[saef]

Community standards, my dears.

If, when you go to your Saturday morning Pilates class, you look at all the women beside you in class with their bare feet sticking out in the air, and all of them have perfect glossy pedicures, except yourself, you may start thinking about going for a pedicure.

If you are walking down the street in Midtown, and every woman you pass is wearing skinny jeans, most tucked into boots, while yours are boot-cut, you may think you got left behind a little bit.

If you attend a lecture, or a gallery opening where a friend is showing her paintings, and look around you, and find that, invariably, out of 100-plus females in attendance, you are always the fattest one in the room, at, say, a size 14, you may think maybe it's time to lose a little weight.

If you are browsing through shops in NoLita, to pass time before meeting someone for a cup of coffee, just idly looking at clothes, and discover that, within a four-block radius, the largest size the boutiques carry is a 12, you may feel you're being left out of the party & you need to lose some weight.

If you are walking in the East 40s and 30s, and see a mob of people in line outside a storefront, all excited, and women coming out with heaped-up shopping bags, exclaiming about bargains, and see the words "Sample Sale" in the window, and go in yourself, and find the largest size available of these beautiful, beautiful & suddenly affordable cloths is a size 8, maybe a 6, and your size is in the double digits, then I defy you not to leave with a feeling of disappointment.

If you are having a cup of coffee in the West Village, and the photographers & models from Industria Superstudios come out for coffee or (in the case of the models) to smoke cigarettes, and there you are, a lump of humanity, without a camera around your neck to excuse yourself, while everyone else is 5'11" or 6', pale, leggy, attenuated, and blonde (and likely Eastern European, and no older than 19), then you will feel short, dumpy & comparatively old.

You need to have a cast-iron level of self-esteem & force of will not to be influenced by these things. You will either work to conform with the norms you see around you -- or, on your bad days, sink into a feeling of despair, that you just can't do it, you can't keep up with it all, so why even try?

If you pass your days without being exposed to these little moments when the Sesame Street song plays in your head: "One of these things is not like the others/ One of these things just doesn't belong" then it stands to reason that you are more likely to be at peace with yourself & not feeling pushed toward making a change to be more like the standards continually raised by the community around you.

[ubergirl]

Sadly, agree with Saef, and it doesn't even have to be such an extreme situation.

While there are MANY obese people in America, none of those people seem to live in my neighborhood. Being morbidly obese made me freakishly out of whack in my world.

Besides, perhaps it's not like this in Canada, but at least in the United States, take a good look around your workplace. It is LIKELY that even if many women are obese, it's the skinny ones who are in charge. This is not 100% true, but it's truer than a lot of us would like to admit.

Plus, there are AMPLE studies that show that obesity actually cuts women's earning power, and that attractiveness in general is highly correlated with success.

Those are hard nuts to swallow, and I know that when I was morbidly obese my lack of self-confidence probably did affect me and was a factor in how I came across, but it is not the only factor.

Of course it depends. It depends where you live. It depends how you carry yourself. It depends where your fat is stored on your body-- some people can carry A LOT of extra weight and still look relatively good...

But I think it's unfair to fat people to make them feel that when they sense discrimination that it might be all in their head.