Save Animals to Save Fat People?

While thinking about what to write for my blog my sister mentioned a new PETA billboard that was causing controversy. As we talked about it I immediately had reactions so I decided to write about it.

The billboard declares "Save the whales. Lose the blubber. Go vegetarian" Then pictured is the back of a fat woman in a bikini. I was blown away right as I saw this. How on earth could a company be able to post something that degrades bigger women so much? My sister argues that bigger women are degraded all the time in magazines, TV, movie, you name it, and that really this was no different. Yet, in my opinion I see it much differently. These women might not be represented and smaller bodies are always portrayed as "better" but to announce them as whales, publicly, for the world to see, I think is completely outrageous. Feministing.com wrote an article about this as well, including a quote that left me heartbroken:
"I was planning on taking [my family] to the beach to enjoy the beautiful day when I saw a billboard that made me want to cry...We all sat there and stared at it for a minute and everyone in the car was silent. No one wanted to mention my weight. I laughed it off as usual, but it really had made me so embarrassed, so self-conscious and so ashamed of my weight that I dropped off my family at the oceanfront and left to go home, making the excuse that I wasn't feeling well"

This woman was so distraught by the poster that she couldn't even spend a lovely day with her family at the beach, where the billboard's setting is.

I understand that PETA wants to save animals and that maybe as a whole America could lose some weight but to use someone's weight against them to try and force them into being a vegetarian isn't worth it and could produce the opposite effect. If I saw PETA degrading my body type like that I'd most likely try to lose weight another way just so I can prove to them that I don't need their "program". (PETA offers a starter kit program for vegetarians and says "studies show that vegetarians, on average, are about 10 to 20 pounds lighter than meat-eaters")

Crayons of the World

In class we were asked to write what we thought race was, what our definition of it was. It turned out to be harder than we all thought. The initial reaction in my head was skin color. Yet, I didn't write that down. It felt, well, racist. When asked how many people write down skin color maybe 3 people raised their hands, I not being one. I wondered how many other people had done what I had. Here we were in class, saying things like "nationality" and "background" were race.

Now every time I visit my own blog I see that picture of all those crayons and in class, reading Fredrick Douglass and talking about race, that picture isn't just crayons anymore, it's a representative of the people in the world, of race. Now I'm not comparing race to a happy coloring book filled world of crayons because race is not a happy issue like that. But as I look at the picture more and more I see new things. One particular part of it that's interesting is the color white. It stands out. There's no doubt about it. In the original picture (re-inserted at the bottom of the blog post) there is one white crayon in about the middle of the picture that clearly stands out. Yes, white traditionally stands out as a color but that made me think more and more about superiority. All the other colors are "darker" than this white and kind of blend together if you squint your eyes. Is this how we used to think, how some people still DO think? All those people, over there, if you ignore humanity, squint your eyes a bit, they blur out, like they don't even matter anymore. All that matters is that the white people, they still stand out of a crowd.

So maybe I'm over analyzing a picture of crayons but all I know is that it sparked something in me about race. About color of skin. No one wants to admit it, but that's what race is all about. If you squint your eyes all you see is color, the person themselves don't matter anymore. It's this that shaped the history of slavery. Not seeing the African Americans as people, only as "blacks".

All the colors of crayons versus "flesh" colors. What do YOU see?