I have absolutely no idea what it is like to have an eating disorder. While I can comment to a partial contributor, society's obtuse desire to comment upon the bodies of others (and say that it's absolutely awful), that I know what is like to have someone say something stupid and ignorant about my body, I can say nothing more. You tell me that people made you feel bad for how you looked, and I believe you. And I am sorry, because no one should feel bad for how they look. No one should be driven so far that their whole life has to stop to pause and recover from such abuse and from a very serious illness.

However, I don't think it's fair to derail commentary on the trials and tribulations of pale women (and how silly it is to talk about this...and perhaps point out what a small number of our population could claim such a problem, but how high this is on this subreddit's page) with something like an eating disorder. That's a life threatening illness, and being pale is a skin color well on the side of the spectrum of white.

Let's be frank. People might say mean things about being pale. Fine. People say mean things about a lot of things. People say mean things about stuff that makes no sense. I have had someone be mean to me about so many things that are absolutely not my fault, and through the lens of adulthood they are positively random and silly, but through the eyes of a child they were awful. Fine. It happens.

Being made fun of for being pale falls in that category, and trying to treat it as an oppressed status, which is the trend that these things posts fall within, is pointless. You might as well post something that says, "Someone was mean to me about something, and I told them they were dumb." Because people are just mean, especially when they don't understand and definitely when they know, without fail, that it will hurt you to hear it.

You know, I've been fat all my life, and as a child my classmates told me so, and as an adult my peers have let me know, oh-so-subtly, by sly remarks that, were I to point out, I would be told I was paranoid, but I have never in all my life turned that around and told someone that he or she was skinny. Because it's dumb. It's pointless. I have zero idea why their body comes that way, because I don't know them. Only mean people would turn around and say that.

So that's what I'm saying--right? I'm saying that random mean remarks by strangers (no matter how deeply they might scar us, might drive us to dark places) are not the same thing as oppression. My paleness is not as bad as my fatness is not as bad as people who are born into this world with a completely different, disadvantage set of cards. Not even remotely. I am an alien in the world of oppressed people, a visitor allowed so long as I promise to not appropriate their language to talk about my small problems. We cannot sit around and act as if we are some terribly oppressed caste because, gasp, be stay out of the sun, we use sunscreen, we wear sunhats. You know, I'm half as pale as I am because I just don't go outside to be active during daylight hours, and some people are pale because they are nigh-obessive with preventing sun exposure (good for them!), and some people are pale because it's that or painfully burn, and some people, even, are pale because their skin reacts immediately and violently to sun exposure because of some rare skin condition. And it's just dumb, because there are so many different reasons we could be pale.

It is not an oppressed status. It is a version of white, and that's all it will ever be.

And for comments upon the societal fixation upon tan ladies, look and the correlation between whiteness and purity, and like notice that tan celebrities have become less and less popular for decades now. Notice that those women, tan or pale, are still almost exclusively thin, almost exclusively white, almost exclusively posed as sex objects. I do not hold my childhood and teenage bullies against the world, and maybe you should ask yourself if you are. There are much bigger issues to tackle. I don't know if we'll ever cure the world of mean people, but I do know that I will do just fine being pale in society as it is.