Hello, and welcome to Gold-Plated Girls. This is Hayley and Victoria. We are friends who love pop culture and love writing and are good at writing about pop culture.
We're also unemployed, sad, horny, mad, wistful, wise, big-hearted, and forward-thinking. But mostly unemployed. And we want to write for ourselves and for others. We want to create a newsletter that gives us both individual space to explore and shared space to talk about our favorite things. Victoria loves the Mets even when they are bad and will unfortunately never stop thinking about those famous star-crossed lovers: Jaime and Brienne. Hayley loves Legally Blonde, which is playing in the background right now. They both love yoga, astrology, the Mamma Mia! Cinematic Universe (MM!CU), the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the fact that Stellan Skarsgaard connects the MM!CU and the MCU, and much, much more. We also want to give ourselves space to write about a breadth of things, like food and books and nail polish and why we'll never wear low rise jeans again. If you like any of these things, Victoria and/or Hayley included, we promise you will like our newsletter.
When we were brainstorming names for this project, we thought of the Golden Girls. We're not quite there yet; that's why we're Gold-Plated. Victoria has also spent a lot of time listening to Taylor Swift's folklore, and we find these lyrics from "Mirrorball" particularly resonant: "I've never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try." We're try, try, trying.
Below the jump, you’ll find our very first essay, written by Victoria. Expect two newsletters a week: one on Tuesdays from one of us, and a joint letter on Fridays. You can also follow Gold-Plated Girls on Twitter and Instagram.
There’s an Instagram trend that’s been around for a while, but has seemingly picked up steam in the last few weeks. Glamour UK calls it “reality versus reality.” To participate in the trend, an influencer, always thin and usually white, posts two photos side by side. In the first she is “posing.” She’s standing up straight, her underwear, bikini bottoms or leggings are pulled up high, and she’s sucking all her jiggly bits in.
In the second photo, she’s “not posing.” Her bottoms are pulled down a smidge to show she has a cute little belly. Her arms are forward to show that they’re not quite as rail thin as they seemed. Maybe she’s sitting and she has one teeny tiny roll. In the most ridiculous version of this, an influencer claimed that standing in different light showed the “cellulite” on her legs. It’s like a “spot the difference” photo where the editors of Highlights for Children forgot to make any edits.
The captions accompanying these photoshoots are all about reminding readers that Instagram is a filtered reality, that their bodies are beautiful in “reality,” too. Of course, none of these influencer post the “unposed” pictures outside these teachable moments. And of course, they’re all already thin!
I would never say that a thin woman can’t have insecurities about their body. Fatphobia and unrealistic beauty standards affect everyone. But let’s look at a particular case. A British influencer wrote alongside her photos, “Here is your daily reminder that every single person on this planet gets bloated and it is so easy to hide with poses and angles.” That’s the issue: I can’t hide that I’m fat with poses and angles. Maybe I can sort of shield some of my body in particularly flattering photo or light. But I can’t make myself look thin. I will never have a flat stomach. My arms will never be small. My thighs will always be thick.
And I might feel insecure about the way my body looks on any given day, but that’s not really the problem with fatphobia. The problem is that I’m more likely to be discriminated against at the doctor’s office, to disastrous and possibly deadly consequence. The problem is it’s harder for me to find work, and I’m more likely to be underpaid. The problem is that fat trans people can’t access gender affirming surgery because of arbitrary BMI requirements. The problem is that all of this is worse for black women, for disabled people, for anyone who lies at the intersections of these identities.
That’s the problem with body positivity, which is a watered down version of fat positivity, which is a watered down version of radical fat politics. These Instagram posts are centering thin people and their bodies, instead of working on liberating the largest, most oppressed bodies. An influencer might say, “It’s normal to be a little bloated,” or even “It’s normal to gain a little weight in quarantine.” But these thin women are never going to say, “It’s normal to be fat.” In fact, if the pictures were posted in the opposite order, they’d be a guide to looking thinner on Instagram, and many of their followers are definitely using these spreads to get “tips” about making themselves more attractive.
When I post my fat body on the Internet, I have to forget about the horror stories I’ve heard of fat people turned into offensive memes. It is a shout into the void that my body is good enough to be seen, too. One day, I might believe it.