Friends, I have been very busy over the past year being fat characters, which has not left me much time to write about fat characters.  Which has been amazing for me, even if I could ideally keep both plates spinning at the same time.  (I blame capitalism.  And less-than-stellar time management skills.  But mostly capitalism.)

Regardless, I wanted to share a link to the amazing Virgie Tovar’s critique of I Feel Pretty, a new film starring Amy Schumer.  I noticed the ads for I Feel Pretty and cringed, because– well, Virgie nails it in her opening paragraph:

[Amy Schumer’s] films feel representational of a troubling phenomenon in the rapid gentrification of the fat movement: the ability for smaller bodied fat people to rise in visibility while larger fat people — and the human rights of all fat people — get increasingly sidelined. There is more room than ever for conditional fat acceptance that benefits white, feminine-presenting, cisgender women who fall below a not-so-subtle weight ceiling.

Her essay is short and packs in a lot of well-observed tropes around what body acceptance looks like in popular culture. It’s a must-read, even if you skip I Feel Pretty.