Cosmopolitan cover model inspires women, exposes critics’ hypocrisy

Why can’t fat models make Page One without controversy?

I have good news and more good news. The first item is that though print media faces extinction, a magazine cover can still turn heads and change minds.

The second item concerns the subject of that magazine cover. She isn’t a gaunt runway model or an actress whose otherwise generous thighs have been shaved down into matchsticks via airbrushing.

She’s a very fat, very beautiful American model named Tess Holliday and she appears on the October cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, the U.K. edition.

Holliday, an early advocate of the “body positivity” movement and founder of the popular hashtag #effyourbeautystandards, appears on said cover in a one-piece bathing suit, blowing a kiss.

The image has gone viral inspiring praise from women old enough to remember a time in not so distant history when beauty magazines didn’t promote self esteem but rather, dangerous, diarrheainducing diets.

But women’s magazines from Cosmo to Teen Vogue have changed a great deal in the last 10 years, embracing progressive politics and a diverse roster of models.

And yet a fat woman still can’t appear on a magazine cover without controversy.

Some say she can’t appear anywhere without controversy, she is so loathed by a culture that claims to care deeply about her health but sniggers and scolds when she wears shorts, goes to the gym and poses for a fashion shoot.

Here’s Piers Morgan on his personal Instagram page this week, echoing thousands of similar statements made on social media reprimanding Cosmo for featuring Holliday in its pages.

“As Britain battles an ever-worsening obesity crisis, this is the new cover of Cosmo. Apparently we’re supposed to view it as a ‘huge step forward for body positivity.’ What a load of old baloney. This cover is just as dangerous & misguided as celebrating size zero models.”

Funny, I don’t recall Morgan objecting so vociferously when DJ Khaled, another celebrity of considerable size, appeared on the covers of various pop culture magazines in recent years.

I don’t recall Morgan accusing Khaled of promoting obesity for merely existing. But why would he? DJ Khaled is a guy, and Morgan’s problem isn’t with fat guys, it’s with fat women, specifically fat women who refuse to hate themselves.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, go online and observe the uniquely toxic brand of cruelty directed at Holliday and other female plus-size models.

This is presumably one of the reasons Holliday started a body positivity campaign because, where public perception is concerned, women of size are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Here she is talking to Cosmo:

“I created the campaign out of frustration. I was angry and sad that people kept commenting on my pictures saying, ‘You’re too fat to wear that!’ or ‘Cover up! No one wants to see that!’ And then one night I was lying in bed and thought, ‘F*ck that!’ So I posted an image with four photographs of myself wearing things that fat women are often told we ‘can’t wear’ and encouraged others to do the same.”

And they did. Today the body positivity movement is massive and growing. But it’s also grossly misunderstood.

There is a popular argument among the Piers Morgans of the world that body positivity promotes obesity; that fat women who have the confidence to wear the same clothes as thin women — shorts, dresses, bikinis — are by their very presence in the world an affront to health.

Not only is this point of view extremely unkind, it’s plain wrong.

No one who advocates body positivity is opposed to healthy diet and exercise.

The message here isn’t don’t work out and don’t be healthy. The message, as I understand it, is this: Love yourself as you are, not only as you wish to be.

There’s no law that says a woman has to hate her body. Holliday’s presence on the cover of Cosmo is a reminder of this.

And if you don’t think teenage girls are in need of such a reminder, you’re full of it.