{"id":49285,"date":"2012-07-09T11:00:47","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T16:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/familyinequality.wordpress.com\/?p=4509"},"modified":"2017-09-17T15:18:55","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T20:18:55","slug":"shame-and-pity-headless-obesity-vs-pitiful-starvation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/07\/09\/shame-and-pity-headless-obesity-vs-pitiful-starvation\/","title":{"rendered":"Shame & Pity: Headless Obesity vs. Pitiful Starvation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fat people shown with no heads, starving children shown with dull stares? The short explanation may be the difference between a shaming<\/a><\/em> frame<\/a> and a pity<\/em> frame. Fat people are blamed for their obesity<\/a>, so to show their faces stimulates shame and stigma. Starving children are helpless, homogeneous victims<\/a>, so to stare into their eyes stimulates feelings of pity in the viewer.<\/p>\n

The news media\u2019s practice of showing what Charlotte Cooper has called \u201cheadless fatties<\/a>\u201d is ubiquitous.\u00a0Writing about this phenomenon on a news blog, Nate Jones<\/a> says,<\/p>\n

Picturing the obese without heads is a handy solution for an age-old problem: How do you illustrate a story on obesity without shining a spotlight on any individuals? Cropping out faces is more polite — and more legal — than leaving them in, the thinking goes. It\u2019s journalism at its most paternalistic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then he asks,<\/p>\n

Assuming we don\u2019t stop covering obesity stories entirely, is there a way to illustrate them without saying, \u201cHello, you are fat. May I take your picture?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But wait a minute. Why not<\/em> ask that?<\/p>\n

It seems to me that, in sparing a few news photographers some embarrassment — as they approach strangers and ask them this question — the media instead perpetuates the shame, embarrassment and stigma of millions of other people. (And if a few people get over it, ask, and show the full picture, it might just be less difficult to have the conversation the next time.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a suggestion: instead of approaching people while they are eating alone on the boardwalk or at a fast food restaurant, how about finding people at work or school or playing with their children, and showing them living real, complicated, human lives with a potentially<\/a> risky health condition?<\/p>\n

An unscientific sample: Here are the 17 pictures on the first page of my Google images search for \u201cobesity men.\u201d The pictures include 15 individuals, 9 of whom have no faces. (The equivalent search for women yielded 30 obese people, 17 of whom were faceless.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On the other hand<\/strong><\/p>\n

So why is it so different for starving children? Here are the Google images of \u201cstarving child.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They all have faces. Also, none of them are White Americans (which makes sense, since hardly anyone starves in America, though many are food insecure<\/a>). Also, maybe no one asked their permission to use their likenesses.<\/p>\n

For obese people in a rich country, the shame and stigma is a big part of the problem itself \u2014 as the anguish it causes undermines healthy behavior.\u00a0Shame and stigma does not promote healthy weight loss<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For starving children in a poor country, the pity of rich-country viewers is also part of the problem, because it becomes the story, detracting from systematic impoverishment and exploitation.\u00a0For them, pity also seems ineffective at generating solutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Showing pictures of obese people and starving children in the news is important. Both of these practices set up dehumanizing scenarios, however, because they do not create images of complete people in the social contexts of their lives.<\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How about images of complete people in the social contexts of their lives?\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,244,223,23384,129],"class_list":["post-49285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-fat","tag-childrenyouth","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49285"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71551,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49285\/revisions\/71551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}