tbh as someone who’s been both skinny and fat since going thru puberty and therefore been seen as a potential sexual partner by men let me just say that whatever like skinny shaming y’all try to equate with fat shaming is fucking hilarious and does not exist at all. the worst i ever got “skinny shamed” was when i came home after a day of not eating and was told by my father that i looked “sucked in” and needed to eat something. due to reasons that i won’t get into on this post, that didn’t make me feel ashamed or embarrassed, it actually made me feel good. and that was the extent of any skinny shaming i ever faced. fat shaming, on the other hand, is such an intensely terrible experience. when i became fat, men literally stopped treating me like a person. and i am not exaggerating in any way when i say this—men would act like i did not exist, they would not look directly at me, they would not acknowledge me at all. im mostly referring to strangers when i say this—random men in public who would’ve ogled me, or at the very least treated me like a human being, had i been 40 pounds lighter. and i know it was because i was fat because i would watch these very same men treat my sisters (who look very similar to me in the face but were thinner than i was) with basic human respect. it was like a switch going on and off, and the switch was respect, and it was being controlled by whether or not the man in question would fuck me. and all that was different about me from before i gained weight was the fact that i was fatter. having experienced both ends of the spectrum i can guarantee that there is absolutely nothing like being a fat woman in the world because it doesn’t feel like you’re in the world at all. you learn to take this shame and internalize it and begin to think that since no one acknowledges you or treats you like a complex person in the world then you must not deserve to be in it. fat women are literally taught that if they want to be treated with any value then they need to lose some weight, meanwhile skinny women are rewarded for looking the way they do every second of every day when they go outside or consume media that shows them their body type is the ideal. so if you’re a skinny woman trying to equate your experience with being a fat woman or trying to make some point about how skinny shaming is just as bad as fat shaming, i want you to genuinely ask yourself if you’ve ever felt like you didn’t deserve to exist specifically because of your body type.
