Just when I am convinced that The Great Stupid has finally reached peak stupid and the dimwits, hypocrites and virtue-signaling addicts in Woke World cannot embarrass themselves, society, the culture, the nation and the human race any more thoroughly, something like the “controversy” over Brendan Fraser winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in “The Whale” comes along.
I no longer watch the Academy Awards, I had no interest in seeing a movie about the travails of weighing 600 pounds and I’m not all that crazy about Brendan Frasier (though “The Mummy” was fun), so I heard about this a bit late. You see, Frasier wore a fat suit to play the hero of the movie. The actor is about 60 pounds past his physical prime when he played George of the Jungle (a funny Tarzan, more or less), but he hasn’t gotten that fat yet, so this was a necessary device. However, Fat is Beautiful activists slammed the picture, Frasier and the Oscars because 1) the film made fat seem unattractive and—this is the best part—it was discriminatory for the part of “the Whale” not to be cast with a real morbidly obese actor. (Brendan is only obese.)
This contrived logic fails on several counts and I apologize for explaining what you probably figured out for yourself, being more than ten-years-old.
First and most obviously, there are no 600 pound actors, since people that obese generally can’t get out of bed and don’t get much experience because there’s no such thing as a “thin suit.” If there were one, it is wildly unlikely that he would have the same skill set as Brendan Fraser or even comparative hack Adam Sandler (who wore a fat suit in “Click”). Moreover, no director in his or her right mind wants to be limited to an acting pool of one or two to have to use in multi-million dollar film. More moreover, there are no and have never been any 600 pound box office attractions. Orson Welles and Marlon Brando at their fattest never got much above 300 pounds; neither has John Goodman, and “Half a Whale” just isn’t a very catchy movie title.
But forget about logistics: let us talk incoherence, double standards and hypocrisy, shall we? Progressives—I am not yet at the stage that I call them “progs” or “wokeys,” but I’m getting there—have cheered an atrocious (by definition) abortion of the musical “1776” on Broadway that has a black woman playing white male Founding Father John Adams and an Asian woman playing Continental Congress delegate John Rutledge. Now I know that there are very capable white male actors who can sing available to play Adams and Rutledge: why is it woke to have actresses who don’t even try to be credible in those roles take those parts away from them, but politically incorrect for an only mildly obese movie star to use grossly obese costuming and make-up to play a character that literally no actor in Actors Equity could portray without a fat suite and gobs of prosthetics?
Well, you know the answers, right? 1. It’s okay to discriminate against white men and take jobs away from them, and 2) “It’s The Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!” It doesn’t have to make sense or be logically consistent. After all, so much of what the Mad Left in 2023 is advocating and claiming it is “hateful” to oppose—you know, like open borders, crippling police departments, secretly convincing kids to have their breasts removed or their puberty blocked without informing their parents, or letting a dementia-ridden fool like Joe Biden be President—is certifiably bats.
But wait! There’s more!
Dove Soap had embraced the “body positivity” movement long ago as part of its “beauty bar” brand. Apparently without thought, the company responded to a dumb anti-Fraser tweet that said, “our identity is not your costume” (I guarantee the tweeter was not 600 pounds) by tweeting back in solidarity,
Morons. Useful morons though: I can’t think of better smoking gun evidence that the large corporations and sports organizations that do irresponsible things like pimping for Black Lives Matter or advocating transsexual conversion indoctrination in grade school ( like Disney) don’t give any careful consideration to what they are promoting, and don’t care about whether it is damaging to the culture or real people, or whether their alleged position even makes sense. They just follow the fads and the noise, with those responsible hoping that their pandering will pad their bonuses. Corporations, with very few exceptions, have no ethics, and in the Age of the Great Stupid, amazingly little common sense.
Thus it is that Dove is getting sharp backlash from its cretinism. Good! One social media wag wrote, “Thank you, soap company, for supporting the morbidly obese and helping them to embrace their poor health and celebrate early death. That’s quite a marketing strategy.” An online film critic noted, “Maybe because being 600lb is massively dangerous, and film studios would rather use prosthetics and makeup than an actor who might not even survive the film?'”
As for me, I used to use Dove, but no more. I’ll move on to the product of some soap company that may be just as ethically inert and irresponsible, but that had the sense to shut the hell up this time.
