I think I'm in love

[jennyaxe]

Imagine this:

You're in a cafe. A skinny woman whines "Oh, I feel so fat today, I feel like such a big fat cow." Then she turns to you and says "How can you stand it every day?"

I'm not sure what I'd say, but I bet it wouldn't be half as cool as what Dianne Sylvan said

Comments

[trixieleitz]

That is just golden. Thank you for posting it!

[jhnc.livejournal.com]

Calling someone "Skinny Bitch" is cool?

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

About as cool as calling someone "fat cow".

It's a cult of vegans

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

...who don't have enough B12 in their diets to think straight.

There's actually a book, Skinny Bitch, written by a holistic New Age nutritionist and a fashion model coach.

[wildcelticrose.livejournal.com]

I LOVED her comeback!

It was brilliant and well deserved.

I just don't get how people think they have the right to insult total strangers.

IT all boils down to the woman's lack of self esteem or personal worth.

No, we shouldn't feel sorry for her, but what a pathetic existence to constantly need to prop yourself up at the expense of others.

And with that, skinny latte bitch with the pink purse gets a big fat

Re: It's a cult of vegans

[jhnc.livejournal.com]

Vegans dither over skimmed versus semi-skimmed milk? That's news to me.

I think all the paragraphs the author spends slagging off the other woman behind her back - and a blog probably has much wider distribution than a comment in a coffee shop - negate any moral high ground she might have had. If it's okay to insult thin women (and women at my workplace do it all the time), then it must be okay to insult fat women.

Frankly I can't really see any difference between the latte drinker's comment and me, if I'm on a soft-food diet because I broke my jaw and I'm in the doctor's waiting room with a guy who has his jaw wired shut, asking how he copes with a liquid diet when I'm having enough difficulty living without pringles. But how terrible of me to ask him! I mean, perhaps he *enjoys* sucking food through a straw. Oh, how condescending of me to imagine he might feel the same way that I do!

dianne sylvan

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

brilliant.

dishing out insults

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

whether there is much difference depends on how and why you ask. do you want to truthfully learn how he copes? physically and/or emotionally? do you want to get to know anything about him? do you actually care? are you just killing time? or are you pitying him, using him as a foil to minimize your own misery? i see the latter all the time with able-bodied people towards disabled ones, this kind of faux-sympathy; "oh i could never deal with that, how can you stand being in a wheelchair". it's horribly insulting, and the perpetrators don't even grok why -- are you one of those people? there is a gulf a mile wide between sincere sympathy and this sort of comment.

i think insulting skinny women out of the blue is nasty; i don't even like slogans that do it indirectly, such as "real women have curves". but to snark back when somebody has insulted you? not a big sin in my book. to slag somebody without naming them or otherwise identifying them on one's own blog is "talking about them behind their back"? heck; she had already told the woman to her front what she thought of her behaviour. what's wrong with recounting the story for others? should we just never talk about the arseholish behaviours we encounter?

how did moral high ground get into this? if i snark in return i don't consider myself gaining _or_ losing any moral high ground per se; that depends on a lot of circumstances.

Re: It's a cult of vegans

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's pretty condescending to ask someone how they "stand" being "such a big fat cow" every day.

[rbradakis.livejournal.com]

Brilliant response.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Hehe.

We are all armed now!

[jennyaxe.livejournal.com]

In this instance, yes.

Re: It's a cult of vegans

[jennyaxe.livejournal.com]

The difference in your scenario and the one that actually occurred is that in your scenario, you're asking the guy about how he feels about something he has to do in order to live, not about the way his body looks. There's a big difference.

Let's say the guy in the doctor's waiting room doesn't have his jaw wired shut. Let's say instead he has a congenital birth defect making him unable to chew, ever. Would you still go up to him and ask him how he can stand being the way he is?

Insulting skinny women for their bodies is not OK in my book. I got quite a few insults (often couched as well-meaning advice) when I was 20 and weighed 50 kg . Now that I weigh 85, the comments are still there - and when I was in between, yes, hoo boy, there were comments, too! Except that then there appeared to be some envy mixed in, now there's more of superciliousness.

IMO, the point of the post wasn't "it's OK to call someone a skinny bitch any time, anywhere". It wasn't even "it's wrong to be rude to fat people". It was rather "it's wrong to make assumptions about how others feel about their body, and it's dead wrong to assume that if they don't meet your standards then they're a) feeling bad about it and b) not deserving of common courtesy". In that regard, would have enjoyed the comeback just as much if it'd been an average woman complaining about feeling bony and asking a thin women how she could stand it. But we should also be aware that there's a different social dynamic at work in that situation than in the actual one. There's also a different social dynamic in a black man calling a white man "whitey" as opposed to a white man calling a black man "nigger". Pretending that both comments are equally insulting requires a blithe disregard of what actually goes on in our society and the history of racial relations.