a little fat phoboa for your friday (thanks j. k. rowling)

so the other day i'm getting changed and jay says to me "manda, have you lost any weight since you were pregnant?"

emphasis on the any. yuck.

my first response (other than complete flabberghastedness) was "don't know, don't care". of course i wanted to know where this came from and why it was something he felt compelled to ask me so i started talking about fatness. i explained that fatness was like eye colour, everyone's different but we are all marvellous and amazing and wonderful. i said i think that fatness isn't a bad thing, just that people come in many shapes.

"but manda, dudley is fat and he's not marvellous or amazing. he's mean and greedy."

aaaaand the penny dropped. russell and i have tried to edit and censor when we read to jay, often changing racist, homophobic, misogynist, hetro-centric and fat-phobic children's story's as we read them in hope that he can continue to enjoy books without all the conditioning and yuck that goes with many of them. the thing is, the child can read alone now (which is super amazing for the most part!) and he picked up the first harry potter book a week ago and started reading. no editing.

for people that haven't read the harry potter books, they are incredibly fat-phobic. jo rowling paints the 'baddies' like dudley as fat, disgusting greedy creatures that are mean and horrible and makes it clear that this meanness is wrapped up with their greediness and fatness. the worst part is that we encouraged jay's interest in the harry potter series. i thought that they would be a much more bearable alternative to most of the crap that is written for children (don't get me wrong, i don't believe the hp books are well written or high quality fiction, i just like the fantasy aspect and i think hermione is awesome) and that it was something we could read to him without being completely bored to tears. not such a good choice, it turns out.

don't get me wrong, i know that his ideas on weight gain and fatness didn't come from harry potter books alone and that's what scared me the most. i can't put him in a bubble to prevent this stuff from entering his world and affecting the way he sees people. so what do we do? as parents we want to raise a respectful, gentle, thoughtful, sensitive child that will question and challenge these ways of thinking.

the question is; how?