“Beauty treated like a beast”: The backlash against Donald Trump’s fat shaming of Alicia Machado shows how deep our fat phobia goes
In the final moments of the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton turned to her rival — a man who had interrupted her at least 51 times in an hour and a half — and called him out for smearing women as “pigs” and “dogs” and specifically for referring to Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, as “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.”
When that happened, I texted to a friend that this was Donald Trump’s “Ezekiel 25:17 moment.” That, according to Jules Winnfield, refers to when the “Pulp Fiction” hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson delivers that infamous verse about righteousness: “If you heard it, that meant your ass.”
And it has meant Trump’s ass — at least with the mainstream media and broad swaths of voters. Within 48 hours of the debate, Machado was mentioned in more than 150 print articles, more than 6,023 times on television and over 200,000 times on Twitter. After the debate, Democratic nominee Clinton has been edging up in polls from some much ballyhooed battleground states.
In a week that saw its share of potential scandals — including reports of legal inquiries into the Republican candidate’s charitable organization, the Donald J. Trump Foundation — the story of Trump in his capacity as then-owner of the Miss Universe pageant forcing Machado to jump rope in front of reporters as he quipped, “This is somebody who likes to eat,” took root more deeply than any other.
Headlines like “15 Times Donald Trump Fat-Shamed Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and More” and “400 Pound Hacker? Trump Comments Fuel Dialogue on Fat-Shaming,” in reference to Trump’s observation during the debate that threats against “the cyber” might not come from Russia but “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds” have arguably eclipsed allegations that he violated the Cuba business embargo.
Then again, the intensity of these reactions should not be surprising, given our culture’s neurotic fixation with weight — one that forces every woman through a crucible of fashion spreads and movie babes and fitness stars and, yes, TV beauty pageants that create the illusion of a Zen-like, aspirational state of thinness that conveys beauty and grace, love and empowerment and perfect health.
Watching the video footage of a young Machado doing aerobics as the flashbulbs pop, her face drawn into a taut mask of forced buoyancy, I remembered the heat in my cheeks when the boys on the playground pelted me with small pebbles, shrieking “Free Willy!” And I recalled when my crush from fifth-period biology class got on one knee to ask me to homecoming and how, for a moment, I was electric with hope until, of course, I heard his friends snickering. And I remembered when the catcaller in front of my office yelled, “Damn, you sure do love to eat!”
I can imagine what Machado might have been thinking as Trump told the throng of camera people that “she went up to 160 or 170” pounds, with the disgusted solemnity of a scientist in a horror movie, explaining how radioactive waste created the monster: Don’t cry, don’t break, don’t let them know that they’ve hurt you.
But they do hurt you and badly. Like Machado and more than 30 million people in the U.S., I strapped myself to a breaking wheel of binging and purging, starving and popping pills, until I was ground down to pulp and bone. To reclaim my life, I had to armor my heart against a culture that reviles my body, a culture that finds its megalomaniacal megaphone in Donald Trump and his crusade against the “Miss Piggies.”
The daily barrage of Trump-isms about fatness is deeply triggering. And yet one could argue that the media coverage indicates a crucial shift in how we think or at least what we’re allowed to say about bodies and size: The blitzkrieg of outraged think pieces, indignant headlines and incredulous TV hosts — including the crew at “Fox & Friends” who sat in slack-jawed horror as Trump doubled down on his size bigotry after the debate, reiterating that Machado’s “massive” weight gain was “a real problem” — is light-years away from that 1997 media scrum that turned the young woman jumping rope under the hot lights into a dancing bear. I want so badly to believe that the frothed-up news and entertainment industry — as well as the furious anger spreading across social media — indicates a real change.
So much of this change, however, seems focused on insulating Machado and other Trump targets like fellow Miss Universe contestants or Kim Kardashian from being besmirched as actual fatties. At 160 to 170 pounds, Machado was actually at the goal weight I broke myself to achieve, only to fall short of. She was then, as she is now, thinner than many American women. As Sarai Walker, writing for the Washington Post, put it, “This is a story about a woman who was ‘called fat,’ in this case a thin woman. This is not a story about a fat woman.”
Though Trump has repeatedly and expressly mentioned his sizeist scorched-earth campaign against Rosie O’Donnell, she is not a beauty queen and hasn’t apparently merited the same degree of attention or sympathy. So I highly doubt that the electorate would have rode out White Knight-style against Trump’s debate-night fat shaming if that shaming happened to, say, a former employee who looks like me: size 26, with hips that spread whenever I sit down.
Source
http://www.salon.com/2016/10/04/beauty-treated-like-a-beast-the-backlash-against-donald-trumps-fat-shaming-of-alicia-machado-shows-how-deep-our-fat-phobia-goes/#comments/