Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists were trying to frantically deduce how the disease was spreading, when we were rushing to buy masks and figuring out which “essential” businesses were still open, director Taika Waititi offered what would be one of many problematic celebrity takes.
As deaths climbed and hospitals became short on ventilators, he suggested that the pandemic was “the perfect opportunity to get motivated, workout and come out of this absolutely shredded.”
Three days earlier, actor Vanessa Hudgens also dismissed the dangers of the virus, saying that “even if everybody gets it, like yea, people are going to die, which is terrible, but like inevitable.” Both statements became defining views of the pandemic for many: that the most vulnerable of us should be left dead, particularly if you were disabled and especially if you were fat.
“During the pandemic, we heard over and over and over again that the people who are most susceptible to COVID are fat people or people with preexisting conditions or people with diabetes and diseases that we normally associate with being fat,” said Imani Barbarin, a writer, public speaker and disabled advocate. “We became extremely obsessed with who has the ‘perfect body’ or, rather, who’s genetically superior. This is kind of like saying, ‘I am worth living and I don’t care because I’m not one of the worthless people that are susceptible to dying.’”
“To me, personally, that stuff is always going to exist,” Barbarin continued. “I hope it goes away. But we live in America where people live on a currency of attractiveness. And thinness.”
We are in an annoying-ass time loop — for all the strides we’ve made talking about body positivity and calling out fat-shaming, the pandemic made it clear that fat bodies are still seen as expendable and undesirable. Fatphobia never went away — it’s been here all along.
Perhaps that’s why I was especially disturbed by a piece in the…
Read the full article here
