The Trailer for Netflix's "Insatiable" Is Being Criticized for Fat-Shaming Women
It reflects all the stereotypes people already have about fat women.
Claire Dodson Jul 20, 2018 5:09PM EDT
In this op-ed, entertainment news editor Claire Dodson unpacks why people are upset about the trailer for Netflix's new show Insatiable, and examines the ways society turns fat people into a punchline without the help of a comedy series.
Earlier this week, the trailer for Netflix’s upcoming comedy series Insatiable premiered on this very website. As a fat person, it was hard to watch the trailer and not have some feelings about the portrayal of a fat teenager named Patty (played by the not fat Debby Ryan, donning a truly ridiculous fat suit for part of the role) who then loses the weight to ostensibly become a beauty queen. Those feelings were shared by some viewers almost immediately after the trailer came out. People on Twitter began criticizing the trailer for the way it appeared to perpetuate problematic tropes about weight loss.
The plot of Insatiable is outrageous: Patty is bullied at her high school for being fat until she’s punched in the face by a homeless man (over a candy bar, because FAT!) and is then forced to have her jaw wired shut while she heals, unable to eat. When she finally emerges from her accident, she is skinny and bent on exacting revenge on everyone who has wronged her. It is a “revenge body” fantasy and it’s probably supposed to be sarcastic, but it’s also the most tired and done-to-death story about a fat girl who gets skinny to exact revenge.
As a result, people are calling for the show’s cancellation.
One person wrote that, based on the trailer, Insatiable “promotes fat-shaming, teaches young people that if you don’t eat, you’ll become skinny and desirable, romanticizes revenge fantasies, and shows that you’re only deserving of love and popularity if you fall into society’s definition of beauty.” Another person criticized the “before and after” dynamic: “Fat girls are not your before. fat girls are not your torture porn. fat girls are so much more than whatever the f*ck this bullsh*t is @netflix @insatiable.” Comedian and writer Avery Edison wrote, “You don’t get to defend any part of your show as ‘body positive’ if a single second of it features an actor in a fat suit.” And a scholar and activist who studies fat stigma wrote, “I can unequivocally say that this series will do serious damage to the lives of fat teenagers who may watch the show.”
Systemic fat-shaming literally puts the lives of fat people at stake. It’s documented that fat people receive worse medical care — the New York Times has reported that many hospitals don’t have equipment for heavier people, and that doctors are more likely to blame a fat person’s illness on their weight than look for underlying causes. Fat people are also discriminated against in everything from dating to clothing to the job market — and the law doesn’t actually protect people from being fired for their weight, either. Our society needs to be held accountable for how it treats fat people, and it’s understandable if some of these wounds are too recent for people to necessarily find humor in them.
I’ll admit, the show also strikes a very specific chord with me because I share a first name with Patty. I was named for my grandmother, but “Patricia,” unfortunately, is also disproportionately used as a name for fat characters on screen. I remember sitting in the theater during Pitch Perfect as a high-schooler, next to a group of my thin friends, when it was revealed that “Fat Amy” (played by Rebel Wilson) had been lying about her name: it was actually “Fat Patricia.”
I was so mortified then, as a typically insecure teenager, that I cried silently in the movie row, trying to disguise my reaction from my friends, who all of course knew my first name. It didn’t matter that Rebel’s character tries to promote body positivity, that she takes ownership of the name as a defense against being insulted: her arc was always, always centered around her weight. (Don’t even ask me about my reaction when I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time: “Claire is a fat girl’s name.”)
Insatiable seemingly takes its cue from a line of other movies and TV shows with fat female characters, including Pitch Perfect, the critically-acclaimed This Is Us, and countless other narratives that focus solely on a fat woman’s body when they talk about her personality. Early on in the trailer, Patty says, “While my classmates were out losing their virginity, I was at home stuffing another hole. Every day I wondered, how much more of this could I take?” When she makes her grand, glorious entrance in school, her friend comments, “This is like every great high school movie ever made.”
And it is. Patty’s monologue in the trailer reflects all the stereotypes people have about fat women: that we can’t be hot, that we must eat constantly, that we don’t have sex, that all we think about is losing weight (or that, if we think about other things, all we SHOULD be thinking about is losing weight).
