Skinny: fat-positive?
So the big buzz on Fatshionista, which has also made the round at the BFB forums, is the video “Skinny” by Lo-Rider. The video’s not 100% work safe, so it’s under a cut at the end of the post.
I agree that it’s nice to see something different in the way of sexuality - the women in the video aren’t just size 2 or 4 or 6, and they don’t cap out at the 12 that mainstream media usually uses to portray a “sexy plus-size” - like Callie of Grey’s Anatomy, who at a size 10 is considered by many to be plus-size for television.
However, and here’s where I start to be the angry feminist (which, hey, I’m okay with, because it does make me kind of angry) - why is there no discussion about how, while the video is somewhat size-affirming, it’s not exactly pro-woman? The women in the video are all featured in lingerie doing domestic work - ironing, vacuuming, washing clothes and cleaning a window. The women are synonymous with the equipment in the video; is it the model, or the iron that has “variable moisture control” and “outstanding design”? Is it the woman, or the washer that is a “laundry cleaning machine”? I can’t help thinking that if it were a bunch of skinny women, there’d be feminist outrage over the portrayal of these women, but because they’re fat women we’ll ignore the dehumanization because, hey, it’s great to see someone finally portraying sexy fat women.
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The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
Ew, ew, ew.
I had a totally different reading of the video right up till the end with the two guys popping out of nowhere looking bemused/amused/however mused they were. Yes, the words were absolutely about the women as well as the appliances, but you could read that as an inversion of both the typical “women’s work” idea and porn. So, they’re sexy, but they’re distant and occupied. And they’re occupied, but not really - or rather, they’re occupied with their own sexuality, not with work. There’s room to declare an awful lot of that video purely ironic and possibly empowering as a result. That possibility would still exist if the women were any size, but because fat women expressing sexuality is automatically read as revolutionary/transgressive/whatevah, I was inclined to read the whole video as sorta porn-making-fun-of-stereotype.
But the dudes? Somehow, capping the whole thing off with them takes all the ambiguity out of it. It’s like “fat women, being sexy… tee hee”. It turns the message into making fun of the fat chick for me.
[…] chores in skimpy lingerie while apparently getting off on it. I’ve already commented in another post about my problems with this video, so I won’t really go into them in depth […]