Back in April, 33-year-old plus-size fashion blogger Anna O’Brien made headlines when she publicly complained about security at a Las Vegas hotel. According to O’Brien, she was asked to cover up as she posed for a photo shoot in the hotel’s lobby in her bikini. O’Brien says she had previously obtained permission to do the shoot and that it was her size that caused hotel security to respond the way they did. “Other women were walking around with as much coverage as me and no one said anything to them,” O’Brien said at the time.
Now, O’Brien is at it again, posing in her bikini in New York’s Times Square as part of a “documentary-style shoot” about life after her experience in Las Vegas went viral. But this time, O’Brien wasn’t asked to cover up. In fact, it was quite the opposite. “I was prepared to be pointed at, shamed, and called fat. I didn’t expect to be fetishized,” O’Brien laments in an article for Cosmopolitan. That’s right, folks, according to O’Brien fat shaming is perfectly acceptable. It’s the fact that anyone saw an obese woman standing in Times Square in her underwear as sexual that really offends her.
O’Brien explains, of her intention to do the photo shoot in Times Square, “I wanted to make a statement and I wanted to be seen.” She just wanted to control what people thought when they saw her. On Instagram, O’Brien frequently poses in revealing outfits as a way to normalize plus-size body types and show that real plus-size women are not “perfected and somewhat vanilla.” All this indicates a desire for plus-size women to be treated equally to average-size women and not discriminated against because of their size. Well, O’Brien getting catcalled in Times Square is about as ubiquitous as you can get.
O’Brien describes seeing “two thin, large-busted women, wearing only g-strings and some body paint” who weren’t getting “yelled at.” But surely the fact that they were making “a few dollars selling photos with eager tourists” implies that they, too, were being judged on their sex appeal. I mean, had they not been nearly naked, no one would be approaching them for photos. So, in essence, O’Brien’s experience of being told to “twerk for the camera” (and other lewd remarks) is not much different than the men lining up to put their hands on those topless women.
Now, obviously, making lewd remarks about a woman’s body and what you’d like to do to it — even if she’s standing around in her bikini in Times Square — is a pretty slimy thing to do. But the idea that fat shaming is somehow better than, for lack of a better word, “fat-philia” is insane. As is the idea that average-size (or below-average-size) women don’t get catcalled in Times Square (or all kinds of places). It’s also pretty irrational to assume that the comments made to a hugely overweight woman standing in a public place in her bikini wouldn’t be about her size. O’Brien even acknowledges this, since she was expecting fat shaming. I guess she just finds the idea of someone being sexually attracted to an obese person kind of icky.
Sure, in an ideal world, people wouldn’t make sexual comments about strangers. And, no matter what O’Brien was wearing, had anyone put their hands on her without her permission, they would have been committing a crime. But if you choose to stand around in a very public place with your body exposed, it would be a good idea to have a realistic idea of what might happen. We can’t control other people’s thoughts.
O’Brien says, “I’m more than my body and I deserve respect and human decency.” And this is unequivocally true. But she chose to do something that was about her body and nothing more. Getting upset that people looked at her exposed body and had thoughts about her exposed body is a pretty irrational reaction. You can’t have it both ways. Either the Times Square stunt was about her body, or it wasn’t. O’Brien has got to choose.
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