In my mind, everyone should know the litany: "age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, religion or disability". Weight should be part of this. All of these are part of your image, and judging you, having prejudices about you, believing you are "this" or "that", because you are a woman, middle-aged, fat, European, white, heterosexual, Social Liberal and Pagan, is xenophobia and - as ageist, weightist, and the other words created to express one special prejudice are simply different words to express the same thing - racism.
After all, there are no "human races" anyway, only people with different color skin, so why not call people of different shapes and sizes races too, so that you can be called with the word that has all the correct associations and connotations already attached.
"Weightist" or Sizeist" says absolutely nothing. Racist says everything.
Ok, what is this all about?
There is "a sit-com with two fat people falling in love with each other".
I adore Melissa. I love Sookie in Gilmore Girls. I don't know Billy, and I haven't seen one minute of the series, all I've seen is the... uh, what's they're called... I had the word on my tongue... you know, the pictures from a movie or tv show that are not moving... stills? Sounds right. Some stills from the series. Looks cute.
I also like the premise - two fat people meet at OA and find out they really like each other and start dating.
Now, "some viewers aren't comfortable watching intimacy between two plus-sized actors."
Oh? Racists don't like watching their hate object behave like all the other people. Facing them with their prejudices, hatred and bigotry makes them feel uncomfortable. So what? Now, I haven't seen the show, so I don't know what the "fat jokes" are, but sounds to me it's fat people laughing on their own expense, and every fat person (50-60% of the general audience, and probably up to 90% when it comes to this specific show) understands exactly what they are talking about. Frankly, I find it hard to believe Melissa and Billy would agree to do a racist show about fat people. But - as I said, I haven't seen any of it, so I can't tell.
“I didn’t take it as making fun at all, and I think I’m really sensitive to that stuff.”
-- Melissa McCarthy about Mike & Molly
Nevertheless, I don't think anyone is forcing anyone watch anything from tv. If you're not "comfortable" watching something, turn the tv off or change the channel!
Marie Claire's editor, Joanna Coles, read the report and got worried. "Do you really think people feel uncomfortable when they see overweight people making out on television?" she asked one of her staff members (above mentioned Maura Kelly), who started researching the issue, even thougha) she doesn't watch tv, so her opinion is of no value to anyone, and
b) she is a fat-racist, so she would definitely feel "uncomfortable" to watch "overweight people making out on television".
I wonder if any Marie Claire staff member watches television much, we know that Joanna and Maura don't.
Maura's first reaction was that Melissa and Billy are "obese", "with rolls and rolls of fat". Perhaps she doesn't understand that even when they are playing characters, they are not wearing fat suits. It's their own fat. I wonder if Maura would tell this to Melissa to her face. I hope not. Perhaps Maura is just one of these socially incompetent people without boundaries, who thinks being rude is being honest. Don't know. Don't much care to know either.
Also, a show with a premise of two fat people MEETING AT OVEREATERS ANOMYMOUS cannot possibly be said to PROMOTE obesity. Dear Maura, find out what OA is, go to a couple of meetings (even when it means you would need to sit in a room with "downright obese" people "with rolls and rolls of fat". But it wouldn't bother you, as you're not some sizeist jerk, right?)
So - Maura finds it "aesthetically displeasing" to watch fat people. I find it "aesthetically displeasing" to watch very skinny people, like Callista Flockheart, but I loved Ally McBeal. I didn't watch the series to see "beautiful people" but to enjoy the social situations and to laugh at the comical everyday situations that I am familiar with, even when I am not a lawyer working in Boston.
Did I feel uncomfortable watching Callista's skinny arms and neck? Yes. I cringe every time I see people who are so thin they are barely anything but skin on bones. It cannot be healthy. But then I forgot all about it, because who am I to tell Callista she's too skinny, she must be anorectic, she cannot be healthy and happy, how sad it is that she lets her chase of unrealistic beauty ideals ruin her life, and so on and so forth. After all, I don't know. Maybe she just happens to be skinny. Maybe she is healthy and happy and quite pleased with her life as it is, just as everyone else in the world.
