In support of Natalie Craig's Cosmopolitan op-ed

Natalie Craig wrote an op-ed regarding fat acceptance for Cosmopolitan in January 2024. Craig quotes a video that plus size influencer Gabriela Lascano created in 2023, but neither directly links to Lascano's video nor explicitly names Lascano.

In case you're wondering, here is the TikTok video from 2023 that Lascano received lots of online reactions. (This is about 1 year old, so it's not linking directly to the video is going to give it significantly more views.) (Also, the most popular of Big Adtech social media sites are extremely anti-semantic and thus difficult to effectively search. Bless your heart if you're trying to craft an undergraduate thesis and have to cite social media posts in 2024.)

It was easy enough to find again, even though I completely forgot the date range, because this was the video with the highest view count (1 million, according to TikTok's fuzzy view counter); and that most of Lascano's other videos typically garner views on the order between 10 thousand to 100 thousand views.

I get why Craig doesn't directly attribute the video to Lascano, as I know these types of interaction circles can become extremely dramatically toxic, especially on the internet. Anyways, this isn't the sort of psycho-cultural space I will be making comments, as I have no authority in as someone who is neither fat nor a woman.

Conclusion

I will say that sometimes what you say has to be crafted for a specific audience and context in mind, and Lascano's video falls into this category. Not sure how ByteDance designed TikTok's engagement algorithm, but I've been in circles where we have discussed how TikTok really encourages people to discuss their difficulties and traumas (if you will) conveyed in a manner that but is unideal at best for a public platform and worst unhealthy for others to engage with.

All I can offer is that there is a certain pragmatic limit where one looks towards the internet (or public opinion, in general) before one must make decisions on their own so that their craft can evolve. I learned that the hard way for physics, but not until long afterwards; probably always known this via some nascent form in math; have a bit of direct experience this in programming/IT and in studies for privacy, security, and anonymity; and have started to realize this in my Vipassana practice.

If one needs to loose weight, then that's one's personal medical matter to take care of. However, if one genuinely leads a healthy lifestyle and is still fat, do you really expect me to engage in fat shaming?

I'd be curious about what a friend thinks on this matter (while avoiding using tokenism); but in the meantime, here are some to consider: