“What your thinness takes from you.” My response.

Today I got this link in my inbox. The “My Fat Friend” blogger writes of her encounter with a thin friend who enthuses about her new job. “You are worth more than that,” the thin friend kindly suggests, then is taken aback when her chubby friend pointedly explains the terrible discrimination she faces due to her size. Sigh. Thin people just don’t get it. Their thinness has taken away their ability to understand.

Well, on behalf of all thin women who will never be offered $200,000 a year, or anything even close, I would be happy if a friend told me I was worth that. Really. I would be thrilled to be getting 50 grand a year, even with 2.5 degrees and student loans. I have never even made 30 thousand a year, and it is doubtful that I will. That has nothing to do with weight, size, color or gender. It has to do with our present economy, in which people in India can do our work for a fraction of the pay, and in which subcontractors and the gig economy have decimated wages. It has to do with the structure of our world economy, which is built on oppressing the poor.

You wish to welcome thin women to your world? Welcome to my world, the world of the working poor, where the trials and travails of rich white women who are denied huge incomes is a joke, even when their pain is due to their huge size. We are meant to be shocked that obese women have lesser job prospects. Truthfully, all of the obese women I have known in my life, both in the US and in Europe, have had no problem securing a good job and even getting good-looking, employed men. This is not to say that there is no discrimination; it’s just that not getting the “dream job” with a six-figure income and blaming it on your size seems laughable, especially for a person like me who has been homeless twice and went down to about 112 pounds due to living on tea and biscuits. Years later, I have a small business with a small income. Most of us will never get the dream job. Welcome to planet earth.

For millions of poor people worldwide, the dream of having as much food as you like, any time you want it, is a dream as far out of reach as getting a “middle income”. That, my fat friend, is fat privilege: the privilege of being born in a country in which dying of hunger is always something that happens over there, to other people, and in which not getting special privileges like an upper-class income, sexy model boyfriend or million-dollar modeling contract seems like oppression.

I agree on many points of the discussion. Of course, we all want more comfortable airline seats, fashionable clothes in every size (I’m a size eight, and I’m even “too big” for most designer clothes). I am categorically against bullying or abusing any human being, for any reason: size, color, shape, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality or social status. I hope we would all want a world in which women are not judged based on their looks, but on their ability, their minds and their souls. Therefore, seeing different sizes in advertisements and in magazines would be a boon for us all. That being said, the world of fashion and beauty has always been aspirational, not based on reality. Advertisers suddenly discovered plus-size women because it was lucrative to do so, not out of some “politically correct” desire to right perceived social wrongs.

However, misusing and co-opting the language of the civil rights agenda has diluted the meaning of oppression, just as misusing the word “apartheid” (which refers to a racist separatist system that robbed Africans of their civil rights) to attack Israel (which grants all citizens, including Arabs and Muslims, civil rights) is an insult to the many brave men and women who died to fight oppression. In a world in which black people are literally getting killed and enslaved, it is an insult to refer to obese people not getting the top job with a dream salary as “oppression”. In a world in which black people can’t get the same home, job, mortgage or education based on their skin color, it is an insult to refer to not getting a Dolce and Gabbana dress in size XXXL as “discrimination”. In a world in which Africans are drowning in the Mediterranean in an attempt to escape genocide, it is insulting to rail against “size discrimination” because some jerk made a nasty comment online, or because your thin friends don’t understand your pain.

My thinness has given me little (perhaps I get hit on by strangers more often), but has not taken one iota of compassion for human suffering. However, it seems that many women who complain of their travails due to size are thickly padded and numbed to the torment around them on this planet. Being heavy may be due to a number of factors: genetic predisposition, medicines that cause weight gain, nutrition or eating disorders. In an industrialized nation, medical access to nutritional help is available, even if it is expensive. For people in Yemen, dying of hunger is an unavoidable oppression. For freezing refugees in Bosnia or Macedonia, there is no easy access to relief.

When we misuse words and ideas like “oppression”, “discrimination” and “civil rights”, their meaning becomes diluted to the extent that we are incapable of reacting to extreme oppression. Meanwhile, people’s right to wear a spaghetti strainer on their heads, go to work in drag or weigh 500 pounds ends up having the same moral worth as an immigrant’s right to eat food and not get shot at. This is the ethical space we have entered: a trans prostitute’s rights to practice her “trade” is on the same moral ground as an imprisoned journalist’s right to escape torture. Instead of encouraging people to give up deadly lifestyles(unsafe sex, drugs, crime, junk food, overeating), we speak of them as civil rights, all the while ignoring the real crisis in human rights worldwide, in which women are having their genitals mutilated, gay men are being thrown from rooftops, and tortured prisoners and child laborers make our clothing.

I am also disturbed by the new trend of “competing for victimhood” that has become the sport du jour. Instead of compassion for immigrants, refugees and minorities, every group now tries to outdo each other. Rich white women exaggerate every perceived slight, every male comment, and suddenly, a drunken sexual encounter from 30 years ago becomes headline news. Meanwhile, black girls get raped by cops and no one bats an eyelash extension. Everyone wants to be “oppressed”: fat people, white men, fetishists, even people who believe they are unicorns. The result? things that are choices or privileges are suddenly seen as rights.

We forget that the definition of rights has already been established by the UN charter of human rights: the right to life, liberty, security of property, freedom of movement, freedom from torture. Comfortable airline seats, a sexy, high-status mate, a six figure income and hot designer clothes are not rights, they are privileges. And if you are already one of the privileged in a world full of people who are daily being denied their most basic rights, then please check your privilege.