Nikki Nuñez Cuevas
To what extent does your appearance influence your social treatment? While pretty privilege has become well known, understanding how systemic biases shape these perceptions is crucial. These biases are embedded in our social structures, making genuine authenticity feel out of reach. Desirability is linked to romance but often overlooks other systemic implications. Disparities based on race, gender, and social class exemplify systemic oppression, where natural qualities are undervalued and need alteration for acceptance.
As influencing culture grows, a broader question emerges: who is willing to abandon what they stand for to comply with specious social codes? One of the world’s most famous athletes, Serena Williams, has recently become a spokesperson for Ro; an online telehealth company that provides medications for hair, skin, and fertility but overwhelmingly promotes GLP-1 weight-loss medication. GLP-1 was created as a medicine for Type 2 Diabetes. Later gained popularity as a weight-loss aid. Serena Williams reports that her health has improved while taking GLP-1, however, her advertisements only mention that she paired it with diet and exercise, which consumers pay no mind to. According to the CDC, most Americans are not committed to a healthy diet and exercise lifestyle. Instead, people are being encouraged to keep their bodies slim rather than healthy and able, leading them to seek invasive, unnecessary, and often dangerous mechanisms for weight loss.
Desirability comes with abandoning what is truly beneficial to make space for what makes people comfortable. People often judge what you can do based on the visual impression you start with. In our age of activism, one might assume that calling out problems would be met with empathy. The reality is that activism is supposed to be uncomfortable. Fighting against systemic issues that work as the heart and lungs of our societies and cultures inevitably causes confusion and disorder. Popular plus-size content creator, @Samyra, has received a lot of backlash for challenging fatphobic rhetoric. Her calling out of the SkinnyLicious menu from Cheesecake Factory was met with people online calling her dramatic and ignoring her valid sentiments about how such vocabulary pushes negative ideas around fat bodies. She also has a series on social media where she tries on and reviews their style, prices, and comfort - a pretty standard shopping experience. She advocates for all clothing stores to be inclusive of a wide array of sizes. In a “perfect world” where all overweight people would start a weight loss journey, they would still need large sizes throughout the time it takes them to drop to a weight that pleases fatphobic ideologies. This trends toward dehumanization by stripping people of basic needs. Weight stigma conditions us to falsely equate obesity with unhealthiness, making people seem undeserving of positivity; Freedom of ridicule supersedes attraction.
