“The privilege of being thin”, does it speak to you? Cora Harrington explains it in a post on Twitter. Last Sunday, this New Yorker who runs The Lingerie Addict, which specializes in lingerie, wrote: “You do not have to feel thin for the privilege of being thin. It’s not a feeling. If people think you are thin, you are thin. If you go back to a clothing store and you expect to see many clothes at your size, then you’re slim. In other words, for this blogger specialized in lingerie, thinness is a social construction.
To explain what this privilege is, she describes several everyday situations inspired by her own experience: “Nobody looks at me in pictures and tells me that I should lose weight, nobody laughs at me with a look disgusted when I eat a cookie or an ice cream, no one rattles or rolls their eyes when they have to sit next to me on the plane or the bus … If you either do not have to to think about it is a privilege.
The debate is not new. Still, since Tuesday, Cora’s tweet has received more than 40,000 likes and thousands of comments. Sign that the question arouses interest. A large number of women found themselves in her remarks and shared their stories: “The privilege of being thin is not just about buying clothes more easily. It’s not being discriminated against because of your weight professionally, socially and medically, “reads Twitter.
Nevertheless, other women are more nuanced. For them, when a person is too thin, she has no privilege: “I’m a size XS and everything is too big for me,” says one of them. These people also face body shaming by cashing questions like, “But do you eat sometimes?” Meager or strong, all make the same observation: the fact of being judged when one does not correspond to the norm.
