Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the stir that Lizzo has been making lately. In recent events, she won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in a Competition Program for her show “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”. She knocked off RuPaul’s Drag Race which was projected to win again for the 5th year in a row. And good lord, her acceptance speech was inspiring. A small excerpt:
“My emotion is for these stories they shared. They’re not that unique, they just don’t get the platform…when I was a little girl, all I wanted to see was someone like me in the media. Someone fat like me, black like me, beautiful like me. If I could go back and tell little Lizzo something… you’re going to see that person but b**ch it’s going to have to be you.”
Woah. So many inspirational and mic drop statements in one quick 2-minute speech. She put the word fat right out there and named it as beautiful, staring fat phobia right in the face and telling it what’s up. Fat is beautiful. And representation, as well as vocalness about this is so important.
I hear so many stories from women about how a practitioner shamed them for their weight as a child; these experiences acted as catalysts for an eating disorder in later years. We’re up against a society that doesn’t teach children to take care of their bodies, but instead teaches them to judge and critique their size.
Right here, you might expect to me to launch into a dialogue on health and fat and Lizzo. Often we link that altogether, almost in a weird way stepping into the role of defending being fat around the topic of health. And yes, I do believe that fat individuals can be healthy and I do believe that Lizzo is healthy (hello playing the flute, twerking, and singing for long extended periods of time!)
But here’s the problematic nature of jumping right into that defense — we are bringing the issue right back to what presents itself as an apology for different body sizes. We don’t do this to slender people, we don’t do this to medium build people — we don’t look at them and make them justify their existence based off an external set of criteria.
So why do we do this with fat bodies? Why do we make fat bodies the topic of negative on slots of information. We force individuals in fat bodies to excuse themselves, or explain themselves off of the limited understanding the general public has about health.
The rhetoric comes from a long history of oppression; colonizers used the negative concept of fat or larger bodies as a justification for slavery of black people. In her book “Fearing the Black Body; The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” Sabrina Strings discussed the inextricable link between the two, citing many writings related to larger black bodies being less self-restrained and having a “lower form of corpulence.” We cannot unlink the history with what is being done to Lizzo in today’s time. The two are intrinsically tied together.
The same can be said for the history of dieting, women, and a whole industry that is now built off of women hating their bodies. We can trace roots back to Victorian times and corsets, where women would go so far as to faint in the name of creating a perfect hour-glass shape.
I had a conversation with a female client yesterday who was trying to figure out why she had such a hard time standing up to a man who made sexual comments about her body at work. It all came back to conditioning — by parents, by culture, by media — women are given messages in small and big ways that standing up for ourselves is out of line. She even remarked that we’re shown all of these strong female characters in the movies but chastised or belittled when we try to emulate them in our own lives.
Back to Lizzo. Here’s an opportunity to, as a culture, to show respect and honor to a powerful black, fat woman. Instead of turning the conversation back to debates about health and justification, let’s step back and think about how to show respect and honor.
Fat bodies are beautiful. Period.
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