obesity is a health problem, part of its drawbacks are not limited to the physical discomfort it produces. There is an extra discomfort, of a psychological kind, which is produced by a discriminatory bias against overweight people: fatphobia..

What is fatphobia?

The concept of fatphobia serves to designate an automatic and usually unconscious bias that leads to discriminate, objectify and undervalue overweight people, especially if these people are women.

Fat people are automatically associated with a lack of self-esteem, difficulties in living a satisfactory sexuality and the need to attract attention by trying too hard. In short, it is understood that these people start out with a definite disadvantage that makes them less valuable not "being able to compete" with the rest. Seen through the spectacles of fatphobia, these people are perceived as desperate individuals, who will accept worse treatment both informally and formally, and who are willing to be more exploited in the workplace.

It is, in short, a way of thinking that is characterized by placing a social stigma on obese people. This means that it is not part of a clinical picture, as is, for example, agoraphobia. In fatphobia, being overweight is seen as an excuse to be able to hold certain people to a different moral standard. In a way, aesthetics dictates the kind of ethics that is applied to this minority.... Because overweight people are in the minority, right?

It's getting easier and easier to be obese

Fatphobia has a paradoxical aspect. Although obese people are considered something strange and of less value because they are out of the statistical normality, that same statistical normality is increasingly reduced, especially in the case of women..

While from a medical point of view the standards of what is and what is not obesity have good foundations and are based on scientific knowledge about what a healthy body looks like, beyond these specialized and professional environments being fat is increasingly the norm. It's not that women are eating worse and worse, it's that the threshold of what is considered obesity is getting lower and lower, it's very easy to cross it.

Even in the world of models, to slightly deviate from what the beauty standards dictate gives rise to conflicts. Just ask Iskra Lawrence, for example, who is especially known for her responses to "accusations" about her weight. The fact that even these women have to face such treatment gives an idea of what anonymous women who are as far removed from the beauty canon, if not further away from it, have to put up with.

The word "fat" is taboo

Fatphobia has left such a powerful mark on our culture that even the concept it alludes to is taboo. The fashion industry has had to invent a thousand and one neologisms and euphemisms to refer to large sizes and the morphology of women who from other contexts are accused of being fat: curvy, plump, plus-size? linguistic formulas that are perceived as artificial and that, in a certain way, give greater force to the term "fat" by its sonorous absence.

That is why certain social movements linked to feminism have decided to start fighting against fatphobia. fight against fatphobia by reappropriating the term "fat" and displaying it with pride. and exhibiting it with pride. This is a political strategy reminiscent of a proposal from psycholinguistics known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which, simply put, consists of the idea that the way in which language is used shapes the way in which people think.

This hypothesis may or may not be true (there is not much empirical support for it at present), but beyond that it is conceivable that reappropriating the word may be a way of defending oneself against fatphobia by fighting on one's own turf. It is clear that the struggle for equality involves making these irrational biases disappear, which are psychological but also socially rooted, and which only hinder human relations. And it is also clear that there is still a long way to go.

Defending the possibility that all people can live a healthy life does not mean stigmatizing healthy life does not mean stigmatizing those who are different from us..