Why We Should Be Concerned with Skinny Shaming AND Thin Privilege

Remember the early 2000s when it was completely acceptable to shame women for being over 100 pounds? For the longest time, the only acceptable body type was stick thin with collarbones and hipbones sticking out.'Yikes. Unfortunately, not much has changed. While being curvy today is encouraged thanks to the larger derrieres celebs like the Kardashians, we're still excluding the majority of curvy body types. Society seems to say it's okay to be curvy if it means having a perfect hourglass figure. This body type is rare and, ironically, most hourglass figures we see in the media have been digitally altered.

Melissa Fabello of Everyday Feminism told Refinery29, “Our current cultural beauty ideal for women is this weird skinny-but-curvy thing,” she says. "The beauty standard has evolved in the past few decades but it hasn’t become any more flexible or generous. It used to require visible hip bones, and now it demands curves — but only in the 'right places.' That’s an issue of women's bodies being seen as public property. That’s an issue of women's bodies being seen through the lens of the male gaze. It is not about size discrimination, which is a separate issue.” 

Because we're slowly adding more diverse body types into the media, and the beauty ideal has changed from "stick-thin skinny" to "skinny-but-curvy," a lot of people think that means fat people and skinny people are all of a sudden viewed equally in society. 

When Nicki Minaj rapped, "F*ck those skinny bitches!" and when Meghan Trainer sang, "Go head and tell them skinny bitches that," the internet went crazy. For a brief moment, it was all about skinny girls. Now, don't get us wrong. Body-shaming is wrong on all levels and we realize that there are hundreds of women out there being shamed for not being curvy enough. However, we cannot deny the facts here....thin privilege exists.

“Oppression isn't one, two, five, or one hundred people saying something bad about your body or making you feel bad about your body. That’s not oppression,” says Fabello, “Oppression is something that is woven into society so that it is inescapable.”

At the end of the day, we're still told to have a body on the thinner side. We're told it's healthier, it's sexier, it'll make you happier. “We are all socialized not to want a fat body,” says Fabello.

When someone brings up fat-shaming, a skinny person may try to convince them that their experience is the same. 

“I would say 9 out of 10 times, thin people only complain about or bring up the concept of skinny shaming as a way to derail a conversation about fat shaming,” says Fabello. “You know, ‘Well, I'm so thin that when I go to the doctor they tell me I just have to gain weight.’ Or, ‘I can't shop in the average clothing store either. I have to buy kid's clothes, because they don’t make clothes in my size.’ They come up with these counter-examples, which then makes it a difficult conversation.”

This tends to happen with any form of privilege. Whether it be woman, someone in the LGBT community, or a person of color; when they speak of the oppression they face, there's a man, a straight person, or a white person on the other side screaming, "I'VE HAD A HARD LIFE TOO!" 

Here's the thing about privilege: no is saying you haven't struggled as well. It's that you have not struggled in the same way. Like, at all. No one is picking on you or saying your feelings are invalid. Having a conversation about these issues is important, but you must be willing to listen to the other person without trying to one up them with your own problems. When you acknowledge the fact that you have privilege, you are listening to voices that would typically go unheard.