Dear Kate Moss,
Everyone's up in arms because of a news report that's doing the rounds. In this report you are supposed to have said: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Someone on my Facebook feed called you a cunt, but they've never met you, how would they know what you're like?
I think 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' is an asinine expression, it's beyond moronic, but the anger being directed at you for allegedly saying it is misplaced. It's a well-known slogan that was popularised years ago by diet companies such as Weight Watchers. These companies turned into global multinationals that profit massively from instilling and maintaining body hatred, sometimes through slogans just like this. It is them that people should be enraged with, not you.
I think people should also get angrier with the media. There are, to my mind rather facile, arguments about 'negative images' or 'Size Zero' or 'media bombardment' but little concern about the extent to which the media propagates lies. Maybe no-one could believe that lying could take place on such a scale, or that what they believe to be true is actually nothing of the kind.
I know that the papers lie about you. You're there, a massive cultural icon, but you rarely say anything in public so they have to make up things about you to put in their paper, which your body and mythology helps sell for them. I saw this happen at the Evans launch last summer. What I saw was not what was reported, stupid things, like the song you sang and the people you sang with, were reported differently.
So there are lies, and there are also clichés and stereotypes. These are the bread and butter of the popular media. They are well-worn things that people can recognise easily. Many journalists use clichés and stereotypes as a basis for a story. There are many clichés about you, and about modelling and also about fashion, the worlds you know best. Sometimes there is some truth to a claim, but a cliché or a stereotype is not a truth at all. The papers try and force clichés on things that are much too complicated to be reduced in that way because they are unable to deal with human complexity or nuance, or subtlety.
One cliché that has attached itself to you over the years is that because you are skinny you must hate fatness. Skinny must hate fat. This is not true, it is a pernicious and destructive lie. The papers deal in clichés, but you are not a cliché, what you are perceived to represent is not what or who you are.
I know that you championed Beth D and helped get her a fashion deal, that is pro-fat, even though the press tried to pitch you against her as fat vs skinny enemies. You did donut hands with me at Beth's party and told me I looked amazing. That is pro-fat. You posed for pictures with my big fat mannish dyke of a girlfriend, you did Blue Steel with her! That is pro-fat, and beautiful. I know you don't hate fat people because I have seen you digging us and I have enough of a radar to know when people's tolerance of me and my kind is false. I met you in queer fat space and I know you loved it and were at home there. I don't know what was said and how it came to be reported as it did, but I know you do not hate fat people, I know you are a friend to us, and I know you can see coolness and amazingness in all kinds of body shapes.
Ten years ago, when my book Fat & Proud was published, a journalist asked me what I thought of you. They were trying to get me to agree with the popular line at the time that Heroin Chic was a bad deal and that it was evidence that you hated fat people and were therefore my enemy. But the thing is, I love those pictures! The journalist tried to make out that Dawn French, the only fat celebrity at the time, would be my preferred role model, but that wasn't true and I said I'd choose you over her if I had to. Fat people don't hate skinny people either.
You work in an industry that hates a lot of things, including fatness, and ageing, which you yourself are now feeling the brunt of even though you're young. I hope your friend Anita Pallenberg, an amazing role model for getting older, is coaching you through this, and I hope Beth is on the phone to you too.
Yours,
Charlotte
14 comments:
it's interesting that in the last two days there's been two stories which have pitted skinny Vs fat or skinny vs curvy. The other was Cindy Crawford 'saying' women should stop buying magazines if they don't want to see skinny models. What these stories fail to see and show (not shockingly) are the complexities involved here. It's not black and white, it's not binary oppositions, it is complex, ambivalent, confusing and all bound up in similar parts of the body size discourse. What they also fail to get is that in reporting these stories in this way they are just perpetuating the very thing they pretend to be protesting. And also, of course, they'll pad their pages with countless obesity stories about how fat people can't help themselves but be out of control pigs.
Yep.
Absolutely fucking spot-on. The businesses that profit from dieting and body fascism are where we need to be directing our anger. Allowing the media to gleefully pitch us all against each other lets the real oppressors off the hook.
Thanks Holly.
I would much rather Kate Moss be honest about her disordered relationship with food than to insist that she eats a healthy, balanced diet and is naturally underweight.
How do you know she has a disordered relationship with food?
According to the BBC, she added, "That's one of them. You try and remember, but it never works."
I can completely believe that the "nothing tastes..." is one of her mottos. After all, she makes a living by being thin (and doesn't make a living when she isn't.)
And I think that cognitive dissonance is in play here, more than likely, in that I just don't think Ms. Moss made the connection between the personal (as she was asked for the mottos by which she lives) and the political.
I've seen too many people say things like, "I'm not saying you should diet. I'm just saying that I don't look good fat."
It bothers me that people are taking the quote out of context. She was asked what her mottos are. This was her full response:
“There are loads,” she told the site of her mottos. “There’s, ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’ That’s one of them. You try and remember, but it never works.”
To me, it does make a difference that she qualifies the quote by saying that it's basically futile to tell yourself that nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels. I'm not saying Kate Moss is some paragon of size acceptance, but she at least deserves to be quoted correctly.
I suspect that whatever you read about Kate Moss in the papers is made up rubbish.
T H A N K Y O U.
Honestly, I'm not Kate Moss' biggest fan, but I think this whole hoopla is utterly ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical. I think journalists are more to blame to whipping up the "obesity pandemic" (epidemic isn't threatening enough any more)then even weight loss companies now. It doesn't help that they're a breed of people who believe all people should be held accountable for what they say - except themselves.
How do you know she has a disordered relationship with food?
I think that anyone who claims to have "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels" as her personal motto clearly harbors at least a degree of disordered eating.
Your comment makes me wonder if you've understood this post.
I'm at a point now where I believe almost nothing in the popular media about celebrities. Kate Moss sounds like a lovely person from your description, I glad to know she's fat positive.
Really great post - thank you!
I. Love.YOU! I do not think that a response to this could have ever been put better! I rad this was perplexed, irritated, frustrated and then I met you. I love you!
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