To Comedy Central's feedback, after seeing Blue Collar TV last night with a
skit showing a fat-suited "feeder family". It was of course a caricature,
but it was an interesting bit of reverse irony, the parents expressing
concern about their daughter engaging in dieting and "wasting away", then
resolving to go out together for a "supersize weekend". Certainly through
the humor the message came through that compulsive dieting is not a very
healthy thing, though the parents were also discouraging her from
exercising, which brought feederism to mind. So I wrote the following to
their feedback form.
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I caught last night's show, and having just come back from the NAAFA
national convention in Newark, I wanted to give you some feedback about the
fat family skit. I thought the premise was pretty cute, kind of an extreme
caricature of what NAAFA is about, as we're into promoting health and
self-empowerment in fat people without so much emphasis on losing weight.
There actually is a small subset of people we call "feeders" who act like
those characters, but most of us actually want fat people to exercise, just
not for weight loss.
One thing that has always perturbed me, and where we might be able to
engage in some collaboration, is having thin actors wearing fat suits.
There are plenty of people who in real life are as large as the characters
you constructed artificially, who are very talented and outgoing and find
entertaining and humorous ways of getting out our message. In fact NAAFA
had a demonstration in St Vartans Park in Manhattan on Friday for health at
any size, in which the leader wearing an outrageous pink dress and feather
boa declared her independence from the diet industry, fat radical
cheerleaders sang about crushing capitalism, and everyone was invited to
step on "yay scales", reworked to provide uplifting words instead of
numbers, like "fine", "divine", etc. Perhaps you could do a recreation of
that rally using some of the REAL fat people and friends who were there!
I have worked hard, played hard, and made wild passionate love to fat women
for much of my life, so there's no way you're going to put a suit on a thin
woman and fool me. The mechanics of motion are just not there. Still, you
did a pretty good job on the shape with the daughter, and it gave me a lot
of pleasant flashbacks of the conference last week, talking and swimming
and dancing with a number of sexy women of that exact size and shape you
were representing. Just as the blackface has largely been abandoned, the
"fatface" should be as well. Some of us guys absolutely got love for the
fat chicks, and prefer to be un-drunk and possessed of all our senses when
one is in the back seat. Give us some love too y'all! Get some REAL fat
gals on your show and let their beauty speak for itself! They do have a
sense of humor about themselves, they just like to have a hand in where the
humor goes.