Becca

Why I don’t like the term ‘fat acceptance’

Tue, 27/12/2011 - 11:50pm | by

This is a bit of a weird thing to say on an FA blog but please hear me out.

Firstly ‘fat’ is not a generic quality. We can have a fat arse, or fat thighs, or fat arms, or a fat tummy. We can be short and fat or tall and fat. And all of the types of fat have varying levels of social acceptability. People can look social unacceptably fat at lower weights, but can also pass the socially acceptable/sexually attract bar at a different places. Different body parts have different social values. Fat boobs = SEX. Fat tummy = GROSS.

Secondly, fat is not the only the kind of OK. And ‘fat’ and ‘normal’ are not the only kinds of OK. Beauty takes on different shapes and sizes. To me I want to see diversity in body types, and for that to all be OK.  Female athletes often develop less ‘feminine’ body types and it should be OK to have bodies that look different. My mantra with the kids is ‘if everyone looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other’. We talk and seek out shapes in bodies. And our different racial features in our family are recognized and discussed, as are our bodies. We all have beauty to look at.

And thirdly, acceptance? Blah. Acceptance is putting up with. Recognizing. Tolerating. I like the idea of celebrating. Discussing. Embracing. I don’t find an emotional connection with acceptance.

So, when I asked I say that I favor body diversity. I talk about a media that would show old and young, representative races, different genders and different body types.

Related posts:

  1. Significant Others and The Road to Acceptance
  2. What is Fat Acceptance?

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  • http://loveashley.net Ashley

    Very good point. I have always liked the term “size acceptance” rather than “fat acceptance” because what about the thin and muscular types? Everyone needs to be accepted, but just not accepted…loved. 

  • http://blog.dianarajchel.com Diana Rajchel

    When I was first learning how to be an LGBT ally, the tiers were explained to me as essentially “opposed, tolerant, [I think it was] supportive, and acceptance.” Acceptance was considered the top tier by the chart makers at the time, and I believe that’s why it’s used so much. You make an excellent point – I often refer to it as “body positivity” myself, because I favor being as inclusive as possible.

  • Mulberry

    I like the term “fat acceptance”.  We’ll never come up with the perfect term, and this has served us well.
    I don’t get your point about fat being not the only kind of OK. You make it sound as if acceptance is black and white. Saying that fat is okay in no way implies that something else isn’t okay.
    Second, there are a lot of qualities that run along a continuum, and those qualities do not preclude the presence of civil rights organizations. You have, for example, clubs for tall people and clubs for short people, but any cutoff line you draw is arbitrary. Or it may be, as with fat, that part of you fits the cutoff point and part doesn’t. I’ve been known to argue that fat acceptance is even for the person who is Ashley’s size, yet thinks she’s too fat.
    I don’t like the idea of celebrating, discussing, embracing as part of a movement title. Maybe some of us not only don’t want to hate, but also don’t particularly want to celebrate. We want to go about our daily lives as fat people without hindrance.
    I am not personally a fan of the term size acceptance. There are issues particular to fat people which we’re trying to address. But what really annoys me about the term is that it’s been proposed by people who feel we could attract more followers by using the word “size” instead of the hated word “fat”! To me, that just defeats the purpose of fat acceptance.
    Ashley, what about thin and muscular types? It appears to me (I’m kind of an outsider on this) that they are accepted in most ways and even held up as role models for the rest of us. They are represented in media in far greater numbers than their actual proportion of the population, and in many positive ways.

  • Becca

    Yeah, I do know the theory behind acceptance. It’s less that I don’t feel the word though – it doesn’t resonate for me on any emotional level. It seems like semantics maybe, it’s probably something I think about in terms of simplifying down theories to explain to the kids these days ;)

  • Becca

    I’m not sure I agree about athletic bodies being viewed positively. I’m thinking of the Williams’ sisters, who get a lot of talk about their bodies which is focused on their ‘large’ build. They are strong powerful women, and extremely muscular. Equally the female swimmers on the Australian team have really muscular build I don’t see as much negative publicity about the male athletes so there are some race/gender issues as well.

  • http://thecrimsonlipstick.blogspot.com/ Blacey

    Interesting post. I’ve been wondering recently about how I feel about this, and I’ve decided that I like the term ‘acceptance.’ After reading your post, I think this is because I do have that emotional connection to that word. Now I celebrate my body, celebrate and embrace fatness, but there was a very long time, a very dark time, when I didn’t: when I loathed my body, when I loathed the bodies of others. I had totally internalized all those negative cultural messages about how thin is in etc, and I was a slave to the magazines that implored me to ‘love my body’ while also showing me what I was supposed to look like (a waif, impossible on my frame) and how to diet to look like I was ‘supposed to’ according to mags etc. ad nauseum. I thought that loving my body, celebrating my body, was something I could only do when I finally made my body conform – I wasn’t going to flaunt it until I got it. 
    While it felt impossible to love my body, it was something I wanted very much. When I heard about size acceptance, I felt in a way, it would be easy to do ,but that I didn’t want it. At the time, initially, I thought it was about giving up on having a perfect body (of course it was about giving up – giving up the fantasy of being thin) but the more I learned about accepting my body and how much happiness it could bring me, the more I felt able to do it. I couldn’t go from hating to loving my body, my fat, and other people’s fat bodies – I had to go from hate to love THROUGH acceptance. Acceptance was/is a gateway and a building block for me. There was no way I could celebrate my body without making peace with it, and I don’t think I could have found my way into loving my body if not for the phrasing ‘fat acceptance’. It stood out for me amid the contradictory messages of ‘love your body/drop 10lbs in a week.’ 

  • http://twitter.com/Fatheffalump Fat Heffalump

    I used to use the term fat acceptance, but I think I’ve outgrown it for the reasons you mention above.  I much prefer fat activism.  I am an activist working for the rights of fat people, myself included.

  • Anon

    When I’m asked, I say that I prefer HEALTH and QUALITY OF LIFE.  I don’t care about conforming to what society thinks is beautiful, but I do care about my body being healthy to live a full and long life.  That is what should be important and where the focus should be.