Various studies have been published and are underway to better understand the impact of Facebook on our perceptions of and feelings about our bodies and selves. But apparently Facebook itself has decided that you might just need to express how “fat” you feel while using the site, and they’ve added it as an option to their list of emoticons under the heading of “feeling.”
This is how that makes me feel:
Because, after all, FAT IS NOT A FEELING!
I never expected that it would take a graduate degree in psychology to understand this point (it obviously doesn’t, actually), but the world still seems to insist on putting the idea of fatness in the category of emotion.
There are two issues that emerge here. The first is that we as a society are so acutely emotionally unaware. We fail to teach our children — and ourselves — a lexicon of emotions. This doesn’t just make us sound less articulate — it actually hurts us.
When we don’t have the words to express the way that we feel, it limits our ability to communicate about and connect around those feelings. We tend to internalize the experience and, as many of us know, it can grow and fester if left unattended. Sharing our emotional pain — and joy, for that matter — is such an important part of our humanity. Without that ability, something gets destroyed. That could mean diminishing our own self-worth, acting out on ourselves, or even resorting to violence.
The second issue with the idea of fat as a feeling is that, when used, it invariably refers to feeling one of the following: ugly, lazy, hopeless, disgusting, afraid, indulgent… The emoticon isn’t smiling and joyful; it looks like someone who’s constipated, ashamed, or both. When fat is used as a feeling, it’s not in a neutral context expressing the status of one’s daily energy expenditure. There’s always more behind it.
And that’s why it bugs me. Because it’s not useful as a descriptor and the user generally has a myriad of other — actual — feelings in which I’m much more interested in hearing.
At the publishing of this post, I no longer could find the “fat” emoticon on Facebook. Does anyone know if the petitioning done by some in our community was successful? Hooray!