So I have been seeing a lot of blogs, diatribes, articles, etc. lambasting Eddie Murphy's new movie Norbit. Now its not that I did not expect to get a few protests, but I guess I expected people to protest because it is ass ignorant, not as the final straw in the attack on overweight black woman and standards of beauty. I have seen personal testimonies of women identifying with Eddie's big female character as a person with feelings and either connecting with her in a sense of solidarity, or standing proudly because she is so out there and confident and cheering her own. In my opinion, all of that is bullshit.
I know and I believe in the effects of the history of slavery and racism and I believe in the affects of a paternalistic society and the so-called european standards of beauty, but what I say to most of my sisters who got caught up in this is to relax, because you are not as you are seeing yourself. It stresses me out when I see a woman who is dark skinned and medically considered to be overweight to consider herself to be like "Mo'Nique." It just ain't so. (Full discosure, I'm not a Mo'Nique fan, particularly the so-called positive and self affirming crap she tries to pass off to legitmize her comedy to be more than just jokes) Even though they both played Effie, Jennifer Hudson is not the same as Jennifer Holiday. And furthermore, please believe that the major reason that Jennifer Holiday did not "make it" was not because of her size but because she was exceedingly arrogant and evil. After all, she is not big now and yet she is not a star. Yeah, size and image do matter, it is why Jennifer Lopez will always outsell Kelly Price, but remember we are talking about pop music and fantasies, and this is not about reality it's about popularity. i know that people have this issue with these big black women being the source of so much comedy, but realistically, that is the rest of the reason why I am not a monique fan. Hell why I am not a fan of too much public cooning in general (private cooning is alright.) Once you have too many people living the stereotype why isn't it fair game to laugh at? To me, jokes about brothers liking a big ass is funny because even though not universally true, the popularity of Buffy the Body shows that some cats are on that next level shit. So as long as you are finding 300 lb women trying to be stripping in the club, and being stereotypically "sassy" why would hollywood not make the jokes that everyone else is making?
Which leads me to the main source of my confusion, which is why so many intelligent sisters I know not only fight to be indentified as less attractive than they are, but then they fight because this less attractive manifestation of womanhood is not being objectified. It reminds me of a blog that my homegirl Le'Keisha wrote about the big boned sisters versus the skinny sisters. Stop the fucking madness. We all have a weight to carry with how we look, and depending on that image we have more or less work to do with how we behave and who we are to fill the gap between how we are precevied and how we want to be perceived. Just because I would rather see a woman of a certain size doing a tip drill in a video doesn't mean I am any more likely to be seen in public with her.
Hell the most offensive thing I think I heard in a while was a woman that told me that while I may have been upset because this high school drop out woman with four kids asked me out, she KNOWS that if the woman was more attractive I would have gladly rolled with it. Get off of that shit. Fine people get played too, pretty people getting shitted on all of the time, but because no one identifies with them, because they don't even identify themselves as one of the fortunate, no one feels sorry for them. No instead people like me have to get lambasted because they think its utterly ridiculous to have a 400 pound woman doing a split on national television talking about she is sexy. There is a very wide line between being confident enough to not let your image set your worth, and being delusional enough to think that your self worth is equal to your worth to others. Hell to play along and cheer that to me is what is really cruel. It's just like patting that illiterate teenager on the head as he says he's going to be a doctor when he grows up without someone telling him that he is going to have to learn to read.
Basically the point is, that someone who can't tell the difference between an heavier Black Woman with a PHD and Big Momma is racist... You don't need to claim all that...
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