Queen Sized (stereotypes about fatties)
Lifetime had a movie on billed as sort of liberatory for fat girls. Instead, it's kind of like fat torture porn. It's called Queen Sized (much lolz based on the pantyhose us fat chicks wear, assuming we wear hose). It stars the girl who played Tracy Turnblad in the remake of Hair Spray 2007. The girl is cute enough, but the material is so overblown with contrived drama and a messaged more like a tossed salad than well blended cake frosting. It sort of takes away from what she can do with it. She does cry well enough, so the abundance of fat tears from her fat pain are taken care of.
The movie starts out by destroying all the tension by letting us know that she wins home coming queen in the first scene. So you could stop watching there, if you wanted. In the second scene, she's huffing and puffing just from trying to walk up a hill. Those fatties, lol! Can't even make it up a hill!
(Personally, I huff whenever I go up stairs, and have from a size 10 to a size 18 and all in between, but hills are not my nemesis.)
Other implications from the "positive" movie:
Fat girls can't walk as fast as the rest of us!
Fat girls hide food under their beds!
Fat girls can't run! (Someone get that gal a sports bra)
Fat girls shove cupcakes in their mouths in sekrit! (This scene made me lol)
Fat girls don't exercise! Evar!
Fat girls eat pizza instead of Healthy Choice!
Fat girls go to a party just to shove potato chips in their face!
Fat girls run for ice cream when they are frustrated!
Fat girls cry while eating chocolate! And ice cream!
Fat girls buy like three cookies when they go out for coffee!
Fat girls would lose weight, if only they could STOP EATING!!!
Her mother recites a litany of the typical things people tell fat people, so much that she is bewildered when her daughter attributes every comment about food to an agenda to lose weight.
Mom: Health! You have such a pretty face! Let's go do aerobic yoga together! The doctor says...!
And the girl has an imaginary version of her mom who taunts her explicitly with the negative things that other people are always thinking/saying. Gradually, after the girl wins, her actual mom starts to support her so hallucination!mom is easier to shut up. Apparently her mother also yelled at her for not being able to fit into her good dress when her father died. Lovely! The mother is a social worker and is completely oblivious to how she sounds to her daughter until her fat coworker calls her on how cruel she is to her daughter. (Of course to a daughter, one negative word from her mother weighs about a thousand of them.)
There could be a redeeming moment when she explains to a reporter that discrimination against fat people is accepted, pretty much, but when the reporter asks her if she wants to lose weight, she waffles and we get a montage of her GORGING. So she brings up the fact that her dad died of diabetes and that people would like her if she wasn't fat. She doesn't say, "I don't want to lose weight. I'd like to work on my health, though." or "I've lost weight, but every time I gain it back, and yo-yoing is less healthy than not starting at all, so no, not right now." or "Actually, I really just enjoy food and I exercise for ME. What I do is for myself and my body, and nobody else." or even if we're being optimistic, "Actually, I'm trying to like myself for who I am now, so no." Boo.
And of course, once she becomes homecoming queen, it all goes to her head and she ignores the people who helped her get the signatures to run and helped her with campaigning. It would have been just as easy for her to say, "No one believed in me, not even my mother, but my friends helped me to…" This is the point when the show became kind of… unbearable. God. So it becomes: She's making herself a victim (not that people are still making pig noises at her). And her best friend turns into a raging bitch, temporarily, to increase the drama.
Especially failtastic is that there are commercials for Lipo procedures, Mega-T Green Tea (burns belly fat!), and Alli, which is a fat blocker. That means it blocks the fat you eat, and a side effect is ANAL LEAKAGE. That means, you don't absorb the fat, but it dribbles out your ass later. GROSS. There are even commercials for maintaining your pets' weight.
The joyful part is when she stakes a stand! and throws away her junk food. So, yeah, it's implied that she's going to continue to "fight the food" but she gets to have a day in a pretty dress and all that shit. She also got a Slow Clap Building to Cheers. What more could you ask for.
