Entertainment Tonight: Fake Fat $ell$
Here is the thing.
I can understand the reasoning behind outfitting people into fat suits and sending them out in public. (After all, the now-ancient piece in Ladies' Home Journal about it is what kind of sparked BFB and my interest in fat rights.)
However.
Entertainment Tonight has apparently decided that November sweeps is best served by... putting thin women in fat suits and sending them out into NYC. Their previous rounds featured Vanessa Minnillo being fat undercover; this time it's two of the models from Deal or No Deal. Uh, really?
The pair were each rigged with hidden cameras and donned padded suits and latex makeup to look like they were packing on over 300 pounds to see how it feels to live like 66 percent of America -- overweight and often mocked and ostracized by total strangers.
Did you know that 66 percent of America is over 300 pounds? Wow!
The promo - on the linked page as well as others - is comical. They went from a SIZE 2 to a SIZE 22! 200-POUND FAT SUITS! NEW YORK CITY! OMG FAKE FAT RULEZ! (Well, not that last one.)
Tomorrow on ET, in part two of our hidden-camera investigation, Brooke and Leyla are in a New York City supermarket, unable to fit down the aisles and frustrated by their own size -- and stunned by their treatment by a Pedicab driver!
The thing is: these two women (and Vanessa before them, and every other person in a fat suit ever perhaps) are not comfortable with these bodies because, hello, they just went up 200 (or 300 or 400) pounds in a matter of minutes and, hello, these bodies aren't real. It's like sending Average White Guy out into Chicago wearing clown shoes, and then doing an expose on people with giant feet. (Big Giant Feet Blog...?)
I'll admit when ET first did this type of thing I was a little more impressed - particularly by their act of bringing in Actual Fat People™ to talk about fat, even if it was ancillary. That was nice. That was an acknowledgment. But even if they do it this time it feels like a half-hearted effort. "Oh, fat suit? Can we dial up that fat rights organization again and get a few of them on? We want them to think we're being fair..." It only goes to dehumanize fat even further - imagine that for a minute - by equating it with something someone can modify on-the-fly, instantly.
Stupid. Hurtful. Disrespectful.
(Oh - related is Amp's great write-up on the use of fat suits in sitcoms this season. He's been on top of the fat suit stuff for years - a Fat Suit Expert perhaps? - and this one is quite insightful.)
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Posted by paul on November 11, 2007
It only goes to dehumanize fat even further - imagine that for a minute - by equating it with something someone can modify on-the-fly, instantly.
On one hand, shows like these increase awareness of the discrimination that fat folk do face on a daily basis, but most often, at least in my experiences, the shows greatly exaggerate the degree of discrimination or focus solely on the discriminatory aspect, so that viewers are left feeling sorry for those poor, poor fat folk and hoping by god they never, ever get fat. It just reinforces the whole be thin at every cost mentality. Almost always, you have sobbing supermodels (as in this story) who say they just can't wait to get back to their normal size, etc..., therefore promoting that fat is a fate akin to or even worse than death.
I have faced a great deal of fat-related discrimination, and I think it's important to publicize this, because most people really don't know the degrees to which fat people can be legally discriminated against. But, I don't see being fat as a handicap or my size as limiting, as this segment suggests I should.
Nice points, Rachel. It's good that these shows do prove to people that, hey, fat people? Get treated like crap! But it'd be more useful in my opinion to, you know, use actual fat people. But then we run the risk of being shut out - for reasons we touched on yesterday - "Oh, you're just whining..." etc.
True Paul, but on the flip side, the trouble with using genuinely fat people to illustrate fat discrimination is that so many fat people have internalized second-class status as status quo. Or, some may even feel they deserve to be discriminated against, because their failure to lose weight is a reflection of overall shortcomings as a person (I sure felt this way for a long time).
By using a thin person - one who has never been fat - to illustrate fat discrimination, you have the possibility to illustrate the myriad of ways fat people are discriminated against with potentially more honesty and detail. Thin people in a fat suit might notice forms of discrimination that fat people, by virtue of social conditioning and experience, may have become desensitized to. And, you avoid the risk as you noted, of being labeled as whiny and overly-sensitive.
Still, only giving 5 seconds to a real fat talking head begs the question if the segment is truly a piece on fat discrimination, or is just a guise for promoting anti-obesity rhetoric.
If we have any audio-visual geeks on here, there might be a project to outfit actual fat people with the video cameras to show the difference between the "instant fat" and those fat people who are actually comfortable in their skin. I don't know if there would be much chance of getting it into the media, but a few copies mailed out might interest some of the "reality show" folks. Especially during a writer's strike when they're hard up for copy
Unabe to fit down the aisles??? Uh, maybe if ET is going to go to all that trouble, it ought to invest in a fat suit that would fit the models like a real body. (Kinda like Jo said). As we all know, thanks to Kate Harding and others, you can have a dozen people who weigh "300 pounds" and every last one of them is going to look different, be shaped differently, move differently, etc.
