Barbie and fatness
photo by AllGo - An App For Plus Size People on Unsplash
Vox has an excellent read on Ozempic and the Barbie movie:
To have a good body, our culture tells us, is to have a thin body. There are bad ways and good ways of getting a thin body. Is there any good way to have a fat body?
If you’ve ever read the comments on any body-acceptance post on Instagram, you know the answer is no. People are truly vile and fatphobic, either explicitly or by concern-trolling and pretending they’re worried about a fat person’s health 🙄. On one celebrity gossip site I read, commenters are literally convinced Lizzo is an “industry plant” to advance some nefarious Pro-Fat Agenda. (It didn’t help when I tried pointing out there is WAYYY more money to be made from women hating their bodies than women accepting them.)
Vox again:
Ozempic seems to give our body-fascist culture permission to say the quiet part out loud, the quiet things we whisper to one another when we sell Barbie merch: Your body is not enough, you should hate your body, you can fix your body only by suffering and injecting and sacrificing money for its eternal maintenance. Those ideas were supposed to be on their way out of the culture by now. Ozempic and Barbie make it clear that they’re just as strong as ever.
Le sigh. If you need a palate-cleanser, some of my fave body-acceptance Instagrammers are Michelle Osbourne, Tiffany Ima Akpan, Megan Jayne Crabbe, and Emilia. Give them a follow!