Of Mary Ray Worley's 'In Defense Of Fat Acceptance'

215 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Causes and effects of obesity

Throughout Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance, author Mary Ray Worley claims it is possible for obese people to overcome society's alienation of their bodies. From the get-go, Worley states that we need to realign our accustomed connotations of the word fat. Everyone’s body is different. Society has embedded in our brains that fat is bad and ugly and that it should be removed immediately. Feeding this ideal of a quick diet, just results in worse health. Along with clothing that is not made for your body type and judgmental doctors, society is full of fat shaming. Shunning, hatred and non acceptance are some of the main health risks for people that are obese. Worley tries to inspire her readers to look above these frivolous societal

Show More
Related

  • Mary Wade Research Paper

    626 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mary Wade, born on the 5th of October 1777 was the youngest convict to be sent to Australia. Before her life as a convict, she would sweep and beg on the streets of London to make her living.

    Read More

  • Fat And Happy: In Defense Of Fat Acceptance By Mary Ray Worley

    1048 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Fat Acceptance By Cynara Geissler

    772 Words  | 2 Pages

    “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.

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of Rethinking Weight By Amanda Spake

    1431 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Women's Health Movement By Mary K. Zimmerman

    740 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mary Zimmerman framed that women have not had ultimate control over their own bodies and health as a fundamental assumption underlying women’s health movement. Men control and dominate a huge portion of the of decision making roles in the healthcare field, such as health related research, health policy etc. Whereas women are more seen in social positions. According to the article “The Women’s Health Movement” by Mary K. Zimmerman, the concept of medicalization is the “increasing tendency to apply medical definitions and control to phenomena not previously thought of as medical problems (Zola, 1972; Conrad and Schneider, 1980). In the 1950’s a drug called Thalidomide was created by a German company, claiming that it was safe for pregnant women. Although many women were still using this drug during this time, in 1961, reports began to surface that this drug was causing several birth defects and other health problems. The author presented the Thalidomide case as an example of medicalization by showing us the potential consequences of a style medical

    Read More

  • Hilll Schwartz's Fat And Happy By Hillel Schwartz

    1037 Words  | 3 Pages

    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,

    Read More

  • Obesity In The Article 'America's War On The Overnight'

    735 Words  | 2 Pages

    What comes to your mind when you hear someone is overweight. In most american’s eyes, it is someone who anyone who is not a model. This creates a huge predicadment counting that America is known to be fat. In the past few decades, lifestyle has changed our habits, but we did not think about the consequences. If we eat more then we must be doing some kind of exercise to counteract what we put inside of us. In the article “America’s War on the Overnight” by Kate Dailey and Abby Ellin, they successfully persuade the reader to tackle obesity, we need to focus more on the subject of obesity and not attack the obese using the rhetorical triangle.

    Read More

  • Gender Inequality In Roxane Gay's Hunger (My) Body?

    1056 Words  | 3 Pages

    Among African American women, trusting in the health care and medical research has become to a lower level. Studies show that obesity rates in black raced women which are enhanced by risk factors, shows that approximately 40% moderately and severely overweight women considered their figures to be attractive or very attractive, which indicates a relatively positive body image (S, Kumanyika, 1987). Adding to this as Gay is a black raced woman who is obese, still feels proud of her own body image, no matter how big she may-be she is still proud of her body and appearance. Gay quotes, “When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be” (Gay, p.120). This shows that no matter what her body looks like people will always be judging you depending on your body image in

    Read More

  • Mary Anne Warren's On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion

    1467 Words  | 3 Pages

    Mary Anne Warren’s “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” describes her justification that abortion is not a fundamentally wrong action for a mother to undertake. By forming a distinction between being genetically human and being a fully developed “person” and member of the “moral community” that encompasses humanity, Warren argues that it must be proven that fetuses are human beings in the morally relevant sense in order for their termination to be considered morally wrong. Warren’s rationale of defining moral personhood as showcasing a combination of five qualities such as “consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity of communication, and self-awareness” forms the basis of her argument that a fetus displays none of these elements that would justify its classification as a person and member of the morally relevant community (Timmons 386).

    Read More

  • Analysis of Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin

    5228 Words  | 11 Pages

    The book Mary Reilly is the sequel to the famous The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a stark, ingeniously woven, engaging novel. That tells the disturbing tale of the dual personality of Dr. Jekyll, a physician. A generous and philanthropic man, his is preoccupied with the problems of good and evil and with the possibility of separating them into two distinct personalities. He develops a drug that transforms him into the demonic Mr. Hyde, in whose person he exhausts all the latent evil in his nature. He also creates an antidote that will restore him into his respectable existence as Dr. Jekyll. Gradually, however, the unmitigated evil of his darker self predominates, until finally he performs an atrocious murder. His saner self determines to curtail those alternations of personality, but he discovers that he is losing control over his transformations, that he slips with increasing frequency into the world of evil. Finally, unable to procure one of the ingredients for the mixture of redemption, and on the verge of being discovered, he commits suicide.

    Read More

  • The Globalisation of Obesity

    3548 Words  | 8 Pages

    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).

    Read More

  • Goffman and Stigmatization: The Stigma That Obese Individual Suffers From

    2594 Words  | 6 Pages

    In order to take a sociological viewpoint into account when one examines obesity, first it is important to understand how obesity is recognized in current society. According to today’s news articles and magazines and advertisements and other mass media about health and healthy life, one can easily realize that a great number of people have an eagerness to be healthy. Also, one can assume through these mass media about health that everyone wants to be attractive, and they are even prone to transform their own behaviors to gain attractiveness. This is because most people live a life where social interaction is frequently required and must engage themselves into social interaction every day of their life. Therefore, based on these ideas and proofs throughout this mass media, obesity is regarded as one of the characteristics that is disgraceful and undesirable in society.

    Read More

  • Fat And Happy In Defense Of Fat Acceptance By Mary Worley

    488 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the article “Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance” by Mary Ray Worley the idea of accepting one’s body for what it was is encouraged. Worley addresses the societal view on “fat” which is that those who are fat are inferior and ignored. Then Worley explains how she had attended a convention. The convention Worley had attend was the NAAFA convention in San Diego.

    Read More

  • Obesity and Physical Deviance

    2442 Words  | 5 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Dear Fat People Analysis

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    Recently, a video went viral called “Dear Fat People” by Nicole Arbour, a YouTube comedian. In the video, Arbour expresses her thoughts on people who are overweight, which she rudely calls fat. She states, “Fat shaming is not a thing…I don’t feel bad for you [people who are overweight] because you are taking your body for granted.” The backlash was astounding. Many well-known YouTubers responded to the video saying Arbour is being a bully and her comments are sending a negative message to girls everywhere. Many people have problems accepting their body because society constantly tells them they are not perfect. Society's idea of perfection especially affects teenage girls who are overweight. Brands that many of their peers wear are unavailable in bigger sizes, making it hard for these girls to shop. Plus size teens have a hard time finding models that look like them which might make them feel like their body type is not good enough for the kind of clothes these models are wearing. When doing everyday tasks, they may experience discrimination by people surrounding them. These girls who are overweight only want one thing: to fit in. It's hard to feel like you fit in with a

    Read More

More about Of Mary Ray Worley's 'In Defense Of Fat Acceptance'

Open Document