“Even your voice sounds fat.”
“I’m just worried about your health.”
“It’s hard to believe someone like you actually exercises.”
These are just some of the horrible things that people have actually said to the 13 women featured in the video above. Wear Your Voice Mag, an intersectional feminist magazine that promotes body positivity and acceptance, uploaded the short video onto its Facebook page yesterday. It shows a diverse group of women quoting comments that people have made ― whether intentionally insulting or not ― about their bodies and their weights.
The video’s creative director Rachel Otis wrote on Wear Your Voice that the project was a hugely emotional one for her. “For the first time, I was creating an experience that was not about what we have come to know as body positivity,” she wrote. “It was distinctly about fat bodied acceptance and liberation.”
Otis explained the key difference between body acceptance and positivity and fat liberation: “Body positivity has become a general societal trend that tends to ignore thin privilege. Fat liberation was the radical fuel that lit the fire.”
The comments in the video are all real, made to the women in the video by their loved ones, by strangers on social media, by doctors or teachers or therapists.
Otis’s message for the women in the video ― and for all women who struggle in the face of a fatphobic culture ― is a beautiful one.
“You are not alone. You are seen. You are heard. You are appreciated. You are loved just as you are.”
Related
Before You Go
