i'm new here and obviously have a little bit of a penchant for (i hope productively) stirring the pot a little bit. i can't on this one. this is easily the most even-handed fairly treated post i've read on this site (with no slight intended to others, this one's just really good). good post.

There are so many different privileges related to appearance, I can see why these threads often get derailed. It does NOT make it ok though.

I've been on both sides of it as well (except I'm kind of the opposite of you, right now I'm underweight and years ago I was overweight). I think it's really hard to use your personal experience (even if you've been on both sides) as one that can speak for people in general. Some people are happier overweight and some are happier underweight. Just because I've been at both ends I would not assume to that my experience would be the same as someone elses. I understand what you're saying when it comes to clothes and the way people talk about you though because I remember those looks and that feeling. But I'm also hurting now from the comments I get from people that are my friends who assume it doesn't hurt as much because their insulting me about my skinniness which is socially more acceptable. Even though I've told them I'm heading toward disordered eating they still make the comments (as if that's helpful!). But I don't want to say I'd prefer to be skinny or I'd prefer to be overweight again...I'd just prefer to be in the middle again. But I digress...

I agree about the derailing of threads, it's not okay that whenever a post is about one thing like being overweight that someone will jump in saying that it's also hard for skinny people. We get annoyed when people jump into a thread about female rape survivors and say "but men get raped too!" It's the same kind of thing.

I'm skinny too (5'4 and 110 lbs). I constantly get comments about it. I remember the hatred I got from other girls in high school...those were some of the saddest experiences I've ever had. Liking girls and wanting to befriend them but not being able to because apparently my weight was a huge deciding factor. I've been skinny forever and never had to worry about my weight the way bigger girls do. But sometimes I wonder how I would feel about myself if I suddenly gained a ton of weight. Like would I even think I was a worthy person anymore? So much of the attention I've gotten in my life has been due to the fact that I'm pretty and skinny. Sometimes I wonder how much of that has subconsciously gotten to me. Like truthfully, how much do I base my worth on my looks? I'm a pretty alternative person, style-wise. I don't conform to any socially accepted standards of femininity. I still get those comments though. Most of the time I feel very unaware about my supposed attractiveness. Sometimes I wonder how much it informs my sense of myself, though, and my sense of worthiness. So much of womens' worth is placed on their attractiveness, and even though I have placed a very good deal of time and effort into creating a look that is a full expression of myself and not a cultural standard, I still wonder how I would feel if suddenly I gained a ton of weight or if my face was suddenly disfigured in an accident or something. Although I have to say that being so skinny and relatively unimposing in stature (with small breasts to boot) has made me feel like a huge baby a lot of the time, and I've been treated that way as long as I can remember. It's incredibly castrating.

There is no comparison. I've never been "skinny", but I have been thin (for me) and fat.
When I was fat, I was invisible. That is, when people weren't talking about me behind my back, or sending me diet advice via email. Men didn't ever look at me, and kept their conversations curt, yet polite. Women would tell me that I was "so nice", but never pretty.
Shopping was a nightmare. My selection was a fraction of what the thin girls had to choose from, and even out of that, I had to try and try on to find something that was flattering. Ah, it's better covered in "Out of the Mouths...".

It was the silence and isolation that was the worst. I didn't realize it while I was fat, but after I became thin, wow!
Men, young and old, smiled at me often, locking eyes with me. Not all men, of course, but many more than used to. Women expressed their "jealousy" of me. I got compliments every day, up the wazoo. I was perceived as more fun, invited to lots of places. And I had better luck shopping, even though I still ran into trouble, because I was still a size 10-12. But it was still a world of difference than being my former 18-20.

Mind you, I am not even the "ideal" American beauty. But that 50 lbs made all the difference. The most my really skinny friends ever got was comments about anorexia and some jealous snide comments. Not saying it's right to shame any body, but the smaller you are, the more priveleged you are, the better you are treated, maybe not by certain individuals, but definitely on the whole. I know.

What irks me is when a post that is trying to legitimately discuss a form of discrimination gets derailed by someone who's main concern is whether or not I may someday get heart disease.

My body is fat and healthy, and you know what? If it were any size and any degree of healthiness, it STILL wouldn't be any of anyone's fucking business but mine.

