I was watching TV the other night and the Christmas ad for Big Lots came on. At first I thought, wow, dancers that are plus size rather than skinny. But then it hit me, plus size-Big Lots. The singer is singing “There’s no Christmas without me.”
When I was growing up, plus size started at a size 16 and skinny was a size 6-7. Now a 6-7 is edging into “fat” and plus size is starting at a size 10 to a size 12. WTF?
On TV, plus size women are seen, almost exclusively, as either the overweight redneck, the “mother”, or in a comedy where her size is a part of what makes her “funny”. You don’t see her as the romantic lead. Those roles are reserved for the size 0 women. If a star in Hollywood adds a few pounds...it’s mulled over and beaten to death.
Recently, a You Tube blogger went viral with her commentary on fat people.
So, it seems that those that are overweight seem to be one of the few “classes” of people that can be used as the butt of a joke without most people going ballistic.
Yes, I’m overweight. I have been all my life. I have Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism. I was also born with a 1/3 club foot so was never able to exercise. I have an IQ of 137 so I’m not stupid. I was ridiculed in school with kids muttering “hey, hey, hey, it’s Fat Albert” as I passed by, so it’s nothing new (needless to say, I HATED the Fat Albert cartoons).
Maybe, if weight was less of an obsession, not to mention one of the last places you can get away with making jokes about, we wouldn’t have the epidemic of anorexia/bulimia fueled by the fears of being made fun of.