Knowing no Pain, Knowing no Pleasure

Courtesy of this is thin privilege,

I genuinely would like your thoughts on my experience: I am severely underweight. I get gawked at, my health brought up, and insulted because of my body by strangers, relentlessly. When I was obese, I never experienced any of that. I actually received way more compliments when i was overweight and when i was obese than i receive at my current weight. I have been respectful and made no negative comments - I'd appreciate if you could respond in the same manner. Thanks

Well, we can feel immediately, slim person's energy-I very much doubt s/the(y) is/are "severely underweight" [under what weight? People often have their own ideas about the starting point]. By slim energy, I mean, someone making the minuscule, maximo if it happens to a slim and makes anything negative that happens to a fat, nothing and anything falling short of base negativity, a "positive".

Calling yourself 'obese' and "overweight" like that, means you have experienced all of that-gawked at, health brought up, insulted because of your body- or you wouldn't applying said terms to yourself with such a sense of peace and comfort.

'Obesity' itself is degrading branding and an insult in any way you could define that. It erases your sentience-addressing it to do so- pathologises you, makes you common property, silences you, tells you you are "disease" and not human, whilst knowing full well that you are. That's just the beginning of it. Every time you apply it to yourself, you validate this, hence a lot of fat people's anxiousness, anguish and exhaustion.

"Overweight" is based on a slim centric metric, validating slimness as the only legitimate size. Here is one of those who don't hear any insult to fat people, due to, for example, perceiving that as legitimate critique. We were all like that at one time.

Probably our friend in struggle thought slenderness would render them immune to criticism. Unfortunately for them, back in the day, advocates for anorexics decided to raise awareness.

Up til then, people were very loathe to cross any boundary of enquiring whether a slender person might be so due to anorexia nervosa-were assured to press through that as PWA tended to deny vigorously that they're anorexic.

That broken boundary led to over-familiarity fuelled by that self-righteousness people get when they feel the changing of your body happens from what they say to you. On the heels of that came this angry contempt for someone "not going to get help". See the case of Eugenia Cooney to peep that atmosphere.

In other words, there is a similarity between the firepower aimed at anorexia and fatness, for pretty much the same reasons, coming from the same people, the difference is anorexia does kill.