Corporate Complicity in Fat Phobia

As anyone who walks through the world in a fat body knows, fat phobia and fat hatred are EVERYWHERE. It’s a systemic problem that manifests in ways big and small but always results in the same message: Your body is wrong the way it is and needs to be changed to fit our arbitrary standards.

All sorts of companies and industries support this message. Some of them are obvious tools of the diet industry and can be more or less avoided. Which makes it especially jarring when fat phobia is encountered in an unexpected place, like Macy’s.

According to this article in USA Today Macy’s has already responded and removed the plates from the single store where they were located in NYC. The plates were created by a company called Pourtions, which created the product to center on the “important issue of portion control.” Which is just a euphemism for restrictive and disordered eating. The implicit message, peddled exclusively to women in the case of the larger plate, is eat less.

"It’s about using shame to peddle products to women who are all too aware of what parameters society wants for our bodies: not too matronly, not too large, not too fit or then they’re vain (expletive)," Ward said." It’s all a mind game to steal our attention and once you’re aware of that machine, you can’t unsee it."

I first came across these when Jameela Jamil retweeted Alie Ward’s tweet. And the horror and revulsion at them was almost overwhelming. I’m fortunate to not have struggled with an eating disorder, but can you imagine someone who has coming across these while on a shopping trip? Can you imagine having your self-worth attacked out of nowhere by a set of plates??

How about when you open up a shipment of clothes from a store and find an Atkins “snack bar” inside? Well, that’s what’s happened to people who bought clothes online from Forever 21. It was initially reported that Forever 21 was only putting the diet bars inside orders of plus size clothes, which is truly horrifying, but a statement from the company asserts that all customers received the diet product as a “free test product” that has since been removed.

Look, eating disorders are real, and getting an unsolicited diet product sent to you out of nowhere I imagine would be extremely triggering, like ordering food delivery and getting a dick pick inside. I don’t have a lot to add to Jezebel’s commentary on the issue.

In both cases, WHAT THE FUCK were they thinking? This kind of corporate complicity in proliferating fat phobia is, on the face of it, unwitting. In which case, how can that possibly be? Body positivity isn’t new, it isn’t a fad, and it isn’t going away. Fat people are tired as fuck of this shit and we’re getting louder and louder about it. It’s time for everyone to pay attention.