Anna O’Brien is looking for hate in all the wrong places. O’Brien, the founder of Glitter and Lazers, a fashion blog for “plus-size” women, posed in a bikini in New York’s Times Square but didn’t get the reaction she had hoped for. Instead of hoots and jeers she got cat calls. “I want to suck on them tasty toes,” one spectator called out. “Hey baby, let me butter them biscuits for you,” shouted another.
“Tears began to well up,” she writes in a first-person account of her experience at Cosmopolitan. “I was prepared to be pointed at, shamed, and called fat. I didn’t expect to be fetishized.”
O’Brien is a card-carrying member of the “fat acceptance” movement, which attacks social stigmas against being overweight. The movement attempts to educate and reform “fat shamers,” which is its first mistake. Societal norms are societal norms: You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t force him to admire Rubenesque women.
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Another problem that O’Brien creates for herself is her belief in a fantasy world where men will cease sexualizing women — a phenomenon without which life on earth could not exist. Primitive sexual urges in humans and other species that procreate by mating are as old as the planet. If O’Brien is seeking to change this, she is fighting a losing battle with the ultimate female, Mother Nature.
In her quest to make herself a victim, O’Brien has managed to receive the response she was hoping to garner from the crowd in Times Square. During a photo shoot at a hotel in Las Vegas in April, she was told to “cover up” by hotel security. Lapsing into “aggrieved” mode, she wrote on Instagram:
Sure, thin girls in thongs and pasties are A-OK but a plus girl in a full coverage suit, trying to take an epic editorial shot — now that’s just too much.
The bikini she was wearing on this occasion, which was far skimpier than the one she wore in Times Square, may have had something to do with the hotel’s order.
