I am an avid fan of sites like Feministing, Feministe, Girlfriend is a Homo, After Ellen, bitch mag, etc. and I love their articles, but the recent obsession with Gossip frontwoman, Beth Ditto is a bit disturbing to me.
Ditto said this in a statement about Keira Knightley
‘The way I feel about Keira Knightley is that even if she has an eating disorder, it’s good for people to hear her say something like that [Ditto has an amazing body], because people listen to her. If she is anorexic, if she is sick, then she knows. And it’s sad…’
Though I think Keira should definitely gain some weight, I hate how people perpetuate this myth that it’s only an eating disorder if you’re too thin. Obviously, a morbidly obese person like Ditto has a problem with disordered eating, yet she’s just ‘curvy’. People say horrible things about very thin people, for example Stephanie Naumoska, the Miss Universe Australia finalist who was torn to shreds by the media for being underweight. She was called horrid things by several different news outlets, yet Ditto is morbidly obese and just called ‘curvy’.
Both of these women (Ditto and Naumoska) obviously have issues that go much deeper than their physical appearance, but why aren’t they both treated the same? Why is it that a woman who is underweight is torn to shreds, therefore further weakening her already obviously fragile psyche but a morbidly obese woman has special clothes made for her and is glorified in the media for being a ‘role model’ showing young women that being morbidly obese is being a ‘real woman’.
I don’t have anything against Ditto, but obesity IS an eating disorder and I think that she (and all morbidly obese individuals) should be treated as though they’re people with eating disorders, not treated as though they’re just ‘curvy’. When we as a society get to a point where an underweight girl like Naumoska and an overweight girl like Ditto are both treated as victims (not as sick or disgusting but also not as revolutionaries) and can get help for the deeper issues that are reflected in their physical appearance, then we’ll have no more obesity crisis, but as long as we glamorize it and make it seem ok, we’re not going to get anywhere.
I’ll be back to updating regularly in about 2 weeks, but I’ll try to check in a few times between now and then. 