We must not hide from fat-shamers
IHAVE walked in Tilly Ramsay’s shoes. I know how it feels to be fat-shamed by total strangers – usually older blokes – in assorted media. I’ve been dubbed “the woman who ate her audience” and told that my breasts are “like FirstWorldWar barrage balloons”. I’ve been assured I have “the perfect figure for radio”. I have endured the humiliation of popping to the shops only to see my ample posterior, spilling out of a bathing suit, plastered on the cover of a magazine captioned: “Vanessa! Oh dear!”
One headline even proclaimed: “Vanessa’s Friends Worry She’s Drinking Custard Again!” Pictures of me pushing a supermarket trolley brimming with the family shop have been printed with the suggestion that every bite of the groceries intended for four is for my solo sustenance.
My solicitor even answered the phone to be told in tones of hushed urgency: “We have the sushi photos!” He rang back. “What”, he asked, “are the sushi pictures?” I was baffled too. It turned out I’d been papped through a restaurant window, eating guess what? Sushi.
The combination of FFW (famous fat woman) and the consumption of calories is lucrative currency. Magazines adore printing them.
READERS adore gawping at them. The commentary is predictable, yet never loses its power to wound. “Lord you are fat. Gosh you are gross. Blimey how does anyone your size dare to leave their front room?”
I tried losing weight. Critics immediately dubbed me “gaunt” and “haggard”. I yo-yoed. Forensic attention was directed at the piled on pounds.After 16 years of vicious commentary I had a gastric band fitted. Part of me hoped it might quell the obsession with my figure – or lack thereof.
It didn’t.
Somehow I never managed to be thin enough to satisfy the self-appointed judges.
In 2019 I underwent a gastric bypass. Now I’m a size 12. Yet I still bear the scars of nearly three decades of brutal barbs.
The notion that because you have somehow stuck your head above the parapet you’re fair game and richly deserve a daily barrage of insults is desperately unfair.
The view that unless you’re a size eight you should do all a favour by staying behind closed doors is cruelly divisive.
“You must have developed a rhinoceros hide after the bashing you’ve taken,” say observers. I haven’t and frankly neither Tilly, nor I, nor Alison Hammond nor Dawn French – who once wondered aloud if the chorus of disapproval would stop if she stuck a knife in her heart – should have to.