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Theoretical framework on bullying among secondary
Problem of bullying
Theoretical framework on bullying among secondary
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I felt the eye of judgment piercing through me as I entered the plane. I could hear people whispering and giggling. While scanning the rows to find my assigned seat, I could see the looks of concern from those who thought I might sit by them. The clicking sounds of seat belt buckles almost sent me into a panic. I was dreading asking the flight attendant for a lap belt extension, or worse, having it offered without asking. Words were not necessary to feel the intensity of mass criticism. To make matters worse, it was a hot day, and my clothes were sticking to my body, outlining my multiple layers of over-indulgence. I was overheating and could taste salty beads of sweat trickling down my face.
As an overweight kid, I have felt this type of social scrutiny as far back as I can remember. School days were miserable; I was taunted for the way my fat giggled, teased when I ate lunch in the cafeteria, and humiliated during gym classes. Nothing changed in high school, if fact, things got worse. The mocking was nearly unbearable, and in my junior year, I finally succumbed to the harassment and dropped out of school. I did not know how to describe what was happening, but I knew I was an outsider, and I knew it was because of my weight problem.
Today, I know that my gut-wrenching experiences have a name, and that name is discrimination. Discrimination of the overweight is real. Fat prejudice has been prevalent in our past and still runs rampant in our current society. "The social stigma against obesity is extraordinary in its magnitude and pervasiveness" Garner (1991).
In a restaurant, a heavy person can order the same type of meal everyone else is having, only to be looked upon as a glutton. Publicly ridiculed, the ...
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...this flight because I am checking into a weight loss clinic where I am scheduled to undergo gastric bypass surgery. The flight attendant comes by offering pre-packaged meals. I decide, what the heck, give me two, after all—this is my last fat flight.
Works Cited
Garner (1991) http://www.lectlaw.com/files/con28.htm retrieved on August 13, 2010
Puhl, R. and Heuer, C. (2009) Epidemiology obesity 17 5, 941–964. doi:10.1038/oby.2008.636The Stigma of Obesity: A Review and Update Rebecca M. Puhl1 and Chelsea A. 1Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
www.smartmoney.com/spending/deals/10-things-the-weight-loss-industry-wont-tell-you-13677/?page=3 retrieved August 17, 2010
Buchwald, H. (2009) Metabolic/bariatric surgery Worldwide 2008 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19885707 retrieved August 17, 2010
The article “Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance” is written by Mary Ray Worley, a member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She writes of her firsthand experience as a “fat person” in society. Throughout the article, Worley explains what it is like to be obese and describes the way society treats those who have a weight problem. She attacks the idea of dieting, criticizes medical professionals for displaying an obscured view of health risks, and defends the idea of exercising to feel good rather than exercising to lose weight. Unfortunately, her article seems to reflect only own opinions and emotions rather than actual facts and statistics.
“Fat Acceptance”: An Argument Lacking Validity Cynara Geisslers’ essay “Fat Acceptance: A Basic Primer,” was published in Geez Magazine in 2010. The focus of the essay is to refute the pressure of society to be thin and promote self-acceptance regardless of size. While this essay touches on many agreeable points, it tends to blow many ideas out of context in an attempt to create a stronger argument. The article takes on a one-sided argument without any appropriate acknowledgement of the opposition, overlooks the risks of ignoring personal health, and has a strong feminist ideology associated towards the essay which tends to make the validity of her argument questionable.
The author brings in the mental health aspect and talks about the ridicule that is a part of a heavy person’s life regularly. She notes that people will make rude comments, or comment about what they have in their grocery cart at the store. She states that people are not that into getting medical help by reason of a doctor almost always attributing health issues to the fact a person is fat. She talks about how she has tried so many times to lose weight, but she realized that she needed to just make peace with her body. Spake and Worley disagree on how people should handle their addiction.
This country places great value on achieving the perfect body. Americans strive to achieve thinness, but is that really necessary? In his article written in 1986 entitled “Fat and Happy?,” Hillel Schwartz claims that people who are obese are considered failures in life by fellow Americans. More specifically, he contends that those individuals with a less than perfect physique suffer not only disrespect, but they are also marginalized as a group. Just putting people on a diet to solve a serious weight problem is simply not enough, as they are more than likely to fail. Schwartz wants to convey to his audience that people who are in shape are the ones who make obese people feel horrible about themselves. Schwartz was compelled to write this essay,
Prejudice is a poison because it is insidious. Individuals hold beliefs or biases, often simply because that belief was handed down to them, not because of any concrete rationale. Conversations serve to prune beliefs, by placing them under the scrutiny of cross examination; something about presenting ideas to another person spawns more careful thought than presenting the same ideas internally. In this instance the prejudice accosted is that against the obese. Mistreatment of the obese is typically rooted in a very shallow, appearance based prejudice, which when confronted, is not logically sustainable.
