10.14.2009

Behold the amplitude of Beth Ditto

Look, its not like I think every article about Beth Ditto needs to be all-fat, all-of-the-time. Heck, I don't even trust the notion of a fat accepting celebrity role model given how many have abandoned size acceptance in the past. But it still seems to me that an interview with an unapologetic fat icon should still treat her size with more respect that to reduce it to some weird indirect parenthetical: "Ditto's fabulous amplitude (in every sense)".

Hey, I'm all for coming up with fun and irreverent ways to reference our fat, its just this seems less like a smirking reclamation than dancing around Ditto's size instead of actually talking about it. Its not the first time I've seen a writer pull this trick when talking about Ditto, introducing her weight with some sort of very "kind" way of pointing it out without actually saying anything. I'm so over these kind of decoder-ring-on-the-cheap method of saying "(get it? cuz she's fat)".

She's fat. She uses the word. So can you. Crafting some "clever" method of obliquely pointing it out frankly strikes me as disrespectful given how "out" she is about her body. I'd have hoped a writer focusing on her unapologetically out stance on her sexuality might have figured that out.