fat

Fashion Week starts today, and Diet Pepsi has a big fat announcement! From their latest press release:

In celebration of beautiful, confident women, Diet Pepsi presents the taller, sassier new Skinny Can at New York's Fall 2011 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

Finally! Our unrealistic beauty standards for women—oh, excuse me, just "beautiful, confident women"—have made the jump to inanimate objects! Is it just me or are regular soda cans looking like total fat asses right about now?!?

Relative to Breillat's other movies, 2001's Fat Girl is fairly tame until its problematic conclusion. Documenting the misadventures of fifteen-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and her younger sister Anaïs (Reboux) while on a family vacation, the movie highlights the disparity between the girls' attitudes toward sex despite their shared virginity. The older sister, who is slender and conventionally attractive, is interested in entertaining men's spirited advances and harbors a romantic naïveté when embarking on a dalliance with Italian law student Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) that she mistakes as more than a fling. Though only twelve, Anaïs, whose beauty is often ignored because of her size, is far more cynical. She wants her first time to be with someone she does not love and watches in horror as her sister gets played, her warnings ignored.

The fat acceptance movement has been active for a long time. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance has been around since 1969, challenging social attitudes about fat and fighting for fat equality. There are clear intersections between fat acceptance and feminism, as writers like Kate Harding have amply demonstrated, and there is also an unbelievable level of pushback when it comes to talking about fat in some feminist spaces; fat is bad, fat is bad for you, fat people are bad people.