This is a TEDx talk by one of Colombia’s fat activists, Adriana, but on social media she’s known as Fat Pandora. She has a very interesting story and take on fat phobia in Colombia, and I thought this was a great talk to watch and include in my blog.
The talk began with the interviewee talking about how she came to know Fat Pandora from an article she read in a newspaper, and it started with a quote that she gave, which roughly translated, since it was done in Spanish, was, “I am Fat, I dress incredibly, and I will not hide”
They describe how it seems as if we live in a world that accepts body diversity, with concepts such as body positivity and size models. Adriana normally speaks about these subjects, as well as aesthetic violence and body violence.
She was asked how her experience has been, especially now that there is the idea of miracles for losing weight. By listening to this, I am assuming she is asking about using GLP1s as weight loss medication.
She speaks about aesthetic violence because she believes there is a misconception that this only involves or affects fat people, but this is something that all women are exposed to. (I can relate this to the book I read about Beauty Sick and how it is something we are just born to face in one way or another) There is constant pressure and watching the body to get close to the body standard society has; in that moment, the more you fall out of this and don’t follow or try to achieve this ideal, you are more exposed to violence. You lose privilege, and this is a type of prejudice. You lose privileges and are discriminated against because of how you look.
Fatphobia and aesthetic discrimination almost always go hand in hand, and they are almost sisters. She comes from Bucaramanga, and her mother was a designer, so from a young age she went to buy textiles. Still, she remembers every time they would leave the house, someone would comment on Adriana’s body to her mom; a very common one in Colombia is, “you can tell that she eats her soup,” which means that she is eating more than she should because she is on the fatter side of the spectrum. Since she was young, she did not think this was bad, and her mother told her that they were telling her she was fat. That phrase marked her life, and it shows how children can internalize what they think is helpful.
She found her place in the fashion space, having seen her mother as a designer and her father as someone who always wanted to look amazing in his clothing. As a fat woman, or just a woman in general, she learned to figure it out; however, when she went to study marketing and fashion communication in Bogotá, she studied with other girls who looked like what the industry had told us was acceptable, sort of like the actresses in The Devil Wears Prada. She started to think about how she wanted to look this way. She started saying she couldn’t be the only fat Colombian to want to buy fashionable clothing, and she looked at the bigger-size industry in the USA, China, and Germany, where there was an offer for this. Hence, she started saying she bought these clothes from these brands, but she understood this was her position of privilege because she had the means to buy them.
She started a blog and took pictures in the clothes she bought. There are fat women in Colombia, and she wanted to prove that they existed.
She called her blog Fat Pandora because she has always liked being disobedient; she found ways to compensate for being fat and admired the myth of Pandora.
The fashion industry is a Machiavellian plan because they put the seed for insecurities; for example, the thigh gap, and a lot of girls fall into eating disorders, and then creams and then machines started to come out to make it better. They invented the idea that it is bad to have your hip bones stick out, and at one point they started saying freckles weren’t good, and everyone was crazy about covering them up; but now that they are in fashion, they sell you a pen that draws them in for you.
Medicine that we don’t know about to lose weight; everyone is very thin right now and following this trend, but in reality it goes much deeper when you get a doctor, and you tell them that you don’t feel well, but they tell you that you are thin, so that must mean there is nothing wrong. (I actually have a friend who has PCOS and was told that since she was not fat, then it was not a problem, but in reality there are so many underlying issues that come with this that we don’t even realize). There is hypervigilance about women’s bodies.
One of Adriana’s friends, who is super thin, told her that she was a victim of medical fat phobia and said that she has biomass. She is going to have to get surgery, but they had never examined her for complete tests, and now that she is getting surgery, they will. They saw that she has cholesterol problems, but if it had not been for her surgery, no doctor would have ever found it necessary to do this test because of how she looks. There, she saw the idea that there is this stereotype that if you are fat, it means unhealthy, and thin means healthy; it affects both sides of the spectrum.
Pathologizing a body by just seeing it brings a lot of problems to fat people. She has her story with Ozempic, but a different one, and a doctor sent it to her. She started using it, and a few weeks later, the voice of reason, and she heard a third voice of What if we die, and she asked the doctor. She said that there is a percentage of people who can develop suicidal thoughts because of this medication, and she stopped taking this medication. A couple of years later, it came out that this is a problem and a consequence and causes depression and has effects on mental health. This fears the idea that society would rather see us dead than fat.
The idea of wanting to lose weight has a lot of effects, and there is research that says that women who are overweight earn less money than those who are not overweight.
It looks like the world has changed somewhat because there are more plus-size models, and yes, and no, it is the message of society that you can only look fat if you look a specific kind of fat; there is still diversity with fat bodies, and the model of being more fat as a model does not represent all fat people. She does not think this is a victory to see them on a catwalk because these women are not representing all women, and it is not a victory that they choose fat women as a life-saving measure when they see that they are losing their market.
What can we say to people who are still fighting these impossible stereotypes? She says to think about what we would have done with the time that we invest in being self-deprecating and use that time on something different, like working, a hobby, and knowing oneself better instead of trying to fit into less space. Secondly, she wanted to say that fat people are not promoting anything or romanticizing anything; they are just saying they want the same treatment and clothing they can wear they want to be treated with dignity.
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