Skinny Shaming?

[NoSourDough]

In a shop today with DD (almost 13) when she told me the bag she was carrying was giving her a paper cut. Out of nowhere an older lady appeared and declared “well maybe if you ate some food your bag wouldn’t be so heavy!” and walked off in the queue with her husband.

At first me and DD were a bit shocked, it was a card shop and I was looking through the cards and as I did so was registering what she just said.

My daughter is tall yet small framed, a bit like me and my DH were when we were her age. If she was a bigger girl and that woman had fat shamed her it would have been completely unacceptable.

We queued up and she was about 3 in front of me and I decided I wanted to pull her up on it as my daughter is very size and weight sensitive and I knew this comment had stung.

Unfortunately she left the shop and after I couldn’t find her in the market square as I wanted to say to her that I felt that comment was unacceptable.

am I being unreasonable to feel this way or over sensitive here?

I don’t need to look in some corner of the internet to see skinny privilege I experience it every time I leave the house in real life. It’s obviously not the same!

Yabu for making any reference to fat people "My daughter is tall yet small framed, a bit like me and my DH were when we were her age. If she was a bigger girl and that woman had fat shamed her it would have been completely unacceptable." - if your argument stands then it stands without the whole "if she had been fat" addition.

I experienced a lot of this as a teen. It’s often jealousy.

But yes I’d want to tell her what a nasty bitch she was to her face.

And any body positivity shite is always piled on with the horrible comments, fat shaming and the "I am just saying this due to health concerns : garbage

IMO you really should have spoke up at the time, immediately after the comment was made.

If anyone spoke to my daughter like that, they would soon know not to again.

@Ddakji

You really just don't get it do you.....

Skinny shaming is absolutely a thing. How dare people call it a privilege to be called names in the street because of your weight - been there and NEVER had a positive comment about being thin.

My skinny DCs and I would have had a giggle at the womam's stupidity and probably linked eating to lots of unrelated things.

If you eat some food then maybe the bus won't be late! If you eat some food then maybe this rock will start to fly! Etc.

My DC aren't bothered about being skinny though.

I hope your DD is OK. I remember people commenting negatively on my (skinny, flat chested) body as a teen and found it mortifying.

Break it down for me then.

People being rude about any aspect of someone’s appearance doesn’t equal “shaming”, just as disagreement doesn’t equal “hate”.

I knew exactly what direction this thread was gonna take when I read the OP.

If that woman had made comments like that to an overweight teen everyone would be frothing and livid over it!!
The double standards are fucking shocking. Yes skinny shaming is a thing, as it fat shaming. They are BOTH wrong! What’s so hard to understand about that?!

I had this loads when I was younger OP and still get it now. People would shout really nasty comments at me in rooms full of people. An overweight male colleague once told me I ‘needed to eat a few dinners’ and you bet I insulted him right back to point out the double standards.

Funny thing is, my BMI is actually healthy. Not borderline, perhaps on the lower side of healthy but it is.

@Ddakji but comments about my weight made me feel utterly ashamed of it. Every time.

Same here - I made a GP appointment when I was about 20 and I was in bits asking him to help me put weight on! He did my BMI and told me I was perfectly healthy but it massively knocked my confidence when I was younger

Why do these threads always end up the same way, arguments about whether fat shaming is worse than skinny shaming, who gets the worse abuse etc.

no one should be abused or shamed or have their weight even commented on by anyone (except a doctor maybe) whether they are fat or thin. That’s it. Stop constantly arguing and complaining about who gets it worse and just tell any rude twat commenting on anyone’s weight to fuck off and mind their own business.

Because it was a nasty comment and OP has every right to be annoyed about it.

MN is truly wild sometimes... If the woman in the shop had passed similar judgement on someone who was morbidly obese, people would be telling OP to call the cops immediately to report the hate crime that'd just been committed.

Yet here you are justifying exactly what the OP means by people thinking skinny shaming is OK. Well done, you. 👏...👏...👏

I was very thin in my late teens and early twenties. I got quite a few nasty comments. The ones that stick in my mind are the stranger who just walked up to me on the street and told me I looked anorexic, and the woman at work loudly announcing she would give me an extra big slice of the cake because I needed it 🙄. Yes skinny privilege is a thing, but so is skinny shaming, the two are not mutually exclusive. And the former does not make the latter acceptable. You have no idea what someone is going through, it’s never okay to comment on someone’s body like that.

You don't need it breaking down for you, just rtft

Op and others should stop bringing fat people into their arguments when discussing hpw wrong it is for people to comments on their body - fat people don't have anything to do with it and don't need to be dragged in to it.

Aren't the comparisons between 'fat shaming' made because that is pretty widely considered an actual 'thing'? I don't think anyone is making an argument about who has it worse, just that the same criticism about bodies exists at the other end of the scale too and that it is wholly inaccurate to say that skinny shaming doesn't exist.

But the fat comparisons aren't brought in by the op and others in a argument of solidarity- the language around fat people in this thread and all others like it are pretty unpleasant.

You have a problem with skinny shaming then that is the problem and you don't need to say anything about fat people to make your argument.

He should have said ‘look
how fat your belly looks mate! And then laughed.

I'm really trying to understand this.

My 15yo DD is extremely 'skinny'. It's just her natural build.
She eats like a sparrow, but gets a huge amount of interest in her body shape.

She gets frequent accusations of 'anorexia', or orthorexia.
She is neither - she just doesn't want to eat a huge amount?
Her DF is tall and lean, and they seem to eat little for fuel.

I'm very different - I'm fat, and need to be careful with what I eat.

DD just doesn't want to eat much. She's happy with very small amounts.

Except you do though. People are comparing the two because judging someone who's fat would absolutely be called out, as it rightly should.
Yet, because 'skinny privilege' (whatever TF that means!) is a thing, slim people are apparently fair game for negative comments. So it's 100% fair to compare the two. You disagree. That's fine.

I have only ever been bullied and skinny shamed by fat people.

And IRL it's only fat people who deny skinny shaming in my experience. And it's aaaaalways a race to the bottom of how fat shaming is worse and everyone should gloss over skinny shaming. Or it DoEsNt ExIsT. I wonder why that is.

i disagree. The point is that the majority of people understand and agree that it is never okay to fat shame someone. However a lot of people don’t see a problem with skinny shaming. It’s not okay to make negative comments about other people’s bodies like this. If people can recognise that’s the case in one situation, they should also recognise that’s the case in the opposite situation. Just don’t make negative comments about other people’s bodies full stop.