Cosmopolitan Magazine is under fire for Anna Breslaw’s June 12 post “Female Celebrities Who Insist They’re Not Fat Are Part of the Problem.”
Fans are firing back under the comment section, all agreeing the article is offensive.
So what’s the problem here?
To begin, the article criticizes actress Allison Tolman for proclaiming on Twitter that she is not fat. Well if she wants to correct people for defining her size on the public forum that Twitter is, there really is no issue to it.
Second, Breslaw’s argument is that though Tolman notes that women shouldn’t be judged by their size, she says “I’m not fat,” and that somehow negates her argument……No. No, Breslaw, it doesn’t. It means she can dispute whatever people say about her body. She can say she isn’t fat, and still maintain that women shouldn’t be judged on their size.
It’s the same as a person saying people shouldn’t be judged by race, and still correcting someone when they misidentify them with another race. I can say we shouldn’t judge people and then add, “I’m not Hispanic,” after someone called me one, without that being an insult to Hispanics. It’s not at all, it’s just clarification because I, indeed, am not Hispanic. Tolman doesn’t attack fat people, she has every right to identify herself as the person she is.
So Breslaw, it’s actually posts like that that are part of the problem. It’s posts that attack people for defending their own size that put the emphasis on the weight of women. It’s posts that blame a woman for defining herself as “average,” that make people judge more on the line between thin and large.
There’s no reason for those. There was no reason for Breslaw to attack Tolman because she solidified the world of judgement on size more than Tolman ever did on Twitter. Society shouldn’t claim issues with weight, whether someone is small or large. That’s their personal health issue, not one for Cosmo’s critique, not one for their solidification, and certainly not one for them to claim someone turned into an issue when their response was self defense.
So Cosmo, if I tweet “I’m not fat,” will there be backlash with that? I may not be famous, but I guarantee people won’t be saying that the tweet causes an issue with weight.
Cosmo, you caused the issue more by writing about it than Tolman did by correcting people who were categorizing her size.
Mistry Solved 