A group of activists have a message for Facebook: Fat is not a feeling.
Facebook’s status update box allows users to select an emoticon associated with a certain feeling from a drop-down box. Alongside “happy,” “anxious” and “full,” users can select “fat.”
In late February, Catherine Weingarten, a playwriting MFA candidate at Ohio University, wrote a Change.org petition asking Facebook to remove “fat” from the list of options. The petition reads, in part:
Endangered Bodies, an organization that promotes body positivity, rallied around the campaign and asked Twitter users to speak up, using #FatIsNotAFeeling to explain why they want Facebook to change the “feeling fat” option. As of Friday afternoon, the petition had received over 13,000 signatures.
Weingarten told The Daily Dot that Facebook’s “feeling fat” option is far from harmless.
“It can trivialize people’s experiences, or encourage people to put out body-negative ideas and have other people validate that,” she said. “Fatness isn’t a feeling, it’s something on the outside; it’s an insult. A feeling should be something more internal.”
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Source: Huffingtonpost.com