Negative Compliments

Originally posted at Fatly Yours on Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Very often, when people say something good about a fat woman, it's not a simple positive compliment like "You look really good today." We all know the aggravating "You have such a pretty face" and "Have you lost weight?" variants, but there's also another type of negative compliment. It's the "at least you're better than" compliment. "You're much better off being fat than anorexic", or "You look much better than those skinny bitches". It's a compliment that directly offends someone else. The fat woman's positivity, especially looks-wise, is constructed through something she's not, the other extreme she's been able to avoid.

This is especially true of fat actors. I was looking through Camryn Manheim's imdb bio and made the mistake of reading some of her forum below. People are complimenting her appearance in this thread, but it seems to be combined with anger against thin actresses:

"I'd like to see a movie where Johnny Depp tells Kirsten Dunst "It won't work out, you're just too darn skinny!"


My jaw dropped when I saw this. Some people want to see a movie where a man dumps a woman based on her appearance. But hey, it's cool because she's unattainably skinny. If a man dumps a skinny woman, he does it for ALL women. He's not offending women who are naturally skinny, because everyone is naturally the same - on the slim end of normalweight - if they eat right and exercise. So really, he's not rejecting the woman inside, but the symbol of having to be skinny to be attractive to men. It might sound good, but this is the kind of logic that we should be trying to avoid. No body should be made into a symbol.

Some people see skinny the same way they see fat. It's unhealthy, it's a sign of having an eating disorder, it's the symbol of abiding to ideals instead of being yourself, it's not being real. This is not empowering or accepting in any way, because it's still making generalizations based on people's appearance and aggrandizing normalweight as the only real body people can have. In my experience, the people who make fun of "stick insects" are the same people who laugh at fatties. They will try to flatter you by saying they find skinny women ugly.

I don't think it's fat acceptant at all to go around saying you'd rather see a fat actress than a "stick insect", "skeleton", or "anorexic". These are all terrible words (except "anorexic" when applied to people with actual anorexia). Some women are naturally that way and should have the right to be seen as normal variants, not as extreme examples of dieting. Some skinny women love eating. Some skinny women are fat acceptant. Most skinny women are far from being bitches.

The negative compliment is really a double negative, because it goes against fat women too. The underlying idea is that fat is sort of a bad thing. Better than some other things, but still inherently bad. Why is it that we never hear fat women compared favorably to "normalweight" ones? Some people do prefer fat women to normalweight women; it's only a matter of taste. However, they're usually shot down with "But it's unhealthy to be fat!" as if sexual tastes have anything to do with health.

Predictably, someone in the thread asks, "Is this a thread for fat fetishists"? Remember, if you like a fat woman's appearance, you like fat; if you like a thin woman's appearance, you like women, or the individual woman. It's ironic, because lots of men fetishize thin women and their disciplined, obedient bodies. This is often not a conscious thing and they are not called on it, so they assume their fetish is just regular heterosexual lust, or even something better - unusually high standards: "I like a really beautiful woman."

As a lesbian, I find many thin women attractive. I also find many fat women attractive. It doesn't seem to have that much to do with weight; it's more about the looks of each individual. I used to try and like exclusively fat women, because it's not fat acceptant to like thin women and everyone already likes them anyway. But then I realized three things:

1) fat acceptance has nothing to do with physical attraction;

2) everyone does not like thin women. There are lots of people who find both fat and thin
repulsive, and are proud to proclaim this;

3) shock horror - thin women have body insecurities too.

So really, it hurts people when we say, "This woman is a stick insect", or "I find people this skinny repulsive". It's never fun to hear that you, or people your size, are repulsive. You don't have to find everyone attractive, but it shows poor judgement and lack of empathy to go around saying people are ugly or repulsive. And in this digital era, you can be sure that stars sometimes read conversations about themselves online. Why do we expect them to have egos of steel that aren't affected by such comments?

"I'd rather see a fat woman than a skinny one" is a straw man. It expresses the attitude that fat is bad, but skinny is even worse. It's a misguided way to rebel against beauty ideals. It changes nothing. One woman is still called beautiful at the expense of another; the ideal is reversed to be anti-skinny, but it's still exclusive. Here's a revolutionary idea: if you find someone beautiful, why not just call her beautiful?

By the way, Camryn Manheim is pretty awesome.