Who among us hasn’t found ourselves working in the 9-to-5 drudgeries of corporate serfdom as a diverse portly immigrant, underpaid and overworked, only to realize that there’s a whole new career just waiting for us out there if we can turn ourselves into a put-upon victim and go about haranguing the people of our adopted homeland about their unhealthy attitudes towards obesity?
It’s as American as apple pie.
Via Images (emphasis added):
Colourful, funny and open-minded — these qualities best describe Cynthia Victor (shawtysin on Instagram), a 25-year-old plus-size Sri Lankan-American content creator who currently lives in New Jersey, United States. Born in Montreal, Canada, Cynthia was only one when her parents migrated to the US where she has lived ever since.
Following a brief stint in college where she studied Human Resources and Labour Studies, Cynthia realised her passion to create social media content to empower women who looked like her — plus size, brown skinned and South Asian.
Could you possibly get more niche in your market appeal than catering to “plus-sized, brown-skin South Asians” who are insecure about being butterballs?
Of course, marketers encourage carving out such niches in order to make a brand for yourself, but this might just be a little bit of overkill, no?
Related: Big Pharma Partners With NAACP to Push Public Subsidy of Weight Loss Drug
Continuing:
Through social media, Cynthia was able to find acceptance for who she was as a Sri Lankan-American. She could easily clear misconceptions about being stereotyped as an Indian or, more broadly, a South Asian, simply for being brown when she was equally a well-spoken Canadian living the American dream in New Jersey.
Content creation cemented Cynthia’s confidence as a plus-size, brown woman. Her love for the creative space allowed her to feel fully liberated. “The way you can just express yourself through clothing or makeup is incredible, and even if you’re a quiet person, you can be very loud in the way you express yourself,” she said.
Within the labyrinthine heart of darkness that is Social Justice™ canon, morbid obesity and racial diversity somehow intersect — everything intersects at the nexus point of misogynistic transphobic White Supremacy™, hence “intersectional feminism” — because something… something… slavery.
For 400 years, the fats have been persecuted relentlessly, denied access to the ballot, and made to swim in fat-only swimming pools!
Via CBS News (emphasis added):
Fatness wasn't always culturally undesirable in the Western world. For centuries, being heavier was actually considered an attractive characteristic. Artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Titian famously portrayed heavier female bodies as the pinnacle of beauty in their works.
As the art and fashion historian Anne Hollander wrote in a New York Times article from 1977, "The look of actual human bodies obviously changes very little through history. But the look of ideal bodies changes a great deal all the time."
While the 1977 Times article considers the switch to thinness as the preferable body type to be part of "a period of revolution in both taste and politics" in the late 18th century, Strings' research traces how that "revolution" is actually rooted in slavery and Protestantism.
"With the dawn of the slave trade, skin color was the original sorting mechanism to determine who was slave and who was free. But as you might imagine, with slavery progressing through the century, skin color became a less reliable source of sorting various populations," Strings explained to CBS Reports.
"Therefore, they decided to re-articulate racial categories, adding new characteristics, and one of the things that the colonists believed was that Black people were inherently more sensuous, that people love sex and they love food, and so the idea was that Black people had more venereal diseases, and that Black people were inherently obese, because they lack self-control. And of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to Whiteness.
Ah yes, self-control and rationality — confined to the whites, as always, thanks to the Enlightenment.