I don't expect a lot from Lifetime Movies, but now that they've got Drop Dead Diva, they should make an effort to have less of a muddled message. It felt like they wanted to present this story positively, but they also didn't want to let fat people off the hook. But they could have gone with a moderate 'fatties are people too" message without propagating the same stereotypes we always see about fat people. You don't get to laud yourself for pointing out how mean popular kids are for calling a fat girl a pig and spreading around pictures of her eating when you're doing the exact same thing on a larger scale.
The movie starts out by destroying all the tension by letting us know that she wins home coming queen in the first scene. So you could stop watching there, if you wanted. In the second scene, she's huffing and puffing just from trying to walk up a hill. Those fatties, lol! Can't even make it up a hill!
(Personally, I huff whenever I go up stairs, and have from a size 10 to a size 18 and all in between, but hills are not my nemesis.)
Other implications from the "positive" movie:
Fat girls can't walk as fast as the rest of us!
Fat girls hide food under their beds!
Fat girls can't run! (Someone get that gal a sports bra)
Fat girls shove cupcakes in their mouths in sekrit! (This scene made me lol)
Fat girls don't exercise! Evar!
Fat girls eat pizza instead of Healthy Choice!
Fat girls go to a party just to shove potato chips in their face!
Fat girls run for ice cream when they are frustrated!
Fat girls cry while eating chocolate! And ice cream!
Fat girls buy like three cookies when they go out for coffee!
Fat girls would lose weight, if only they could STOP EATING!!!
Her mother recites a litany of the typical things people tell fat people, so much that she is bewildered when her daughter attributes every comment about food to an agenda to lose weight.
Mom: Health! You have such a pretty face! Let's go do aerobic yoga together! The doctor says...!
And the girl has an imaginary version of her mom who taunts her explicitly with the negative things that other people are always thinking/saying. Gradually, after the girl wins, her actual mom starts to support her so hallucination!mom is easier to shut up. Apparently her mother also yelled at her for not being able to fit into her good dress when her father died. Lovely! The mother is a social worker and is completely oblivious to how she sounds to her daughter until her fat coworker calls her on how cruel she is to her daughter. (Of course to a daughter, one negative word from her mother weighs about a thousand of them.)
There could be a redeeming moment when she explains to a reporter that discrimination against fat people is accepted, pretty much, but when the reporter asks her if she wants to lose weight, she waffles and we get a montage of her GORGING. So she brings up the fact that her dad died of diabetes and that people would like her if she wasn't fat. She doesn't say, "I don't want to lose weight. I'd like to work on my health, though." or "I've lost weight, but every time I gain it back, and yo-yoing is less healthy than not starting at all, so no, not right now." or "Actually, I really just enjoy food and I exercise for ME. What I do is for myself and my body, and nobody else." or even if we're being optimistic, "Actually, I'm trying to like myself for who I am now, so no." Boo.
And of course, once she becomes homecoming queen, it all goes to her head and she ignores the people who helped her get the signatures to run and helped her with campaigning. It would have been just as easy for her to say, "No one believed in me, not even my mother, but my friends helped me to…" This is the point when the show became kind of… unbearable. God. So it becomes: She's making herself a victim (not that people are still making pig noises at her). And her best friend turns into a raging bitch, temporarily, to increase the drama.
Especially failtastic is that there are commercials for Lipo procedures, Mega-T Green Tea (burns belly fat!), and Alli, which is a fat blocker. That means it blocks the fat you eat, and a side effect is ANAL LEAKAGE. That means, you don't absorb the fat, but it dribbles out your ass later. GROSS. There are even commercials for maintaining your pets' weight.
The joyful part is when she stakes a stand! and throws away her junk food. So, yeah, it's implied that she's going to continue to "fight the food" but she gets to have a day in a pretty dress and all that shit. She also got a Slow Clap Building to Cheers. What more could you ask for.
I don't expect a lot from Lifetime Movies, but now that they've got Drop Dead Diva, they should make an effort to have less of a muddled message. It felt like they wanted to present this story positively, but they also didn't want to let fat people off the hook. But they could have gone with a moderate 'fatties are people too" message without propagating the same stereotypes we always see about fat people. You don't get to laud yourself for pointing out how mean popular kids are for calling a fat girl a pig and spreading around pictures of her eating when you're doing the exact same thing on a larger scale.