In response to the intense backlash to the show, Alyssa Milano, who plays a character on the show, defended what she believes to be the purity of its purpose on Twitter, saying, “We are not shaming Patty. We are addressing (through comedy) the damage that occurs from fat shaming. I hope that clears it up.”
Creator Lauren Gussis told Teen Vogue that the show is based on a lot of her personal experiences as “a bullied teenager,” which I’m sure is validating for her and her personal history. And a trailer is short, and sometimes lacks the necessary context for a larger conversation; it’s hard to say if it was an act of poor editing, but the punchlines in the clip, rather than undo stereotypes, appear to reinforce them.
Good satire should punch up, it should grapple with the unseen and force us to face our demons. And yes, it should make us uncomfortable (which the Insatiable trailer certainly does) but not to reinforce experiences and people that have already been excluded from most television. There is nothing subversive about depicting a fat woman as depressed and unlovable only to be the center of attention when she finally loses the weight.
Watching the trailer reminded me of the recent fervor around another Netflix show, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which has been praised for the way it discusses the trauma queer people face. Hannah talks about the burden marginalized people feel to make their experiences palatable in comedy, funny without being so uncomfortable that the audience can’t stand it.
BuzzFeed News writer Shannon Keating recently wrote on the subject, “Watching Nanette made me question the way queer people tell our darkest stories, and who we’re telling them for. Namely, how often are we either sensationalizing these experiences, or else downplaying them and making jokes, worried that what we’ve gone through isn’t traumatic enough to merit more than a passing mention? Tragedy of all kinds is usually centered in the queer stories we do see, particularly in the mainstream, and not for nothing — for so many of us, our identities were formed in times of trauma. But what would it mean if the stories we told about ourselves weren’t focused on the worst things that have ever happened to us?”
In her Teen Vogue interview, Lauren again reiterated her own experiences, saying, “Hopefully a lot of people through the laughter will be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m laughing because I relate. I’m not laughing at, I’m laughing with.’”
Regardless of the reason, bodies like mine are still the punchline. Perhaps it would be more useful to address the systemic oppression before we start making even more jokes, especially because we already know those won’t solve the problem.
https://via.hypothes.is/https://www...ler-is-being-criticized-for-fat-shaming-women
It reflects all the stereotypes people already have about fat women.
Claire Dodson Jul 20, 2018 5:09PM EDT
In this op-ed, entertainment news editor Claire Dodson unpacks why people are upset about the trailer for Netflix's new show Insatiable, and examines the ways society turns fat people into a punchline without the help of a comedy series.
Earlier this week, the trailer for Netflix’s upcoming comedy series Insatiable premiered on this very website. As a fat person, it was hard to watch the trailer and not have some feelings about the portrayal of a fat teenager named Patty (played by the not fat Debby Ryan, donning a truly ridiculous fat suit for part of the role) who then loses the weight to ostensibly become a beauty queen. Those feelings were shared by some viewers almost immediately after the trailer came out. People on Twitter began criticizing the trailer for the way it appeared to perpetuate problematic tropes about weight loss.
The plot of Insatiable is outrageous: Patty is bullied at her high school for being fat until she’s punched in the face by a homeless man (over a candy bar, because FAT!) and is then forced to have her jaw wired shut while she heals, unable to eat. When she finally emerges from her accident, she is skinny and bent on exacting revenge on everyone who has wronged her. It is a “revenge body” fantasy and it’s probably supposed to be sarcastic, but it’s also the most tired and done-to-death story about a fat girl who gets skinny to exact revenge.
As a result, people are calling for the show’s cancellation.
One person wrote that, based on the trailer, Insatiable “promotes fat-shaming, teaches young people that if you don’t eat, you’ll become skinny and desirable, romanticizes revenge fantasies, and shows that you’re only deserving of love and popularity if you fall into society’s definition of beauty.” Another person criticized the “before and after” dynamic: “Fat girls are not your before. fat girls are not your torture porn. fat girls are so much more than whatever the f*ck this bullsh*t is @netflix @insatiable.” Comedian and writer Avery Edison wrote, “You don’t get to defend any part of your show as ‘body positive’ if a single second of it features an actor in a fat suit.” And a scholar and activist who studies fat stigma wrote, “I can unequivocally say that this series will do serious damage to the lives of fat teenagers who may watch the show.”
