The medical community is clear that obesity is a risk factor that can lead to serious diseases such as type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, fatty liver, cancer and multiple morbidities. Likewise, there is a growing social movement, led by women, that considers that the word obesity implies illness and that the origin of the word itself stigmatizes fat people, blames them and holds them responsible for their condition.
In Spain, activism against fatphobia is very recent, unlike what is happening in other countries such as the US, where it originated with the Fat Acceptance Movement in the late 1960s, which later continued in England.
In the Spanish-speaking world, the movement against fatphobia was born in 2012 and gained strength in Mexico, Chile and Argentina through the Internet, focusing above all on social networks, blogs, web pages and Facebook, YouTube accounts and other social networks.
The fight against fatphobia in Spain has a woman’s name and is called Magdalena Piñeyro, philosopher and co-founder of the Stop Gordophobia platform in 2011. Since then, she has demanded that euphemisms and other terms not be used to talk about a fat person, especially in female. She does not want to be called “chubby”, “obese”, “chubby” or “chubby”. From the platform they insist that fat is not an insult, it is an adjective. Not using the word causes it to become taboo and continues to be used to cause harm.
This is what we have analyzed in a study that we are carrying out – not yet published – in which the reactions on social networks to the death of the actress Itziar Castro, also an activist against fatphobia and the subject of offensive and hurtful messages on social networks, are studied. social.
Networks can be a space that, on the one hand, favors the fight against all types of discrimination and, on the other, becomes a weapon to attack them with total impunity.
Of the classification of all the messages analyzed in Others were related solely to overeating.
Dehumanization is seen when these comments point out that fat people are sick and guilty for being so. When they refer to the body as something “sick and ugly” the person is blamed: “You asked for it.”
Given the lack of ethical and legal limits, there is a lack of reflection and coherence in the messages that are published, where a person is judged by their physical appearance and is even blamed for their death.
In that sense, European law does not hold social networks legally responsible for the illicit content they may host, since it treats them as mere hosts of the opinions of users.
This fact highlights another issue: the limits to freedom of expression in the face of messages with offensive content, unverified data and information that serve to mock people for their bodies without taking into account the serious consequences that this implies.
Activism demands that the media, and specifically social networks, assume and react to the consequences of promoting unrealistic beauty standards that glorify thinness and stigmatize fatness.
The media and journalists have an ethical responsibility in the way in which information about fat people is addressed. It is essential to avoid sensationalism and stigmatization, as well as promote messages of inclusion, acceptance and body diversity.
The fight against fatphobia is not limited to changing the way we talk about weight and physical appearance, but rather to building a more inclusive, respectful and empathetic society in which body diversity is accepted in all areas of life. .
This article was originally published on The Conversation. María del Mar Rodríguez González is Professor of Information Genres and Communication Offices at the University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