The only aisle I ever had trouble fitting down was the one on the bus I rode in high school. I don't know who they make those things for, but at the time, I weighed perhaps 180 lbs, and I'd have to turn sideways to get down the aisle. But, a grocery store? Nope.
Those are the most unrealistic fake-fat people I've ever seen.
They're supposed to be 'imitating' people of my weight, and I certainly don't look or move like that. No wonder passersby are starring -- so would I!
I agree! I finally saw the clip (with the sound off, though, so I don't know what anyone was saying). The woman in the red top looked deformed! They looked really bizarre.
1. I kinda wish 66% of the population were 300 pounds. The infrastructure would change to better suit my body in one big fat hurry.
2. I wish fat suits actually caused the person to weigh what a fat person weighs. Then along with feeling sorry for us for all the discrimination, they might also realize "Gosh, people who weigh 300 pounds must be really strong."
3. There ought to be a game show called "spot the fat suit" where contestants have to guess who's wearing the fat suit and who's the real fat person.
It's so frustrating to see things like this portrayed as though they were valid analogies for fat. Because yes, the fat-suited supermodel always breaks down crying about not wanting this body blah blah, and then TAKES THE SUIT OFF and goes back to being treated "normally," i.e. given special treatment because of her looks. The analogy, of course? All fat people must be weeping inwardly for the thin self that they know is in there somewhere, and they should just zip off that fat and be "normal"! Of course it's a message that people eat up -- schadenfreude, supermodels, and a reminder that you're superior to all those unhappy fatties, who could resist it?
You know, this kind of bullshit "report" always talks about the "everybody ignores me, I feel invisible, people say mean things" stuff....which has *never* been my experience in almost 30 years of being fat. I get way more "nice ass" comments than "fat ass" ones.
And it's a good point that they're going through this change in two seconds, which is no way mirrors how an actual fat person develops and moves through the world, physically and otherwise. Having a body of size is very different than wearing one.
What would really be groundbreaking - though probably not as sensational as models in fat suits - is if they looked at, say, job discrimination or healthcare discrimination or that buy-two-seats crap.
I just detest the idea of us being the recepients of pity, I don't think you need it if you stop buying society's crap and stop hurting yourself through self-hatred. That's what this kind of 'experiement' doesn't tend to bring up. That most of the low self esteem that some fat people complain about is not about being fat, but about the fact that you as a fat person, are encourageed to sell yourself out so much, to think of yourself as innately dishonest and shifty, someone that needs to apologize for being alive etc., how is investing in any of that compatible with self esteem? They don't touch on that, because yet again, it's all about them, not about us. I don't give a damn for their pity, I just want them to shut the hell up and mind their own beeswax.
It would be interesting if there were a 'Supermodel Suit' out there that people could put on. Then we could see the world from a model's point of view. When are they going to start making one of those?
I think the models' point of view gets plenty of play already. How about a Comfy-In-Whatever-Skin-You-Have Suit?
Gaak! That was so friggin' bogus! I think I'll go throw up now.
I caught The Soup last night. Joel McHale, who doles out potshots pretty evenhandedly IMO, had a good one -liner at the end of their treatment of the segment about fat suits...I paraphrase just slightly...
"So when did being a size 22 automatically mean you have bad hair and clothes?"
Wow! You'd think with all the money these people have they would've made more realistic looking fat people. I mean for goodness sake, Harvey Fierstein in Hairspray looked more realistic! and these are at least actual women donning the suit! They also should've gotten clothes that fit them. It was really obvious that it was padding.
I think the only way this fat suit thing would really "work" would be for the celebrities donning the suit to actually then be part of a group of real fat women. Then they'd have to make the person look realistic, otherwise it would be too obvious. You'd see the difference in how a real fat person moves compared to the fake one. So they'd have to make the suit really well designed so the actor could move in it realistically. What they tried to do with these women would only really work if there was one in padding and one real fat person and then the two go out about town. They could then contrast this with the same excursion with the actor sans padding and with a thin person. Then they could show what, if any, difference in experience the actor had being both fat and thin. Or better still, have two thin women go on an excursion about town and then have two fat women go on the same excursion and then see what, if any, differences may have occurred.
I don't have have a problem with people wanting to highlight the differences and discrimination that fat women face, it's when it's done so very badly, as this was, that annoys me. Plus, there will always be the factor that no matter how well the suit is made, that person can never really feel what a real fat person feels, even if they went to the great lengths of adding a bit of padding each week so the actor would not just suddenly have gone from 100 to 300 pounds.