Our Fattys, Ourselves

"We don’t call ours stars 'Fatty' anymore, and studios don’t (officially) ban stars from Hollywood. But we do let stars take on our personal anxieties, and shun them when they fail to embody them in ways that please us. We blind ourselves to corporate machinations that allow individuals to take the fall, and we make it easy to associate outsized bodies with the grotesque. Libel laws are more stringent these days, and stars are, in general, more circumspect. But I’m still terrified by what humans are eager to believe of one another, especially when class, gender, and body size intersect." [The Hairpin]