Fat Shaming in the 2000's and in my comic

A lot of you younger readers often leave comments wondering why the world of kip-land is so fatphobic and I think this is a reasonable question if you did not experience the 2000's. Most of the worldbuilding is based on my personal experience of having grown up as a teen in the late 2000's and realizing I was into big bellies and fat bodies at a very young age.

The 2000's were a horrible time for even a normal sized person. Girls with regular weight and healthy bodies were ruthlessly mocked for being "fat cows" by guys at school. Magazine covers had borderline anorexic celebrities openly ridiculed as being out of shape flabby pigs with their fat hanging out in public. Women in media were ruthlessly scrutinized and their bodies picked apart and analyzed.

Probably the most famous of these is the Britney Spears 2007 vma Awards performance, where she was bombarded by the media for being a disgustingly fat trainwreck that had really let herself go.

Now as a fat appreciator, I probably don't have to tell you that this has absolutely nothing to do with being fat. I remember actually being disappointed having read an article headline calling a celebrity "fat and bursting out of their clothes!" and then finding out that it's just the same usual lean/athletic/sometimes even anorexic body. This is a pretty grim reminder of the time period and how society at large seemed to have a collective psychosis for calling anything beyond size zero 'fat'. The anorexic heroin chic look with ribcage popping out was the style at the times so anything bigger than that was considered to be chubby or disgustingly overweight.

Dieting ads were everywhere, the only fat people you saw in media were comedy relief characters or bad selfish stupid people to laugh at. Women were shamed for ever eating anything more than a salad but simultaneously shamed for "always dieting". Eating disorders were vilified while the bodies with eating disorders were glorified. And when the girls got 'too thin' they were also shamed for dieting too much and looking like skeletons, when that was the exact thing that media was telling them to be.

There were dozens of movies that played on one of the girls being 'the fat one' while the actor was the same size zero as the rest of them.

In Bring it on: All or nothing, this girl played the role of the fat cheerleader who cannot control herself and is always eating. The other girls comment stuff like "Look how massive her ass is!" or " You need to do something about that huge gut sticking out like that!"

Often in my comics I portray the society from this perspective, where if this is considered to be fat then my characters must feel like they are beings from an another planet. And mind you this isn't a wild fictional idea of a world either, I'd argue that the 2000's was probably even more openly hostile towards fat(and regular bodied) girls than society in my comics is.

Normal female bodies with a healthy bodyfat percentage were completely absent from media outside of diet ads where the 'disgusting fat belly' was used to signal to the audience that you need to buy this product so you don't end up like this fat cow. And often the belly in question was just... a normal stomach being portrayed as something you shouldn't have. I was looking back at pictures of celebrity women I found "cute and chubby" from the time and realize most of them are just... skinny. Fit even. Like they hardly have even a bump on their stomach. But the skeleton concaved stomach look was so prevalent that pictures of girls with a regular stomach was completely impossible to find on the internet.

Living in this kind of environment obviously affected my fetish for fatness a lot. Hence why I find so much enjoyment in teasing and shaming and playful bullying and so on. It is in a way taking back power from society that used to be so openly hostile towards normal and bigger bodies. Ohh you want to shame me for being fat? Too bad for you, I'm into that shit.

I definitely do not long for this kind of culture and I'm glad we've gotten rid of some of that, but I think it's a perfect setting for exploring the societal aspects of being fat and how people react to you when it's so overly exaggerated and even the social norm of being able to publicly comment on others' fatness. Also I think it's really hot how much even a moderately fat character stands out in a society where being fat is extremely taboo. And of course my own experience of living in this kind of environment where I draw a lot of the inspiration from.

As the recent ozempic drama clearly shows, I would say society as a whole is still very fatphobic, if not as openly so as it used to. It might even feel weird that mocking someone for their weight publicly was commonly accepted but nowdays it is just done behind somewhat closed doors. Thankfully the public perception has changed a lot and the bodies I posted as an example here would not be considered fat by most people today.

I hope eventually we will stop judging other people based on their bodies and that being whatever size you want to be is no one else's business. But I still enjoy the concept of fat shaming and teasing in a fictional setting where I can enjoy it without harming anyone. The 2000's lore and culture is also very fascinating to me and it's super interesting to study all the myriad of ways our culture was fucked up during that time and how much we've progressed from back then... in certain areas anyway.

So I dunno I just wanted to write this short article about my thoughts on the matter! Hope you enjoy reading, leave me your worst fatphobia stories from 2000's in the comments!