Today in Fat Hatred

From Brazil: An ad campaign for Marilia Light dairy products. If you don't eat them, you make a bigger target for people wanting to shoot at you. Or something.


[Click images to embiggen.]
[Images are of a fat female form and fat male form pictured as rifle targets, with various body parts marked with weights as targets are marked with points.]

This? Is eliminationist imagery. And the frequency (and increasing acceptability) of imagery like this, combined with "war on obesity" and anti-obesity rhetoric, is terrifying. "Obesity" defines fat people in a way that many other physical differences don't, because being fat is viewed not only as a flaw, but as a flaw by choice, a moral failing due to weakness of character. There are lots of people who would look at the crooked scar running down my spine from surgery and consider me less than for the so-called imperfection—but very few who would axiomatically assume I'm a bad person with serious character flaws for it.

My fat, on the other hand, is a different story. And their hatred and prejudice is underwritten—and justified—by eliminationist rhetoric that targets the bodies of fat people. As if those bodies are somehow separate from the consciousnesses that inhabit them.

There is not "a thin person" inside of me screaming to get out. There is only me, screaming for my right to exist in the body I have.

[Via Copyranter.]