Thank You! I hate when the complaints from the thin girls start. While I totally agree that too much emphasis is put on what a woman weighs, be she considered too thin or too fat, I don't think the girls who are thin and have always been really get it. I, too, have been thin (98 pounds) and chubby, though not obese. There is a lot of privilege that comes with being thin. The attitudes of people towards me and amount of privilege were so much more positive when I was skinny. I am happier now that I weigh more, not because I weigh more, but because I don't have an eating disorder any more. That said, if I could snap my fingers and weigh whatever I wanted without having disordered eating, being obsessed with cals or working out all the time I would choose to be thin because it is so much easier to live as a thin person and our culture rewards that. I get really angry when posts about trying to accept our bodies when they don't meet cultural standards (which right now is to be thin) turns into the women who do meet those standards complaining that they feel attacked. It also occurred to me that it is similar to men or white people complaining about "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism". Nobody should personally attack people based on their weight but thin women should be aware that they do come from a position of privilege and not be so quick to get defensive when issues of body image and fat acceptance come up.

I totally agree with this post. Thank you. Yes thin girls do get some awful stuff thrown at them, but on the one hand there is still thin privilege. There is a huuuuge culture of fat hatred in this country and I don't want to minimize or ignore the abuse thin girls may receive but it really is not appropriate when issues surrounding fat prejudice come up, it's a totally other realm.

Yeah, there was a lot of derailing on that post. I think a lot of it is that so many people can sympathize with disliking their body and not fitting into clothes. That doesn't make it okay, but it's one explanation.

Also, anyone who wonders aloud how having the "body of a ten-year-old boy" can possibly be sexy deserves to be chased after by an angry mob of skinny chicks. Particularly when said person goes on to defend it in the comments.

Which made me kind of want to excuse some of the derailing, except that I've seen plenty of the same on posts that weren't written by women who can't remember that they're not the only ones with body issues. (Trust me, most of us skinny girls know we're privileged -- at least, I certainly do. Doesn't make it okay to compare us to prepubescent boys.)

I'm thin and am aware of the privilege that comes with it, but I am also aware of the privilege that comes with having SOME curves, in a world where women are judged based on their appeal to men. My sister is a bit curvier than me and I am basically ignored when I go anywhere with her, so I can relate to the invisibility, at least on a surface level. I agree that I can never know what it is like to be overweight or obese, but there are others who cannot relate to being thin either and the stuff that goes with that. The ideal body standards teach women to hate/want to fix their bodies, whether they theoretically "fit" the model or not. Thin girl rant...done.

You know, yeah it's kinda like I said in the comments of my post about skinny/fat sizeist bullshit, is that it's bullshit.

We need to stop bickering with each other about it and finally accept the fact that all women are women, -people-. We need to stop playing this oppression olympics ( not accuseing the Op here)
and quit playing the damned game!

The more we are focused on inward fighting the less focused we are on problems faceing women on the whole, the less able we are to tell the companys and society that created this situation to f*ck off, we ain't haveing this shit anymore.

All women, reguradless of race,class, religion, lack of religion, cis or trans, gay, straight whatever the hell ARE WOMEN and we deseive the same rights as everyone else.

/rant

Okay. This is not derailing, it's a direct response:
No, it's not always similar to "what about the men" or "what about the white people," because--though you said don't post "all women are faced with body image issues"--sorry, we are. And I'm not talking about thinness so much as small breasts.
I'm tired, so tired, of being made to feel like less of a woman by men and by other feminists for being not quite a full a-cup.
Just as pointing out patriarchal structures is not man-bashing, I do not take fat acceptance advocates to be skinny-bashing (not that I'm really thin, just flat-chested)--and I do consider myself an ally. I totally acknowledge thin privilege, and our society is obviously more hostile to overweight women.
But it's really unfair to say that other women's body image issues are less valid somehow or less worthy of being addressed, such as when the above poster said "I hate when the skinny girls start complaining." That's plainly hurtful, as is the (admittedly non-feminist, but embraced by some feminists) idea that women who aren't curvy aren't attractive.
Sorry if that was the defensiveness you didn't want to hear, but you have to expect it when you're obviously hitting a sore spot for a lot of feminists, myself included.

