I am fat. I am probably dangerously overweight. I have a slew of medical problems to prove that. I also have body image issues. Being fat does get me down fairly often, each morning when I get dressed to work, every time I stand on a weighing scale or go shopping or swelter in tent-like clothes in peak summers when all I want to do is wear something strappy to work. Sometimes it affects me socially too, with respect to how I mingle with people.
But I doubt if I have ever given a thought to my own weight issues when I saw someone post an emoji like ‘feeling fat’. I find this whole concept of announcing how one feels every day to one’s friends on Facebook ridiculous anyway. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw a petition come up on Facebook calling for an elimination of the ‘feeling fat’ emoji from Facebook.
Fat is not a feeling and it shouldn’t be an emoji either, says a group of body-image activists who have started a petition on change.org asking Facebook to remove the ‘feeling fat’ emoticon.
The chubby-cheeked, double-chinned emoji is one of about 50 “feelings” icons the social network’s users can add to their updates. The petition to remove it was initiated last week by Catherine Weingarten of Endangered Bodies, a group that “challenges the current toxic culture that promotes negative body image.”
So far the petition has 15,500 signatures and counting. Weingarten said she got the idea after she saw a friend’s status set to ‘feeling fat,’ accompanied by the supersized icon. She didn’t find it amusing.
“When Facebook users set their status to ‘feeling fat,’ they are making fun of people who consider themselves to be overweight, which can include many people with eating disorders,” Weingarten told ABC News.
I totally agree with Weingarten in that we need to do away with body hatred and bring in positivity. I could surely do with some. But what I disagree with is making people so conscious of the language of body images that they make being fat, a sensitive topic. Around 16,600 people have signed this petition.
But there are probably like a million people across the world, who have suddenly sat up to think, “Hey, I never realised before! That emoji was meant to make fun of me!”
It was not.
Grammatically ‘fat’ may not be a feeling. But it’s a euphemism for those days when you are not comfortable with your body, feeling stiff or when you are feeling bloated. And honestly, in this age of anorexic fashion, ‘feeling fat’ is not just the prerogative of the medically ‘fat’ people. There are probably people of medium and small sizes who have eating disorders, who also feel dissatisfied with their bodies.
It’s foolish to think everybody is too-good-to-be-true and that nobody will ever make fun of the fat people. They will. And it’s our job to not care. But on Facebook, I honestly think people are too caught up in their own miseries to put up a generic post intended to make fun of the fat people, dark people, short people or other body types. Frankly, we have wasted far too much time on the issue of this emoji.
We may need conversations about body images issues, but what we need to strive for is making body image a non-conversation. Body neutral rather than body positive, where it no longer ceases to matter whether I am fat, thin, tall, short, stout etc. I don’t want to be teased for being fat, but I don’t want to be told either that I am beautiful because my size is irrelevant. That’s charity. I just don’t want it to be a conversation at all. And I think there are many others who feel the same way as I do.
If we really want to ring in body positivity, don’t make plus size a separate fashion label, in a separate section of the mall. Don’t bring in the occasional plus size model on fashion runways to emphasise that you think about the ‘other people too’. That again is charity. It makes us feel far more worse. Ultimately, I just want to not care, not make you people feel conscious of MY weight issues.
Image Courtesy: © Thinkstock photos/ Getty Images
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