Fat oppression doesn’t just affect fat people or fat women. It really works to keep everyone in line. Fear of fat is rampant in our society and is responsible for the current masochistic race toward a slender body image. We are a culture nearly addicted to individual control and the notion seems to exist in our society that fatness means a loss of self-control – which is considered the ultimate moral failure in our culture, and perhaps the most frightening of all fears.

Statement of the Problem

Everyone is born into a culture – a set of shared ideas about the nature of reality, the nature of right and wrong, evaluation of what is good and desirable, and the nature of good and desirable versus the bad and non-desirable. (Richardson, Taylor, 1983)

The definition of desirable, with regard to body image, has spanned rotund to emaciated, with various ideals in-between. And, the methods for achieving the desirable, idealized image of the times have been equally as...