"Shaming" Shaming

I write a lot about body image, and one of the main complaints I hear when I discuss fat-shaming or skinny-shaming is the use of the word “shaming”. Not that anyone necessarily dislikes the words, or thinks that it isn’t a fitting term for the topic, it’s just that it is used A LOT. “Joan Rivers fat-shames Lena Dunham” “Autocomplete’s Body Shaming” “Anne Hathaway and One Piece Shaming” … and those are just the blogs with shaming in the title. I also talk about skinny-shaming, sweats-shaming, and cellulite shaming. I’m not going to stop talking about it, because I do really believe that it’s an important topic – I think that body positivity is something everyone should believe in, and the more that I can make people aware of how ridiculous it is to boost one subset of people by putting down another, then the more I feel good about what I’m writing. That said, I have heard your cries, and I agree – the shaming term is getting old, so let’s fix it. I recently heard “weight hate”, that’s kind of catchy. The only thing is that shaming goes a bit further than hate. I can hate brusell sprouts, but that only affects me, not the sprouts. I can’t shame brusell sprouts because they aren’t sentient and therefore not able to feel ashamed. Whether it is effective or not, the goal of “shaming” is to elicit a response from the subject, specifically one of shame. These aren’t perfect synonyms, but here’s my starter list of possible terms to substitute “shaming” with:

• sizism
• weightism
• body bias
• weight hate
• body negativity
• fat discrimination
• anti-fat
• fat phobia
• skinny stigma
• body disgracing
• body belittling
• skinny debasing
• skinny stereotyping
• body bigotry
• fat faulting
• skinny scorning

If you think of any others, let me know – because the body shaming stories will keep on coming – the terminology will just get better.