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Old 07-05-20, 12:47 PM  
hch
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Join Date: Mar 2002
Quote:
Originally Posted by dianestjohn View Post
I just want to point out that thin is not necessarily the same thing as fit. So although this thread is titled “fit-shaming” I think it’s actually more a case of “thin-shaming”. I doubt anyone cares if Adele has been working out more but people who thought she was a good role model for body acceptance may feel disappointed that she has seemingly capitulated to society’s standard that women should be thin by losing so much weight.
Thank you for writing this! (I'm glad that someone else posted these points first. ) The first point is crucial, and I also agree with your second point about what you think is most likely happening here.

Without this thread, I probably wouldn't have started looking at a few things, one of which linked to this piece on self.com from this May 14:

Adele Isn’t Discussing Her Weight So Why Are We?
Even compliments send a powerful message about whose bodies we value.


Either the website of an established magazine has published a piece with substantial factual errors or this is a very interesting point:

Quote:
Few of the singer's followers echoed her thanks to first responders and health care providers. Instead many focused on something she hadn't even mentioned: the changing shape of her body.
I just did a search, and I haven't learned more about how fit Adele actually is.

Next I'll post another reply to your first point from a piece that I probably wouldn't have found without another search, also related to this thread.

Later, I'll post more of a reply to your first point. It concerns another example of what's explicitly been called "fit-shaming" (by a major US TV network); I really don't think that it's precisely "fit-shaming" but rather another example of the problems concerning weight, size, and aesthetics.
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"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The Velveteen Rabbit
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Old 07-05-20, 01:06 PM  
hch
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Join Date: Mar 2002
Quote:
Originally Posted by dianestjohn View Post
I just want to point out that thin is not necessarily the same thing as fit.
Thanks to this thread, I'd also recently found this transcript from a 2014 radio show on Australia's ABC:

The obesity paradox

The webpage introduction begins,

Quote:
Kate Fridkis has always been praised for looking fit and absorbed the message that if you’re skinny you must be healthy - until she found she wasn’t fit and she wasn’t healthy.
And Kate, who is interviewed last, has some interesting things to say, like this.

Quote:
Kate Fridkis: As I got older I went to the doctor and the doctor said, 'Your heart rate is pretty high, you should really do some type of cardio exercise.' And it was easier to dismiss that advice because I had over the years had so many people say to me, 'You don't need to exercise,' as though I'd already accomplished any goal that exercise might have, as in I already looked the way that you're supposed to look after you've exercised. Actually a pretty dangerous and at the very least stupid idea.
I don't know exactly what Kate's admirers were thinking about fitness per se--maybe at least some of them suffered from a misconception that thinness magically confers fitness snd that Kate, despite not exercising, must've been "fit" because she had a "runner's body." But whatever they were thinking, this example fits well with my suspicion, from reading this thread, that many examples of both shaming and praising are based more on appearance than on actual fitness. My next planned post here will concern an even more explicit example of this idea.

I've also always heartily disliked exchanges like this:

Q: "Why are you exercising? You're thin!"
A: "How do you think I stay thin?"

Whenever I've seen words to this effect posted somewhere--including on VF in the past--people have seemed to find it rather clever, but it actually reflects the same basic "dangerous" and "stupid" attitude that younger Kate had heard so often (in other words, that someone who didn't exercise to "stay thin" supposedly wouldn't need to be active). Again, as you'd said, "thin is not necessarily the same thing as fit."

(Kate's experience is also why I don't believe, as someone told me in a VF thread about unsolicited comments on weight loss, that people should just accept compliments without disputing them. Maybe someone wouldn't dispute such comments in every circumstance, but the mindset behind these comments shouldn't receive consistent quiet acceptance either.)
__________________
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The Velveteen Rabbit
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Old 07-16-20, 07:39 AM  
hch
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Join Date: Mar 2002
Quote:
Originally Posted by dianestjohn View Post
I just want to point out that thin is not necessarily the same thing as fit. So although this thread is titled “fit-shaming” I think it’s actually more a case of “thin-shaming”.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hch View Post
[...] this example fits well with my suspicion, from reading this thread, that many examples of both shaming and praising are based more on appearance than on actual fitness. My next planned post here will concern an even more explicit example of this idea.
I was wondering how people have been using the term "fit-shaming," and I found this page, for a 2018 segment on the (US) ABC show What Would You Do?:

[Warning: video may play automatically.]
'What Would You Do?' focuses on 'Fit-Shaming' tonight

There is a 00:25 video that looks like a commercial for the show, with a brief appearance of Serena Williams saying "I've been body-shamed" and a clip of the show itself. In this video, a woman is shown exercising at a beach boardwalk while she is wearing clothing that shows that she has muscular arms. She and the "passersby" are all part of the show.

Quote:
Tonight on ‘What Would You Do?’ a muscular woman is fit-shamed by a male and female passersby.

You've heard of fat-shaming. But, what about fit-shaming? World class athlete Serena Williams has gotten heat from internet trolls who say "she's built like a man," or "too muscular."

The tennis icon opened up on "The View" about body image. "I've been body-shamed basically since I've been in the public eye," Williams told the co-hosts.
And I'd say that what's happening here is actually not direct "fit-shaming" (or even "strength-shaming") but "body-shaming" of a particular and persistent sort. Not all prominent athletic women are shamed to roughly the same degree--and if this exercising woman looked like Miss America or even had the ever-coveted "long, lean body of a dancer," this scenario would've failed. I did find it interesting that a major TV network has called this sort of attention "shaming," and I see other (and welcome) evidence of societal change, but if shaming women for being "too muscular" had completely lost its power, this segment wouldn't have been filmed.

More later.

[Note: For some reason, I never posted more in this thread, but a sort of continuation is in a post in a 2023 thread, "Vent: When people are surprised that you exercise," about the "opposite" problem of people assuming that people who don't look stereotypically "fit" must be unfit.]
__________________
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The Velveteen Rabbit

Last edited by hch; 08-10-23 at 10:24 PM. Reason: Added link to another thread
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