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No one should be made to feel as awful as Gay felt during some of the incidents she describes in Hunger. Everyone deserves to be respected, accepted, and loved no matter if they weigh 110 pounds or 500 pounds. The body positivity movement is about respecting people of all different shapes and sizes. It seems that there are quite a few people online (mostly men) who believe the body positivity movement is simply a glorification of fat bodies. While I can’t relate to some of the specific struggles that Roxane Gay describes, I have had days where I’ve cried about how I looked. I was still a healthy weight and I worked out regularly, but there were days when I hated the way I looked in a certain dress or top. When I was a teenager, I weighed about 20 pounds more than I do now and became very conscious of how many calories I was eating every day. I don’t have as toned of a stomach as I would like, and sometimes I think my thighs are too big. I think most women have been unhappy with some aspect of their bodies at some point in their lives. Though I certainly benefit from thin privilege, that does not mean I have always been happy with my body either. An overweight person just doing their weekly grocery shopping does not need to be talked down to about their life choices. As cliche as is sounds, this is why it’s so important to be kind to people. It’s not as if Gay is unaware that she takes up space, that she is fat, or that the world we live in is not designed for people of her size. I can put junk food in my cart when I’m grocery shopping without strangers judging me. I can go to the mall, find clothes that fit me, and not think twice about it. I am able to move through the world without giving much thought to how much space I take up. These are all real experiences Gay describes in her memoir. I have never had strangers on a plane complain about me to flight attendants because I take up too much space. I have never had strangers take food out of my grocery cart and lecture me about healthy choices.
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I’ll admit, I never gave any serious consideration to the concept of “thin privilege.” Isn’t that, in itself, thin privilege? I have never had to feel ashamed shopping at a special plus-size store because regular department stores don’t carry my size. It must have been such a frustrating catch-22 for her to hate the body she was in, but to need that body to feel safe.
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She believes a bigger body is a safer body, but of course having a bigger body comes with a plethora of other problems that she describes throughout her memoir.Īs a teenager and an adult, she tried to lose the weight she had put on as a form of protection, but every time she loses some weight, she seems to feel like she is becoming vulnerable again. In the same way that some people turn to drugs or alcohol to numb themselves or temporarily escape the pain of a traumatic event, Gay turns to food for comfort. She believes that if she makes herself bigger, she will no longer be a target for that kind of violence. She does not tell her family what happened, and instead turns to food as a way to cope with the trauma. Using Food As A Coping MechanismĮarly in the memoir, Gay describes how she was gang raped at age 12 by a group of boys from school. This memoir made me think about the issue of obesity in an entirely new light. Because I have always been relatively thin, I’ve never had to think about some of the struggles that come with being obese. She makes it clear that it is not the kind of story that ends with her becoming thin and standing in one leg of her old pants to show off her weight loss. Yesterday I finished reading Roxane Gay’s memoir, Hunger, a memoir about being fat. I think that by reading memoirs written by people that have grown up in other countries or cultures or just live different kinds of lives, the reader becomes more empathetic. I read I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai when I was a teenager, and learned how dangerous it is to be a teenage girl going to school in Pakistan under the Taliban. I read Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, a couple years ago, and had a small window into what it was like growing up as a mixed race child during Apartheid in South Africa. Memoir is one of my favorite genres, because when I read memoirs, I get to read about the author’s life and experiences, which may be vastly different from mine.