By Micco Caporale
A recent study affirmed what social scientists have known for years: women like to complain about being “fat.” Scientists call these self-deprecating conversations about weight “fat talk,” and fat talk hurts more than a strenuous workout.
Women choose to participate in fat talk because it serves some basic functions. In a culture where women are expected to be modest, fat talk assuages any suspicions of arrogance. It says, “Look at me! I’m not a proud person because I’m not proud of the way I look!”
Fat talk also bonds women together. When one woman identifies a physical shortcoming (“Ugh, my thighs are SO big!”), she’s admitting vulnerability. Simultaneously, she’s inviting other women to admit vulnerability, but she’s also making a bid for emotional support. (“God, I have the thighs of a prepubescent boy. I would KILL for your thighs.”) In some ways, fat talk is a way of seeing how much a woman is willing to share and give—essentially, testing a friendship’s waters.
On a deeper level, though, fat talk is a socially sanctioned way for women to express their feelings without being perceived as “emotional.” So often, fat talk is not a response to ill-fitting jeans or inappropriately large portions. It’s seldom a declaration of a physical state (“I am fat”) but rather a glimpse into one’s emotional world (“I feel fat”). Focusing on weight gives material concern to abstract feelings.
The problem with fat talk is multifaceted. First, it is modesty reproducing modesty. Women that apologize for their weight are apologizing for their appetites, both literally and abstractly. If a healthy woman can’t be proud of the physical appetite that led to her size, can she really be proud of the emotional appetite that led to her accomplishments? No matter how successful a woman is, if she engages in fat talk, she’s still labeling herself as “not good enough.”
Fat talk also reinforces thin as an ideal by normalizing weight dissatisfaction amongst average or underweight women. Women accept weight complaints as part of normal discourse—which is inherently problematic, but it also ostracizes women who like (or at the very least accept) their weight. How can a woman be apart of a group whose affinity is predicated on struggling toward something, if that woman is struggling against the exact same thing? Women who do not participate in fat talk are excluded superficially because they can’t contribute to the conversation, but ultimately, because they’re satisfied with not being “ideal.”
Weight is the red herring in many women’s lives. Rather than addressing personal shortcomings or accepting situations beyond their control, women focus on weight as a surmountable obstacle. Diet and exercise are something proactive that women can do when they’re feeling powerless—the problem being, of course, that weight usually isn’t the problem needing a solution. (It’s also a problem that fat talk leads to diet and exercise resolutions which often get abandoned, but that’s a separate issue entirely.)
The reasons as to why weight becomes the red herring are probably as endless as Lindsay Lohan’s legal troubles, but one point to consider is weight as a facade for emotions. Another study showed that, when asked to construct narratives around photos of unhappy faces, most study participants attributed women’s unhappy faces to the women being “emotional” while men were probably just “having a bad day.”
While women are allowed to express their emotions more freely than men, they still struggle against the stigma of having emotions. Thus, through fat talk, women can express frustration or unhappiness without having to articulate it as such, making fat talk a sort of exercise in denial.
