More hate mail!

The F-Word is being attacked again. Yesterday I wrote a post about how the Daily Mail article on how a size 16 Miss England finalist is "dangerously overweight" and a "bad role model" was fucking ridiculous and also included some blatant lies (the "ideal" body mass index is 20, according to them, and this is after they've done loads of articles about how wonderfully "curvy" she is and what a great "role model" - *YAWN*). As a result of this, I've been called fat by someone who presumably has never seen me:

isn't it the norm for feminists to be againstbeauty contests period, why are you now pro-beauty contest just becausea fatty has been included in the line up? Youre also against BMI too.So i'm thinking maybe you're all angry just because you're over BMI 26and rather fat? just a hunch.

This comment isn't going on the site because we moderate comments to avoid flame wars like the one that this would inevitably lead to, but I thought it deserved airing. Of course I'm fat - the only reasonable explanation for me saying that it was unfair dragging someone who is marginally overweight through the mud as a poster girl for heart disease and type 2 diabetes is that I'm fat. If I wasn't fat, I'd be cheering on the Daily Mail and calling for Chloe to be forcibly removed from the competition and recycled as a bouncy castle.

Actually, The readers of the F-Word would totally have lynched me if I'd said anything that appeared either to endorse beauty contests or to comment subjectively on Chloe's appearance, so here's another point that I would have made if I'd felt able to do so: Miss England is a beauty contest, and however you feel about beauty contests, that's what contestants are being judged on, not whether they are "good role models". Few people would deny that Chloe is a beautiful girl even if you do happen to find her a little on the porky side, and thus she is eminently qualified to participate.

As I said in the original post, she is no more overweight than many of her fellow contestants are underweight, so that blows the whole "role model" issue out of the water anyway. Chloe has as much right to compete in this repulsive display of young women as commodities for public consumption competition as anybody else.

I do think she could have chosen a more supportive bikini top though...