August 4, 2024
One of my favorite reality shows is called “My Big Fat Fabulous Life”. The show on TLC chronicles the life of Whitney Way Thore, a gal from Greensboro, North Carolina, who went viral in the early 2010’s for a YouTube video called “Fat Girl Dancing”. In the video, she danced a hip-hop routine with her best friend, Todd – and the only remarkable part of the video was that she confidently and unapologetically completed a very good dance routine in her own body, despite looking very different from dancers we were used to seeing at that time. She’s a self-proclaimed fat person, and throughout the 11.5 seasons of her reality show, her weight has bounced around between 300-350 lbs. On the show, she started her own dance class called “Big Girl Dance Class” or BGDC, where people of all shapes and sizes showed up to learn from Whitney – a formally trained dancer. The BDGC gals got to dance between innings at a Greensboro grasshoppers game, and had a dance off in Charlotte against a rival dance group called the “Trophy Wives”. I love the show mostly because Whitney is southern and funny and goes through a lot of things that women in all bodies can understand. On the show, I’ve seen her complete 5ks, hiking trips, fitness challenges in Alaska, boyfriend drama, friend drama, family drama, the loss of her mother, and the discovery of a family she didn’t know existed when she learned that her father had a daughter that was put up for adoption years before Whitney was born. Her friends are delightfully southern and funny, and to me, it feels like they are the best sort of people. I find the show to be compelling and Whitney’s friends feel like my own friends. I look forward to seeing them on my tv each week.
Sometimes I look at Reddit threads that show me the worst of humanity. I pop into r/niceguys where women post screenshots of self-proclaimed “nice guys” being anything but nice. I also look at r/nicegirls, which is the same idea except women are the offenders, and this helps me maintain perspective. I find my way to the r/notlikeothergirls page, where there are all these examples of women tearing other women down, which is my least favorite corner of the internet. I think this is why I don’t like to watch any Real Housewives shows on Bravo because girl on girl crime is the most demoralizing for me to consume. I follow people on instagram who critique and expose me to some of the worst takes on the planet. A lot of my social media consumption is downright toxic. I’m willing to admit that. But the one place on the internet that surprises me the most is the r/MyBigFatFabulousLife page. Holy shit. People watch Whitney on her silly, light hearted show, and they head directly to Reddit to talk about how they HATE her. They hate her. Universally – no one in that sub actually likes her or enjoys the show, they just show up to dunk on her.
The idea of watching a tv show or consuming any kind of media just to fuel some hate or rage or make you feel better about yourself is not something I’m immune to. All of the subreddits I mentioned previously are good examples of that. Sometimes I follow these red pill guys who hate women on instagram just so I can watch them and feel strongly about how much I hate them. Hate isn’t a good feeling, but it’s a strong one – and sometimes you need to feel it and let is course through your body. And feeling it toward a bad idea, or a person spewing hatred with every word they utter feels like a safe way to let it all out. It’s much better that hating Jessica from the billing department or your ex boyfriend, because the objects of theses strong emotions never cross paths with you. You don’t need to cooperate with them or try to understand them because you don’t need anything from them. It just feels like such a natural outlet for our feelings – strangers on the internet or strangers on our tv screen. So, yeah, I get it. But man. The Whitney Way Thore hate really upsets me when I read it, because the attacks on her feel like personal attacks on ME.
The themes of the Whitney hatred are mainly centered around how she “whines” a lot about being single. Her love life has been a prominent part of her show over the years. She was engaged to a man named Chase who got another woman pregnant during Covid, so that didn’t last. She was dating a man named Avi, and then discovered that he was dating multiple fat women at one time and had a fiancé in Egypt. She also dated a man named Lennie, who had trouble with alcoholism. After they split, they became good friends again and started working together on her No Body Shame campaign. She’s been through some shit when it comes to men. Some of that has no doubt been dramatized for television, but the sentiment of being close to 40 years old with no husband and no prospects and a strong desire to be a mom is familiar to me. On Reddit, they make fun of her desire to find someone. They say she focuses on it too much. They say she drowns in self pity. They say her standards for the men she dates are way too high. Way too high? Imagine that. Imagine ending relationships over men being alcoholics, cheaters, pathological liars, etc. and then people telling you that your standards are too high. They might as well be saying – hey, you’re fat, you’re not allowed to expect anything from the men you date. How dare you want someone you find attractive! How dare you want someone who is kind and faithful and makes you laugh! You don’t meet MY standards of beauty and value – so you shouldn’t have any standards at all.
Man it bums me out. I am not a fat person, but like every other woman I know, I have had insecurities about my body. I have big thighs and stretch marks. I don’t think my smile is that pretty. I’m getting older – I have laugh lines and wrinkles, and I have to square up with that every time I go on a first date and then when I go on that date, I have to look at the man in front of me and decide if he’s what I’m looking for. I went on a date with a guy who basically told me he was a gambling addict over dinner. In my head, I was like well, it’s not like I don’t have my own addictions and vices. Then he blew me off for our second date to go gambling. I could see it on the Bumble app – after I messaged him asking if we were still on for dinner and he didn’t respond, I looked at his location on Bumble, and it said he was in Delaware, where he liked to gamble. He ghosted me for several weeks and then reached out again wanting a second chance. I heard all of those voices in my head – telling Whitney that her standards are too high, telling me MY standards are too high – and I almost gave him another chance. “It’s not like I have any better options…” Ultimately, I told him no. But the fact that I considered it even for a second might tell you how the outside voices in this world have infiltrated this very personal experience that is deciding whether you want to tolerate someone’s behavior or not. Those outside voices turn into my own voice telling me “You’re too fat to expect better. You’re too ___________ to expect better.”
Shortly after this all happened, I went on a completely blind date for the first time in my life. My friend set me up with a guy she knows from work and we planned a date without exchanging pictures. I spent the whole day worried that I was not going to be attracted to him and that I would have to let him down. Then when he showed up – he was perfect. Tall, good looking, has his shit together, funny, kind, family-oriented. All the things I want. We had an amazing date and talked for hours. Then after he walked me to my car, I cried in the parking lot on the phone with my best friend telling her how this guy is “too good for me”. I blame the wine slushies for a good chunk of this, but I also blame all this shit that I have allowed to infiltrate my head. I scolded myself for having the audacity to worry about whether he’d be attractive to me. Somehow, a successful date turned into some kind of failure to me because I have convinced myself that I don’t deserve…anything. I don’t deserve to feel excited about a date with a cute boy. I don’t deserve to let myself off the hook and shrug and say “oh well, at least we had fun”, when the cute boy doesn’t text me. Heavens no, it’s time to reiterate what I cried about in the car and walk through all the things that may have turned him off about me during our date.
The thing I’m really working on is grabbing hold of these small moments where I draw some boundaries and expect more from men. Sending a text to my gambler to politely tell him that I am not interested felt like a big step for me. I don’t want to be in this space forever – feeling that men deserve second and third chances because I’m not perfect. I’m not perfect at all, and I never will be – but do you think they are giving me multiple chances when I mess up? No way. I’m allowed to expect more of these people. I’m allowed to say no. I’m allowed to have standards even though I’m an old maid and I’d give my left foot to be in love right now. Desire doesn’t have to equal desperation. Whitney and I are allowed to want what we want.
My Big Fat Fabulous Life airs on Tuesdays at 9 on TLC.
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 