My older sister used to be quite heavy, and she went on a diet about a year before her college graduate. Suddenly she went from the chubby funny friend to "Oh you look so good now that you've lost weight!"
So she kept loosing it
and loosing it

Eventually she was about 110-120 (she's 6 foot)

And then everyone felt the need to tell her that she looked gross, and she needed to eat a sandwich. A few times total strangers would come up to her and tell her that she didn't look good.

I remember getting so upset at the fact that everyone felt it was their right to intervine and tell her how she should look when she was underweight, but no one ever said anything when she was overweight (and for her at least, she was unhealthy at both ends of the weight scale)

I remember once a few years ago, a friend of my mother (Who I had never met before and had no idea who she was) came up to me at a retaurant and started hugging me and telling me how glad she was that I had gained weight (At first I didn't realize she had confused me for my sister and I got really upset haha)

In my sister's case, she clearly had an eating disorder, and anyone that was around her for more that a few minutes would have been able to see that (either that or that she was on drugs)

I just wish people would keep thier mouths shut about someones weight, fat or thin. Telling someone that the way they look is wrong, regardless of what size they are.

The reason, I think, for the thread derails in THIS post are because the original post was kind of all over the place. And that's not an insult at all by any means, just an observation. The OP starts off saying it's this is a response to the derailing that goes on by thin girls when it comes to weight issues. That's a fair conversation of course. But then it ventures into the OP's own experience on both sides of the fence, as a thin girl and as an overweight one. She compares the two and says she'd much rather be overweight. Then again, at the end of the post, she goes back to the issue of derailing. I think the middle section, where she talks about her own experiences, is where some of the commenters got the idea that this post was NOT about derailing as much as it was about body image issues and "who has it worse" or what have you and so they felt that there stories would be appropriate. This post wasn't meant to be about that and I just don't think some of commenters understood that in the beginning because of the comparison the OP was making in her post.

One reason threads about fat girls get derailed is that they seem to be unable to discuss the problems of fat women without resorting to some type of skinny hating. Scarlett herself did so with a reference to 10 year old boys. I almost called her out on it, but I saw that someone got there first. Scarlett then clarified that she wasn't refering to actual adult women as 10 yr old boys, but rather to the idealized woman that some designers make clothes for. I appreciated that greatly.

Could you say it a few more times? I'm not sure I understand.

How exactly are discussions about the experience of being thin derailing a post entitled "Body Image - thin privilege?"? Especially when the OP discusses her experience of being thin?

I'd also like to point that thin privilege is just that - thin privilege. When you cross the line from thin to down right bony, the privilege disappears. I can't understand why the people here who state that they have been 100 lbs don't understand that. Maybe they've never had the experience of being called anorexic when they are not, or being compared to a boy (evidently they didn't read Scarlett's post), or being told they are unattractive because they are too thin, or had to listen to discussion about how models are so unattractive b/c of how thin they are and women look better with a little meat on their bones... There are hundreds of examples I could give you of how it is made perfectly clear to bony, flat-chested women that bony and flat-chested is simply not acceptable. I simply cannot agree that having to constantly hear that one's body type is not acceptable is consistent with any sort of privilege. In fact, it is downright insulting to be told that there is privilege associated with a body type that is constantly disparaged.

Once women and men are adults, only women get these kinds of comments from strangers or near-strangers. Overweight or thin men might get occasionally teased about their weight but it's understood that it simply isn't as much of big deal, so nobody thinks twice. The reason why body image is such an issue is sexism: the common enemy. It's oppressive to have to look a certain way, thin or bigger. Period. When I was 14 and weighed 90 pounds because of an accident, I had to buy children's clothes, was called "bag of bones" and some idiot kicked away my crutches. Now, I weigh about 180 - twice my smallest size - and have discovered the joys of not finding clothes in the bigger range. I work mostly around other women of various shapes so I think this is the reason get few comments about my size. I think I would get angry if someone told me I was too fat, unless it was my doctor. Ironically, the weight gain is a side-effect of three kinds of drugs I have to take to be healthier. All this said, I think there's more pressure, at a minimum self-inflicted, on women to lose weight than to gain it.