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I've been doing a bit of reading in the area of sizism and fat rights lately. Not that it's an easy topic to crack into as very little scholarship has been done, unlike feminism, gay rights, and civil rights. I've been trying to track down one scholarly article for months now (Mev Miller's 'Fat Politics: The Bottom Line is Women's Power' from Melpomene, if anyone happens to have a copy when the multi-million volume research library has failed me). There is also the fabulous 'Killing Us Softly,' 'Still Killing Us Softly,' and 'Beyond Killing Us Softly' by Jean Kilbourne, which deal with imagery of women in advertising. Here's a link to an introduction to her third installment of Killing Us Softly.

It blows my mind how common and socially acceptable it is to be sizist, to treat people as a faceless group of, not people, but things. The news, advertising, even TV shows constantly point a finger and teach us "thin=healthy" and "fat=unhealthy". Thinner = better. Well, you know what? Shut the hell up. How confused and messed up is a culture who consider women the size of concentration camp victims to be beautiful? That makes  women think they need to have major plastic surgery just to feel normal or healthy? And fat women? What instant assumptions have media, government, and news taught you to think about them? What? They automatically aren't active people? They automatically eat too much? And it's just EVERYWHERE. And no one seems to think there is anything wrong with this sort of stereotyping and bigotry. It absolutely blows my mind. And. Pisses. Me. Off.