This Fat-Shaming Onesie Is A Good Way To Project Body Image Issues Onto Your Baby
I’ve seen a lot of gross baby outfits in my tenure at Mommyish, but few were quite as overt as this “I Hate My Thighs” onesie that happily projects body image issues onto your preverbal infant.
The awful “I Hate My Thighs” onesie was produced by a company called Wry Baby, which actually has a lot of really cool products on their website. (I am particularly enamored of this “fortune telling” baby shirt that comes sealed in a bag and reveals your baby’s future career once you open it.) Wry Baby clearly meant the onesie as a joke, and was evidently poking fun at the idea that any baby would hate their thighs. But it still seems creepy at best to associate babies with fat shaming at all.
Ms. Magazine wrote that, “there’s something icky about projecting fat awareness on babies.” I agree. We live in a world in which people do grow up being told that their thighs are unacceptable the way they are, and those messages start practically at infancy. I’m constantly stunned by the number of comments I hear about my baby’s eating habits and body type, and my baby is only six months old. The onesie might be trying to be absurd, but it’s not absurd enough to be funny. The kid that wears it probably will grow up with some body-image issues, not because of the shirt, but just because that’s the world we live in. There’s too much body shaming in the world as it is; we can leave the babies out of it.
After the Ms. Magazine blog post started gaining attention on social media, Wry Baby put the “I hate my thighs” onesie up against one that said “Love me for my leg rolls” and said the one that sold best would stay in production and the other would be pulled. Thanks to the results of the challenge, “I hate my thighs” is officially off the market.
I’m utterly tickled by “Love me for my leg rolls,” though. Because I do love little babies’ thigh rolls. They’re so cute with their little legs! Even seeing the onesie not being worn by a baby makes me smile because I’m picturing a pair of little baby legs. Because baby legs are perfect, whatever size they are. And so are grown-up legs.
(Photo: Wry Baby)
