skinny

Today (while “busy” procrastinating) I somehow got to thinking, why on earth do so many girls aspire to be “skinny”? Do they really think it’s something cool, attractive and worth striving for? As far as I know, the word “skinny” has never been thrown my way as a compliment. I’ve always been skinny and that’s something I get from my dad, who can stuff his tummy full of cakes all night long and not get so much as a drop of fat. But skinny is certainly not something I’ve aspired to be, I’d like very much to have a more, eh … “regular” figure. Do you have any idea how annoying it is that whenever I go in for a check-up, I get pointed out that I’m underweight? It doesn’t even matter what doctor or specialist I go to – my family doctor, the gastroenterologist, the gynecologist, heck, even the optometrist, they all find a way to lecture me about the dangers of being underweight.

OK, I can get that. They are doctors, they kind of have the right to express their concerns. I can deal with that. But what’s frustrating beyond words is that people who don’t even know my last name, how old I am or what I do for a living have the nerve to point out how skinny I am. They would ask questions like “why are you so skinny?”, “when did you last eat?”, “don’t you eat at all?”, “where do you get jeans that fit you?”, “have you thrown out your fridge?”, etc. They certainly make me want to throw my fridge at them. And the crazy thing is that they say it as a kind of a joke. They don’t think it’s offensive or rude, they don’t think it gets to me or hurts my self-esteem. But I’ve had to listen to these kind of comments for almost 20 years (I’m counting out the early years of my life during which, hopefully, I was a perfectly chubby toddler or at least during which I didn’t pay attention to all of that). Yes, I have grown to more or less accept my body, but it still doesn't make it acceptable for other people to make comments about it. What if I answered back “why are you so fat?”, “have you been eating again?” or “have you bought another fridge?” Wouldn’t everybody gasp and tut and think I’m being incredibly rude and insensitive? But, excuse me, why is there this double standard? Why do they think it’s funny that I’m skinny and point it out whenever they can, while the F word is completely taboo?

I don’t know if it’s the cold weather or the coming end of the year and the thoughtfulness it brings, but there seems to be a lot of talk & thought about body image related topics. Just as I was thinking about it today, Zoe and Louise, or, Zoella and Sprinkleofglitter, over at YouTube had made a video about this very same topic. It’s called “Why are you so skinny” and you can watch it here. Zoe has also made a blog post with the same title and you can read it here.

Please stop calling skinny people “skinny”. It’s just as rude as calling fat people “fat”. And it’s also just as rude as asking somebody why they’re white.