Challenging the Total Environment of Fat Oppression
My family believes that they love me. However, they treat me hatefully. The hateful ways they treat me are obvious distress recordings of fat oppression, of which they are unaware and feel free to direct at me without restraint. It would not occur to them that what they are doing is wrong. It would not occur to them that they are being unkind. It is simply true, in their recordings, that I am too big, too loud, scary, viscerally irritating, less interesting, undeserving, ridiculous, rightfully mocked and belittled, to blame when I’m mistreated or denied access, less intelligent, and not particularly beautiful.
If I did not know Co-Counseling theory, I would believe that they hated me. Instead, I know that they love me and have a distress recording of hating fat and, by association, fat people. On top of that are oppressor-role pretense recordings to deny directing hateful recordings at me while they are doing it. So any stand I take against being treated hatefully becomes another way that I am stupid, ridiculous, and to blame.
On the flip side, my family also finds me incredibly useful. They call me for help. They fully count on [rely on] me. They expect me to do things for them. They see me as good at helping, supporting, nourishing, and backing [supporting]. They expect I’ll self-sacrifice for their good. And they fully expect I will always be there, in the background, making their lives go better.
This is the environment of fat oppression that I live with as a large woman. I’ve shared how it plays out [is enacted] in my family, but I could as easily have described how it plays out in my job, my community, or anywhere, because this oppression and its recordings are consistent as a total environment of unchallenged fat oppression.
Women’s oppression is horrible. It creates an environment in which every female is set up to scramble for her individual security. Under sexism, women’s individual security is often minimized as an internal self-esteem issue. However, it is an external social problem when violence toward us is rampant and we have less access to resources than males. Racism, classism, and national identities get layered in so that some women are asked to sell out [betray and abandon] their sisters in order to get physical and economic security. The extreme version of this is a non-working thin white woman with a rich husband who lives in a house in a community designed to give a sense of protection from the harshness experienced by most of the world. The fantasy of this “success”—of having economic and physical protection—drives a diverse group of women to pursue it, even if only as a fantasy. It also organizes how women treat one another and how thin women treat their large sisters, given fat oppression.
Thin women often enjoy relationships with large women because they see us as “outside the competition.” They often relax and feel more secure around us. (They get a break from constant comparisons, a sense of inferiority, and fear of losing in the “security marketplace.”) Thin women often see us as their best friends. And thin women—even our closest friends and family—rarely take stands on our behalf, hold a perspective on our deservedness, or choose to stay with us in the fight against sexism rather than seeking a path, through thinness, to the false sense of individual security.
WHAT I'M DOING IN MY SUPPORT GROUP
I lead a large women’s support group in my RC Community and have decided to challenge in it the total environment of fat oppression.
I led my first large women’s support group in the mid-1990s and have consistently found that large women’s RC gatherings must include “digging large women out” from under the everyday experience of fat oppression that they have endured since the last gathering. Unlike with any other identity work I have done in RC, it is difficult for large women to hold on to the most basic perspectives about their goodness, smarts [intelligence], and worthiness to exist as humans. With other identities, there is some awareness, once you do the work, that you are up against distress recordings, even if you sometimes believe them to be true. But I have observed that it is harder for large women to hold on to this. So challenging the total environment of fat oppression is what I have decided to tackle [work on] in my support group.
In our last large women’s support group, I talked about the total environment of fat oppression. I shared how oppressions like racism and sexism have solid social movements around them and we have done enough work in our societies on the overt forms of them that we are now aware of their more subtle forms. So, for example, when you hear a white boss say that two Black workers socialize too much, you know it as a subtle form of the racist recording that Black people are lazy. But, in many workplaces, you no longer hear the phrase “Black people are lazy” coming out of a white person’s mouth.
I shared that we still experience so many overt forms of fat oppression—being called names, comments on our bodies, being forced to buy two plane tickets, and more—that we forget there is also the subtle and constant environment of fat oppression, that the recordings of fat oppression are being run [enacted] around us and at us all the time, even when we are not being called names or blatantly denied human rights. This subtle stuff deeply impacts us and reinforces the recordings that we run at [direct at] ourselves all the time.
My plan is to tackle, in three sessions of our support group, three ways that the constant and subtle fat oppression of large women plays out. The three ways are (1) blame and undeservedness, (2) hierarchies and competition, and (3) caretaking. The following is a report on the first of the three sessions.
BLAME AND UNDESERVEDNESS
In the first session, I started by talking about the entire constant and subtle thing. Then I talked about how we get blamed all the time and treated like we don’t deserve good things, and are even treated like we deserve to be blamed. This often plays out [occurs] in visceral reactions to us, as so much fat oppression seems to do—in people snapping at us, acting irritated by us, twisting up their faces in disgust at us, and more. I talked about how we are expected to blame ourselves and see ourselves as undeserving and, when we act differently than that, how the level of viciousness is ramped up. This plays out around more than food and bodies. It also happens around love, money, leadership—all the things that have been distorted by capitalism and denied to some humans. We are supposed to understand that we are the humans that don’t deserve to get our human needs met. In terms of sexism, we are the females who are not competing.
I talked about my family to show the everydayness of fat oppression and how it gets acted out at us as large women even when we are not being called names. I worked with women on their everyday experiences of being blamed and treated as undeserving. Women worked on being targeted in their families, by doctors, and in the workplace. Women worked on how they self-blame and don’t fight for things for themselves. Women worked in a way that felt different from how they could work in previous meetings of the group. Something about acknowledging the everydayness of this oppression made it clearer how each woman feels about herself.
I left the group with a profound sense of how the internalized oppression of large women is equal to the external oppression we experience. And how transformational it would be in our RC Communities if every counselor of a large woman assumed that any negative feelings she has about herself are direct recordings of how she has been and is currently being treated.
In upcoming sessions of my support group, I look forward to looking at hierarchies and competition and then at caretaking, as aspects of the everyday subtle fat oppression.
USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of women
(Present Time 204, July 2021)