Ethics Alarms 
One of the pitfalls of attending sci-fi or comic conventions is that the celebrity guest might say something you don’t want to hear.
At one convention, a hefty fan asked Stan Lee why there weren’t more large superheroes so that overweight fans could identify with them.
As an aside, I have always rejected the idea that a character has to look like me in order to identify with the character.
But I digress…
Stan’s blunt answer was, “Because it’s unhealthy and not a lifestyle I want to promote.”
“Let’s change beauty!” Yea, verily. No more good-looking actors and actresses and models. We’ll have a complete turnover of people in fashion and Hollywood. Ordinary people will all get high paying jobs. Works for me! No more insufferable stars. Yippee!
You know British tv seems to have regular looking people in their productions. None would get past the Hollywood screening process. Yet remarkably, these shows are far better than most of the crap on American TV
Rowan Atkinson is no Brad Pitt, but Mr. Bean was hysterical.
I think the Brit situation is as it is because they use professional, trained actors and actresses, not just cute kids who work in Disney shows and then get older and appeal to their contemporaries for the next fifty years or so. Yes, Kurt Russell, I’m looking at you.
Oh, you could have chosen a more deserving target of that charge than Kurt! “Breakdown,” “Tombstone,””Overboard”? He was a great Elvis…Kurt can do comedy, camp (“Snake Pliskin”), drama and action. One of Mrs. Marshall’s absolute favorites.
Let’s not forget Gillette being…um…hungry enough to…er…weigh in with Anna O’Brien some four (4) years ago…
Rewire the human instinct to be attracted to attractive people. That’s quite a project. Whatever happened to “for every Jack there’s a Jill?”
I am technically obese given that my BMI is over 25. That fact alone makes me want to work harder at shedding some pounds even though I know that I will never be able to tip the scales at less than 160 lbs. which would make me 24.7 BMI. After losing 50 lbs. and weighing in at 185#, my waist measured 34 inches. I am at my best at around that weight. At 170# I had to explain to others that I was not sick. Going to 160 was not going to happen unless I wanted to look like a prune.
Nonetheless, it is ludicrous for anyone to celebrate being grossly overweight unless you are wanting them to suffer from preventable diseases. Recently, some research focused on why maternal death rates have been rising in the US. The article below outlines the work done. In short, obesity related illnesses are the leading factors in pregnancy related maternal deaths.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-020-00691-4#:~:text=The%20risk%20of%20maternal%20death%20increases%20with%20BMI%3B,pregnant%20women%20with%20obesity%20could%20improve%20their%20outcomes.
Black women are 2.5 times more likely to die within 42 days of delivery and the primary reasons are complications from cardiovascular issues, hypertension, diabetes and embolisms. Each of these is positively correlated if not directly caused by obesity. Yet if you review the progressive media, they attribute the differences to systemic racism and lack of pre-natal care until the third trimester. This flies in the face of the fact that poor white women have a significantly lower pregnancy related death rate than college educated black women. This would suggest that being poor and on Medicaid does not have a major impact on pregnancy related mortality. It seems to me that celebrating obesity in black women is really racist.
While I have not made any scientific study of comparative data among whites and blacks I do shop regularly at Wal-Mart and a cursory observation of those using “independence Cards”, white women are typically significantly smaller than their black counterparts. It should also be noted that people using public assistance for nutrition do not seem to be bothered by the amount of sugar they are consuming.
I have always struggled with my weight, and I understand that we should not ridicule those with significant weight issues. It serves no purpose and may exacerbate the underlying psychology that is preventing them from succeeding in losing weight. However, the idea that we should celebrate their girth has the same effect as shaming.
Your digression into a discussion of Dove soap brought these lines from Fight Club to mind:
“ Tyler sold his soap to department stores at $20 a bar. Lord knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.”
-Jut
Will they be cancelling Mike Myers for his “Fat Bastard” character? Maybe better get your collectible action figures while you can (seem to be at least two different ones)…
https://www.collectors.com/action-item/mcfarlane-toys-fat-bastard-austin-powers-action-figure-vint/780790295538559257
I should have mentioned “Fat Bastard.” Also Goldie Hawn’s fat suit in “Death Becomes Her” and Gwyneth Paltrow’s in “Sahhlow Hal.” I guess its better for the actor to gorge on Twinkies and get genuinely fat, like DeNiro did for “Raging Bull.”