Systemic fat-shaming literally puts the lives of fat people at stake. It’s documented that fat people receive worse medical care — the New York Times has reported that many hospitals don’t have equipment for heavier people, and that doctors are more likely to blame a fat person’s illness on their weight than look for underlying causes. Fat people are also discriminated against in everything from dating to clothing to the job market — and the law doesn’t actually protect people from being fired for their weight, either. Our society needs to be held accountable for how it treats fat people, and it’s understandable if some of these wounds are too recent for people to necessarily find humor in them.
I’ll admit, the show also strikes a very specific chord with me because I share a first name with Patty. I was named for my grandmother, but “Patricia,” unfortunately, is also disproportionately used as a name for fat characters on screen. I remember sitting in the theater during Pitch Perfect as a high-schooler, next to a group of my thin friends, when it was revealed that “Fat Amy” (played by Rebel Wilson) had been lying about her name: it was actually “Fat Patricia.”
I was so mortified then, as a typically insecure teenager, that I cried silently in the movie row, trying to disguise my reaction from my friends, who all of course knew my first name. It didn’t matter that Rebel’s character tries to promote body positivity, that she takes ownership of the name as a defense against being insulted: her arc was always, always centered around her weight. (Don’t even ask me about my reaction when I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time: “Claire is a fat girl’s name.”)
Insatiable seemingly takes its cue from a line of other movies and TV shows with fat female characters, including Pitch Perfect, the critically-acclaimed This Is Us, and countless other narratives that focus solely on a fat woman’s body when they talk about her personality. Early on in the trailer, Patty says, “While my classmates were out losing their virginity, I was at home stuffing another hole. Every day I wondered, how much more of this could I take?” When she makes her grand, glorious entrance in school, her friend comments, “This is like every great high school movie ever made.”
And it is. Patty’s monologue in the trailer reflects all the stereotypes people have about fat women: that we can’t be hot, that we must eat constantly, that we don’t have sex, that all we think about is losing weight (or that, if we think about other things, all we SHOULD be thinking about is losing weight).
In response to the intense backlash to the show, Alyssa Milano, who plays a character on the show, defended what she believes to be the purity of its purpose on Twitter, saying, “We are not shaming Patty. We are addressing (through comedy) the damage that occurs from fat shaming. I hope that clears it up.”
Creator Lauren Gussis told Teen Vogue that the show is based on a lot of her personal experiences as “a bullied teenager,” which I’m sure is validating for her and her personal history. And a trailer is short, and sometimes lacks the necessary context for a larger conversation; it’s hard to say if it was an act of poor editing, but the punchlines in the clip, rather than undo stereotypes, appear to reinforce them.
Good satire should punch up, it should grapple with the unseen and force us to face our demons. And yes, it should make us uncomfortable (which the Insatiable trailer certainly does) but not to reinforce experiences and people that have already been excluded from most television. There is nothing subversive about depicting a fat woman as depressed and unlovable only to be the center of attention when she finally loses the weight.
Watching the trailer reminded me of the recent fervor around another Netflix show, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which has been praised for the way it discusses the trauma queer people face. Hannah talks about the burden marginalized people feel to make their experiences palatable in comedy, funny without being so uncomfortable that the audience can’t stand it.
BuzzFeed News writer Shannon Keating recently wrote on the subject, “Watching Nanette made me question the way queer people tell our darkest stories, and who we’re telling them for. Namely, how often are we either sensationalizing these experiences, or else downplaying them and making jokes, worried that what we’ve gone through isn’t traumatic enough to merit more than a passing mention? Tragedy of all kinds is usually centered in the queer stories we do see, particularly in the mainstream, and not for nothing — for so many of us, our identities were formed in times of trauma. But what would it mean if the stories we told about ourselves weren’t focused on the worst things that have ever happened to us?”
In her Teen Vogue interview, Lauren again reiterated her own experiences, saying, “Hopefully a lot of people through the laughter will be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m laughing because I relate. I’m not laughing at, I’m laughing with.’”
Regardless of the reason, bodies like mine are still the punchline. Perhaps it would be more useful to address the systemic oppression before we start making even more jokes, especially because we already know those won’t solve the problem.
https://via.hypothes.is/https://www...ler-is-being-criticized-for-fat-shaming-women
