Professional troll Piers Morgan decided that his opinion on a woman’s body was necessary when he took shots at Cosmo UK’s recent cover model, Tess Holliday, for a plus-sized and fabulous cover.
In his Instagram post, Morgan said: “As Britain battles an ever-worsening obesity crisis, this is the new cover of Cosmo. Apparently, we’re supposed to view it as a ‘huge step forward for body positivity.’ What a load of old baloney. This cover is just as dangerous & misguided as celebrating size zero models.”
Ah, the old: “I’m just worried about your health bit.” Maybe Morgan literally missed the part of the cover where Holliday asks haters to kiss her ass.
Holliday responded, according to TMZ, saying: “To everyone saying I’m a burden to the British health care system, I’m American so you don’t have to worry about my fat ass. Worry about what horrible people you are by whining about how me being on the cover of a glossy magazine impacts your small minded life.”
Look, everyone’s relationship with their body is different. There are some women who love their size and feel empowered by showing it off and doing their thing; at the same time there are women unhappy with their bodies for any number of reasons. Welcome to being a woman. What we need not do, as a society, is act as though people really are concerned about “health” when they are talking about fat people, especially fat women.
Because we know that you don’t really care. We know you don’t really care because you don’t walk around skinnier women asking if they are that weight because they work out and eat right, you just assume that being a certain size equals health. Plenty of actresses have talked about starving themselves for roles and being malnourished during a performance only to be told they look “great” by mainstream audiences.
Anne Hathaway talked about this with Les Miserables where she lost 25 lbs to play the role of Fantine and then, of course, getting asked how much weight she lost to fit into the Catsuit for The Dark Knight Rises as Selena Kyle. Watching interviews from that era it is all she gets asked about only for people to go “but you look great already.” Yeah, that’s the issue.
It is sad to watch her have to explain that the weight loss wasn’t so “Fatine would look hot” but to show the character’s health decline.
Rosario Dawson in Shape Magazine years ago talked about how she was complimented for looking good in RENT when she was emaciated:
“It’s s a form of violence, in the way that we look at women and how we expect them to look and be — for what sake? Not health, not survival, not enjoyment of life but just so you could look pretty,” the Zookeeper star tells Shape. “I’m constantly telling girls all the time, ‘Everything’s airbrushed, everything’s retouched. None of us look like that.'”
She said she had to lose a lot of weight in 2005 to play an HIV-positive drug addict in Rent — and was shocked when people told her how great she looked.
“I remember everyone asking when I was doing press for the movie, ‘What did you do to look so thin? You looked great,’ and I’m like, ‘I looked emaciated,'” she said.
When Rihanna first gained a little weight people called her fat; every time an actress eats a full meal she is asked if she is pregnant. No one is concerned for the health of actors when they go through intense weight loss regiments, but the moment they put in weight it is a health crisis. When actresses gain weight, like Charlize Theron in Tully as a recent example is shows how “dedicated” they are that they would make themselves fat for a film. A true artist.
If you really cared about the health of people, you’d think about their mental health and realize that there is nothing negative that you can tell a person about their body that they haven’t already told themselves.
(via TMZ, image: Cosmo UK/Edited by Author)
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