BY Lux Alptraum
June 1, 2007
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As you may have heard (and if you haven’t, you’re about to!), Beth Ditto (of The Gossip) recently got naked and got on the cover of NME. Which, you know, normally wouldn’t be a big deal (think of all the naked, or near naked, shots of pretty ladies that have graced the covers of magazines), but it’s a little different in this case: see, Beth Ditto is fat.

Before we go any further, I should take a minute to establish the Boinkology policy on getting naked in public. For the unaware, it’s basically that it’s not a matter of if you do it, but where and how. If all involved parties are consenting adults, and no one feels taken advantage of, then everything’s a-okay in my book.

Beth Ditto seems pretty content with getting naked in print (after all, she’s already posed for the lesbian porn mag “On Our Backs”), so it seems unlikely that she was taken advantage of or coerced (quite the contrary, she seems pretty happy to be on the cover of NME). So, um, why is this news?

Oh right: because Beth Ditto is fat.

What always drove me crazy, when I used to have frequent discussions about the politics of porn, was when people tried to argue that fat fetish sites were an indication of fat acceptance — as though the juxtaposition of the words “fat” and “sexy” automatically means we’ve entered progressive, body friendly territory.

But fat fetish sites are exactly the opposite: fat fetish sites are about, well, fetishizing fat. About valuing the fat above the person, about valuing the fat, in part, because it’s not socially acceptable. That’s not progressive, that’s not body friendly: and it’s not fat acceptance so much as the flip side of the fatphobia coin.

In a similar vein, all the attention that Beth Ditto is getting? It makes me uneasy, largely because it’s not about the quality of the photos or people liking the cover or anything except that, hey, Beth Ditto is fat and also naked. And the more people talk about it, the more I’m reminded how far (how very, very far) we are from being in a place where we’re not constantly judging people on the basis of their bodies, where people of all sizes can get naked without it needing to be a statement of some kind, where Beth Ditto can get naked and just be Beth Ditto naked, nothing more, nothing less.

It’d be nice to get to that point. Some day, maybe.