I don't think skinny, anorectic bitches have any right to give "weight loss advice" to fat people, Maura, just as childless people have right to tell anyone how to raise their kids. I know just as much of "nutrition" as you do, and the only weight loss method worth knowing and following is the Swedish 4M - "mer motion, mindre mat". That is "more exercise, less food". It doesn't matter what you eat, just eat less. It doesn't matter how you exercise, just do more of it. No counting of calories, reading labels, learning things like "high fructose corn syrup" and worrying. Simple and effective.
I suppose you could get some points for your "concern" for my well-being, but when I know it's only to save you from the "esthetically unpleasing" sights, you, poor woman, have to see every day, it kind of makes me not care.
For your information, Maura, I weight over 200 pounds and I'm physically perfectly healthy. My mental health problems are due to idiots who think they have "right" to express any prejudiced, hateful crap they think, with no reason to THINK before they open their nasty mouths, and it is people like this that are personally responsible for majority of obesity problems that is "costing your country far more in terms of all the related health problems you are paying for, by way of your insurance". I really wish you'd learn one day that bullying causes the same psychological reaction as torture, and PTSD is costing every country far more in term of all the related health problems than everything else together, as it is one of the main causes in most of them. 90% of all fat people are fat because they are trying to comfort themselves by eating, because food is their only friend and the only luxury they can afford, not because they are lazy gluttons.
Also, Maura, I am married to a man I love, who loves me. How about you, ms "living flirtatiously" since April 2009?
Really, how happy are you? You should be really, really, really happy, because you're not fat, and it's only fat people who are unhappy... or? Don't you think happiness has more to do with your attitudes and thoughts than your image? Even though magazines with "unhealthy obsession of physical perfection", like Marie Claire- which you are a part of - try to make us feel bad for being fat, and succeed too, don't you think the overall happiness doesn't come from your scales, your new handbag or a boyfriend, but from inside you?
I can have compassion to you with your problems with eating disorder, but you don't seem to have any understanding of the eating disorder that hasn't even got a fancy, medical name like anorexia, orthorexia, bulimia (hyperorexia - overeating in Greek is not the name of the eating disorder overeating, but bulimia...). In Marie Claire there are articles about eating disorders - like yours - but to overeaters all you offer is diet and exercise advice. Did that make you stop undereating? Did the understanding that you are damaging yourself make you stop doing it? Did your father's concern stop you? No. You had to be taken in to a closed ward for four months to make you stop, and you STILL after all these years and all that you went through, are only "living sober", a day at a time. You are all the time aware of eating, the weight issue is in your back of your head all the time, you look at people - you yourself included - and value them by their weight. You just ASSUME things about people based on what you think about their weight, and think that justifies your racism? I'm sorry, but ASSUMING people are "damaging their bodies" has nothing to do with aesthetics, and you did say you find fat people "aesthetically displeasing".
Then to Joanna.
Leah Chernikoff, the associate editor of Fashionista, thinks people expressing their feelings about Maura's stupidity are PILLORING her. I didn't know what that is, so I looked it up in the dictionary. My dictionary says: "to expose to public derision,ridicule, or abuse". Abuse? I think Maura put herself in the pillory through open expose of her racist ideas, and she really deserves every verbal rotten tomato people throw at her. Really, her intentions might be good and her heart in right place, but all that means nothing, when one is a racist and speaks up for one's racist ideas.
Anyway, NOW Joanna says she is "concerned about a show that makes fun of large people", even though one gets the impression that she was more concerned about people needing to watch large people being human beings in public television. I think she would have reacted if Maura had misquoted her in her blog entry... don't you?
"Do you really think people feel uncomfortable when they see overweight people making out on television?"What ever.
- Joanna Coles, to Maura Kelly
P.S. It might be possible that this is just a publicity stunt. *sigh*
Yeah, irk the people, sacrifice a couple of them, most of the people don't give a dime about human rights and civil liberties, and don't kind of understand that even though you HAVE THE RIGHT to say what ever, it might not BE RIGHT to say it, and you also have the RESPONSIBILITY to take the consequences. The consequences for a racist openly blurting her racist opinions are "public pilloring".
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