Fat Talk In Mean Girls

“I really want to lose three pounds” says Regina while sitting at the lunch table with her friends. She continues to stare at them expectantly for several seconds before they catch on and respond with “Oh my God, what are you talking about? You’re so skinny!” (Waters 2003). This quote, from the movie Mean Girls, is intended to be funny. However, it is actually an inside look at the phenomenon more commonly referred to as, Fat Talk. This quote does a really great job of giving insight to what fat talk actually is and why it is so ordinarily used amongst middle class white females. In an attempt to understand the meaning of fat talk and body image to adolescent girls, Mimi Nichter, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of

She discovered that fat talk is more of a way to get reassurance from your peers than to actually complain about your body; as seen as the Mean Girls quote above. Several girls she interviewed also said that they often felt obligated to participate in fat talk, regardless of whether they actually disliked their body or not. By not participating, they were admitting they were happy with their body or that they believed they did not need to work on anything. Nichter also points out that during these interviews the girls who were larger, or actually over weight, said that they did not participate in fat talk. This actually makes sense, only skinny and average sized girls would participate in fat talk if the sole purpose for it is to get reassurance from her friends that she is not

In chapter six, Nichter discusses results from a one year study focusing on African-American girls. She performed this additional study because the initial groups were predominantly white and Latina. From the results we can see that the differences between their comments and the comments from the white and Latina girls, and these differences were astonishing. The image of beauty in the black community was so different from the unattainable image the other girls strived for. For black girls the ideal girl had very little to do with her weight. Instead, this perfect girl was “smart, friendly, not conceited, easy to talk to, fun to be with, and had a good sense of humor” (2000:164). This is strikingly different from the ideal girl that was described by white girls. We see that black girls place significantly more emphasis on personality than they place on appearance. Also, the black girls’ description of the relationship between mother and daughter differed from the description of the white girls’. Black girls typically did not talk about dieting, nor did their mothers. They also did not participate in fat talk; instead, they offered positive feedback and encouragement for their friends without them having to ask for it by first saying something negative about themselves. Black girls did not place the importance on weight that white girls did, they