The main reason most cover models look good is that they are very carefully lit and posed and photoshopped out of reality.

Not showing real women on magazines isn’t just a fat issue – most of them literally aren’t real at all.

Also, Lady Rose, health is not a moral imperative. It might be a about health for you but health might have entirely different connotations for another person.

Meghan, that’s sort of what I mean. She DOES do whatever she wants to do – and even though I would find her style trashy on fat girls or thin girls or pretty much any girls, and even though I find her sort of out there and occasionally horrifying, that’s OK.

Because I don’t have to find her inspirational just because she’s a famous fat girl (or even because she’s a famous fat girl charting her own course) – it’s not my job to validate her. If other fat girls find her empowering, that’s great. Vive la difference, and all that.

I have yet to find my famous-fat-girl icon. America Ferrera isn’t it, because she’s not a fat girl. Beth Ditto isn’t it, because she doesn’t make any sense to me. But I know that they’re both other fat girls’ famous-fat-girl icons.

I find her much more of an inspiration to fat girls that America Ferrara or whatever other “fat” girl of the moment smiles humbly and good-naturedly during interviews when every frickin question is about her weight. Beth is making her own way and I applaud her for it.

Beth Ditto has made me think a lot about the difference between “fat in good taste” and “fat in bad taste”, because her public persona is mostly “fat in bad taste” (e.g. those photos in that orangey-gold-shiny-thing where she’s trying to put her foot in her mouth, srsly).

Perhaps it is that what is empowering to one is sort of horrifying to another, and perhaps it is that that’s OK, because perhaps it is that just because I’m a fat girl doesn’t mean I have to be all rah-rah about the public face of famous fat girls.