I decided to skip this issue a month ago when comic Amy Schumer was being called a hypocrite for suddenly showing off her newly svelte, Ozempic-drowned body all over social media after spending years defending being”plus size.” Then she posted bikini photos yesterday and social media was freaking out again.
“I think there’s nothing wrong with being plus size,” Schumer argued in a tiff with Glamour Magazine a decade ago. “Beautiful healthy women.” Amy got progressively more plus-size as the years went by and was more militantly anti-fatshaming as a “body-positivity” advocate while the pounds piled on.
Then, suddenly, in early December, she was showing off her body in tight dresses and bikinis, most recently in the new year on her Instagram account. Social media critics instantly reacted furiously, saying that her sudden exhibitionism proved that the “Fat is Beautiful” stance was a contrived position when she thought she was stuck being chunky. One wrote, “The only thing I don’t care for are these celebrities who tell you they love their body as it is and then slim down…they say it was for health, which OK, but the amount that they lose far surpasses the ‘health’ reasons excuse….It makes the message they were giving in the past a total facade that they really never believed in, which makes the people who looked up to them question themselves.”
Well…
1. Nobody should “look up” to celebrities who are just performers.
2. Hasn’t everyone seen enough of these fat-to-fabulous scenarios to know that the “Fat is Beautiful” refrain is usually born of necessity and desperation rather than sincerity?
3. On the other side of the debate, just because someone likes something about their appearance doesn’t make them hypocritical if they decide to try something else and then decide they like it better.
4. On the other other side, shouldn’t Amy Schumer have some concern for her fat fans who took solace in their condition because she was fighting for their self-respect, and not flaunt her new bod as if to say, “Haha, suckers! Now I’m beautiful and you’re not!”
Your Ethics Alarms First Ethics Quiz of the New Year is…
Is Amy’s post-Ozempic conduct unethical?
Ethics Alarms 
Perhaps ask Anna O’Brien to…um…WEIGH IN…
PWS
Let’s go a few steps back. Let’s hear it for the ethics of women and girls who only look sexy and show off their bodies for their husbands or boyfriends, respectively, and not their cell phones and strangers on the internet.
I don’t really see her saying it’s wrong now; other than that, what she is doing is “self-love.” Fat or overweight people should practice it more because it only gets worse as you get older.
Of course, she is showing off in front of a bunch of strangers. Not sure how much self love in that…
A celebrity did what celebrities do.
Ethics Alarms has a maxim that it is unethical to propose the impossible. Since it is impossible for for a self-promotor to not self-promote, it would be unethical to expect Schumer to do otherwise.
Her posting photos of herself was inevitable. It was neither ethical nor unethical to do so.
To her credit, the images are relatively tame. That some people on the internet got mad is itself inevitable, however overtly racy photos might have been deliberately rubbing it in people’s faces.
No.
Nothing unethical with accepting yourself as you are, and also nothing unethical with seeing ways to improve and acting accordingly.
Intentions can be (and I believe are less problematic) when they are driven by aspiration, not self-hate or self-deprecation.
I liked my new body when I became a serious athlete and proportions and muscle mass adjusted accordingly. That doesn’t mean I hated my body before that, or that I dislike it now that I’ve put a few pounds back on with the passage of years.
I also like pie. The balance of training and pie varies over time and it’s all good!
Did encourage people to look the way you did before you worked out? Did you shame people who thought it would be a good, healthy thing if you worked out? Completely inapt.
“It’s all good!” No. It’s not. Idiotic cant.