The central problem with fat oppression comes from the way in which we as Americans are taught to look at people. Everywhere we look - TV, movies, magazines and so on - thin people are portrayed as glamorous and cool. The encouragement of dieting is terribly prevalent and the dieting market takes in billions of dollars every year. Our society is obsessed with fat and the loss of it.
Interest in the social aspects of obesity is nothing new. Jeffrey Sobal has written extensively about the social and psychological consequences of obesity , including the stigmatisation and discrimination of obese and even overweight individuals (Sobal 2004).
Discriminating against a person because of one's weight can be a seriously hurtful and demeaning thing. Many people assume that the causes for being overweight are eating all day and rarely exercising. Some people call overweight people slobs or lazy, when in most instances this isn't the case. Some have health problems that lead to being overweight, like a kidney disease or malfunction, or the person may even be suffering from a birth defect.
Moon, Amy. "A Culture Obsessed with Thinness Propagates Misconceptions About Obesity." SF Gate (8 Apr. 2008). Rpt. in How Should Obesity be Treated? Ed. Stefan Kiesbye. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009. At Issue. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.
"Obesity." Current Issues: Macmillian Social Science Library. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 21 Oct. 2015.
Libal, Autumn. "The Poor Get Fat, The Rich Get Thin?" Social Discrimination & Body Size: Too Big to FIt? 2005. 40-55. Print. 10 Nov. 2013.
Physical beauty is constructed by the society that we live in. We are socialized from a very young age to aspire to become what our culture deems ideal. Living in the United States, as in many other Western cultures, we are expected to be well-educated, maintain middle-class or upper-class status, be employed as well as maintain a physical standard of beauty. Although beauty is relative to each culture, it is obvious that we as Americans, especially women, are expected to be maintain a youthful appearance, wear cosmetics and fashionable clothes, but most importantly: not to be overweight. Our society is socially constructed to expect certain physical features to be the norm, anything outside this is considered deviant. Obesity is defined as outside the norms of our culture's aesthetic norms (Gros). “People who do not match idealized or normative expectations of the body are subjected to stigmatization” (Heckert 32). Obesity is a physical deviance; it is one that is an overwhelming problem in our society as we are always judged daily, by our appearance. Those who do not conform to the standards of beauty, especially when it comes to weight, are stigmatized and suffer at the hands of a society that labels them as deviants.
Townend, L. 2009. The moralizing of obesity: A new name for an old sin?. Critical social policy, 29 (2), pp. 171--190.
Obesity is a physiological condition characterised by an excessive accumulation of body fat, specifically the build-up of adipose tissue beneath the skin. In recent years, the number of people diagnosed with clinical obesity has increased dramatically, with governments desperately trying to tackle the obesity epidemic and its associated consequences (McLannahan and Clifton, 2008). Studies have found that the prevalence of obesity once stood at an estimated 9.8% (Kelly, Yang, Chen, Reynolds & He, 2008), a considerable figure representing almost 400 million individuals worldwide. Even though obesity has now been recognised as a major problem the number of people affected is increasing rapidly, with almost 300,000 deaths attributable to obesity in the USA each year (Allison, Fontaine, Manson, Stevens, & VanItallie, 1999). Excessive amounts of fat can prove dangerous as the condition has a very high comorbidity rate with other long term health issues such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and cancer (Pi-Sunyer, 1993). Numerous examples of media, medical journals and educational literature concerning obesity refer to the condition as a disease, with an increasing use of the word ‘Epidemic’ to describe the somewhat recent surge of obesity cases in western societies (Boero, 2007), however there is little material available that offers evidence for obesity meeting specification for disease. Instead it has been proposed that obesity is alternatively a risk factor for developing other potentially harmful diseases, influenced by a variety of other factors i.e. genetics, cultural ideals and biological impairments.
“Flight 208 to Los Angeles is now boarding. Section N you may now take your seats”. You looked down at your carry-on bag to make sure you have everything packed up, even though you took nothing out, and headed toward the flight attendant and handed her your ticket. As your walking through the tunnel, the sound of the planes jets put just enough pressure on your body, causing your pulse to increase. “Why are you nervous, you been on planes before”, you ask yourself. You shake your head and start to inhale and before you could finish getting your lungs to the maximum capacity they could hold, a man wearing a white shirt twice his size and jeans that also seemed