BBW

Are you a BBW (Big, Beautiful Woman)? Are you striving to be this? Is this a goal in your life, something you've always wanted to be? Or is it something you are "saddled" with and being so "saddled" have managed to "deal" with the excesses of appetite and engorged fat cells by softening the jelly tissue with euphemism?

If being a BBW is your goal in life, then I do applaud you. I have always despised my fat body which I converted to thin these past three years and now feel a modicum of happiness for redeeming myself. I was born too late to be impacted by Carole Shaw's BBW Magazine in 1979 and the feminist or weightist movement of Fat Acceptance which is relentlessly crawling at a snail's pace toward enlightening a dark world. Nevertheless, it is disturbing the molecules  of our culture in an attempt to right the scales of injustice away from the power dominance of thin chauvinists.

You do know there are websites where BBW and BBM can feel unloved no longer. (www.largeandlovely.com/   and  www.bbwpersonalsplus.com/ )  And if the BBW and BBM truly, honestly and sincerely love their appearance, their soul and their health, then I am very happy for them. But what do they do when the jokes vampire their jugular? And the blood gougers do come to feast on obese carcasses. From where I sit, the culture does not prize FAT in any shape or form, regardless of how hard Fat Acceptance adherents strive to make it so.

The Urban Slang Dictionary defining BBW has posted many entries. (http://www.urbandictionary.com/definephp?term=BBW&page=4 ) And they are not pretty. On the first page of the site definition for BBW, an entry posted 2003 made me think that maybe attitudes toward obese women had gotten better seven years later. NOT! A June 2010 entry states a BBW is "delusional enough to think that she has any physically attractive qualities." Another entry states the acronym stands for "Big Blue Whale," another "Beast Beyond Whale." And these are the more gentle epithets.

So who cares? The urban slang dictionary is crude and most of the entries are made by younger contributors. (Somehow, I can't imagine the 55 year old making such comments.) My concern is that the posts are a very telling social barometer of youth and perhaps economic class.  If you were an overweight teenage girl, how would you brace against such attitudes? If she were your daughter, would you keep yourself apprised of such terrorism to counteract it? How would you counteract it?  With Fat Acceptance?


More on this next week...and the teenagers who made a suicide pact, one of whom had been bullied about her weight (and she was far from being obese).