A while back I wrote about whether or not fat-sploitation was real or myth. With all of the attention that plus size fashion and plus size modeling has been receiving the last few months I have come to the conclusion there is a bit of exploitation going on in the world of fat but not in the way most of us would think.
Up until the 1960′s most of the celebrities and models were larger. Think about Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield. Both of these ladies in their prime were considered gorgeous voluptuous women with hips and curves that many admired and some were even jealous of. What changed? Enter Twiggy and the view of what was considered beautiful went from curvaceous to pre-pubescent boy looking ladies.
Fast forward to today the world of image and fashion is over crowded with models who are so skinny they look near dead. Not to mention what they have to go through in order to maintain that look is abuse at its highest level. We hear about it in small doses but it wasn’t until I read Crystal Renn’s Hungry: A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves
The verdict at least for me is that fat is being exploited in a subtle way and the curvy revolution that most including myself have been enjoying is really just a continuation of what was stifled in the 60′s. Plus size, fat, bbw, curvy or whatever you want to call it is actually the larger community fighting for something we never should have had to go to war about in the first place. The battle lines were drawn and the fight continues with fashion, modeling, and society trying to dictate what a person should look like and what they can and cannot wear.
Should we be fighting this fight? My answer is no, but as long as we are part of a system in the United States that measures a persons worth by dress size we will continue to fight. Even with hard evidence stating that as long as a person is healthy their size does not matter. Finally, though my thoughts are that the fat community is being exploited from both inside and out I also feel that the establishment is finding it harder to ignore a section of the population that refuses to be held down. What do you think?
