Marie Claire: fatties are gross!

So much has already been written about Marie Claire magazine’s colossal fuck-up when they decided to publish one of the most offensive blog posts I’ve ever read.  The author of the blog post, Maura Kelly, thinks that it’s perfectly ok to publicly humiliate a specific group of people.  She later offered a really bad apology, but the damage had already been done.

I have read several rebuttals to this blog post, but the best one I’ve read so far was written by Josh Shahryar on the Huffington Post.  “Dear Marie Claire and Media: Fat People Are People, Too.”  The first thing that amazed me was that it was written for the Huffington Post, not exactly a fat-friendly website.  This writer is a self-admitted “foreign policy guy,” but he wrote this article with what I felt was such sensitivity and caring for someone who usually does not write about such topics:

“The big deal isn’t one person pulling this bigoted post which will undoubtedly go down as a masterpiece in the annals of hatred. It is the audacity of a reputable international magazine for women to make thousands of women feel like their bodies are unworthy. That they are ugly. That their mere presence on our television screens is a public offense.

I know that many overweight women have image issues and they know that there are people out there that look at them and judge them by their BMI. However, at least those people are kind enough to not come up to them and say it to their faces. Because that would be mean. A reputable international magazine for women just came forward and told millions of women that its staff thinks they’re gross. It gave a bigot the platform to come out and hurt millions of people. That is a very big deal.”

And for the people who complain that this is a free speech issue: Nobody is saying that people can’t have their own opinions.  I personally don’t care whether people don’t like me for being fat, gay, black or whatever.  What I do care about is people contributing to the ill-treatment of an already marginalized group.  The freedom to hold opinions, no matter how distasteful, does not mean that you get to be free from criticism of said opinions.