Shame they didn’t think of the backlash
As the 71-year-old woman undressed in an LA Fitness locker room, she had no idea she was being photographed. The photographer — Playboy model Dani Mathers, in the foreground of the shot, feigning shock in the selfie — posted the image on social media in 2016 with the following catty comment: “If I can’t unsee this you can’t either.” Well. Turns out few found Mathers’s public ridicule of another woman’s body as hilarious as she did.
For starters, LA Fitness revoked her membership and banned her from all of their gym locations. Playboy suspended her. A local Los Angeles radio station fired her from a recurring spot she had on air.
Police investigated. Charges were laid. And the case is still not over, even though in May of this year, Mathers — now 30 — pleaded no contest to misdemeanour invasion of privacy. That came with three years’ probation and community service to clean graffiti in lieu of jail time.
Social media scorched Mathers as being a vain jerk for posting the photo on Snapchat for all to see.
Though body shaming is not new, Mathers’s creepy stunt arguably amplified the backlash to it across social media. This year, celebrities such as singers Kelly Clarkson and Rihanna — both picked on publicly — led crowd pushbacks and ignited body-shaming discussions.
Just two months after Mathers’ conviction, Clarkson tweeted out a July 4 tribute to U.S. military members. A Twitter user criticized the singer’s weight. The troll wrote: “You’re fat.” Clarkson responded: “. . . and still f***ing awesome.”
In another low, a male blogger for Barstool Sports tried to make the case that Rihanna was overweight. The post by Chris Spagnuolo was deleted after an angry torrent of reader blowback. (The blogger later whined he was being cyberbullied.) Toronto had an ugly episode, too. This past summer, vocalists in the Sheraton Cadwell Orchestra received a fatshaming email from management directing those “not physically fit and slim” to stop wearing “tight-fitting dresses.”
The email, aimed at two singers, read in part: “It has been brought to our attention that, although almost all of our vocalists are fit and slim, the way our boutique orchestras would like our front-line performing artists to be, two of our featured singers were not.”
The volunteer orchestra program folded soon after female vocalists went public with their reaction to the email.
Body shaming often begins at a young age for girls and too often, stays with them into adulthood.
Sally Bergesen, founder and CEO of running sportswear company Oiselle, is a Twitter user who asked women to share their first experience of being body shamed via the hashtag #TheySaid. Her idea, featured in People, was to spur public discussion on the subject and hopefully change some bullying behaviours.
Bergesen kicked it off with a personal memory:
“Keep eating like that and you’re going to be a butterball.’ My dad when I was 12. Pls RT and share a body shaming com- ment. #TheySaid,” Bergesen tweeted. Some responses, via Twitter: “My own family member (when I was a tween): ‘you have horse hips!’ and that’s the demon that’s forever followed me.”
“‘I didn’t break 100lbs until I was pregnant with my second child.’ My mom when I hit puberty and weighed in at 100lbs at 12.”
“‘You’d be a knock-out if you lost 15 pounds.’ Spoken to me by my “boyfriend” who was about 30 pounds overweight.”
The People article listed Bergesen’s suggested retorts to body shamers:
“What replies can we arm our girls with? I’ll start: ‘Actually, all bodies are different and I’m just right for me,’ ” she tweeted. Dani Mathers was back in court recently and — speaking of shaming — failed to impress an L.A. judge with the pace of her graffiti scrubbing.
In November, Mathers was to submit evidence of the community service work she’s completed. According to published reports, Mathers informed the judge she’d finished just 56 hours of the 240 hours she was ordered to do.
She is scheduled to return to court Jan. 17 to prove she’d worked the entire 240 hours or will face the possibility of jail time — according to news reports, as much as 45 days.