- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
... and I still find myself looking askance at my fat-assed sisters smiling coyly and bending over on the covers King, Smooth and Black Men magazines. Shouldn't I be happy as a fat-assed, darked skinned woman that my kind of beauty is being celebrated somewhere? Uh no. Frankly, it makes me feel uncomfortable. And reading the Village Voice article doesn't help. Before you all pile on Ms. Dickerson, maybe you should too.
One lover of "fat asses and pretty faces," remarked:
"If a girl walks by, you really get a good idea from her back of what it would be like to have sex with them," he says. "Not from the front. If she has a fat ass, there's just a lot more to work with."
That's not exactly the kind of attention I want thankyouverymuch. Before I step foot on a scale, I can always tell that I'm a little heavier than normal because as my weight goes up, so do the number of catcalls, whistles and sexually-explicit comments from black and Latino men. But let's put aside the fetishism and exploitation of (mostly) black women.
It's true that with her proportionally thin waist, Buffie's body may not seem like the best to hang her argument on, but Ms. Dickerson is right that there is a huge problem in the black community with women eating unhealthily and not taking care of themselves. All of my fat-assed aunts have diabetes, high blood pressure and other health problems. My mom seeing what was in store for her, thankfully upped her intake of whole grains, cut out the sugar, started exercising and lost 30 pounds. They make fun of her for being so "skinny," even though she's 5'5 and 150 lbs.
It is a different standard of beauty than the Hollywood one of being skinny and white, but it's still a "standard." In other words, women are still being told to be a certain way in order to gain acceptance. I thought it was sad when Buffie said she had to start drinking GNC protein shakes to gain weight and that now her only way of supporting her family is her ass.
Wouldn't it be nice if dudes of all races could just back off and stop telling women of all races whether to eat too much or too little depending on what got them off that week? Yeah, that would be great.
