This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Trigger warning for fat hatred, body policing.]

Fat Stigma Spreads Around the Globe. With the single exception of the quotes from Marianne and Alexandra Brewis, everything about that article is horrendo.

To be sure, jokes and negative perceptions about weight have been around for ages. In Mexico, for instance, a nickname like "gordo" which translates as "fatty," raises no eyebrows.

Sure. No one in Mexico has ever been bothered by being called gordo (or gordita) before. Except, of course, for the people who have.

Stephen McGarvey, a professor of community health at Brown University who studies Samoan health issues, noted that 25 years ago, Samoan study subjects living in Samoa and New Zealand who viewed thin and large body silhouettes mostly had positive feelings about bigger bodies. (The exception was young, educated women, who showed a preference for slimmer silhouettes.)

A preference for the silhouettes, or a preference for the status associated with slimmer silhouettes and the privilege slimmer silhouettes afford them? That's not semantics. That's the whole point of the concerns being raised in the article. And yet here it is, the preference for a "slimmer silhouette" just being reported without the merest suggestion that it might not be the thinness itself that's ultimately at the center of the preference, but the avoidance of all the negative associations with fatness.

Dr. McGarvey said that more extensive study was needed to determine just how much that had changed, and that it was important that public health campaigns intended to curb diabetes and high blood pressure did not end up creating negative images of overweight individuals.

Too late!

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad that Dr. McGarvey is raising these concerns, and I'm glad this issue is getting more attention. It's just, ugh, the reporting. I'm not sure the best way to present the idea that fat stigma is dangerous and proliferating by including quotes from a man who hates "fatties" on the bus and a woman whose friend would rather her children be anorexic than fat, but none from the fat people who are victimized by these attitudes.

(Note to the editor: Congrats on getting the message that headless fatty pix are dehumanizing garbage. Now apply same message to pix of disembodied female parts, thin or otherwise. Thanks.)

[H/T to everyone in the multiverse, and thanks to each and every one of you.]