Cool Zone Media.
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the show where we talk to the Internet's characters of the day from time gone by to see what their moment says about the Internet and about us. My name's Jamie Loftis, and everyone is always shocked to learn that I am actually six feet tall, which is unfortunate to admit here, but I think it is because my personality scans a hard five to six. But I use it to my advantage. It's how I
get people to tell me so many secrets. And today we are continuing our discussion of the Curvy Wife saga of twenty seventeen. Now, if you haven't listened to part one of this episode and aren't familiar with the story, I would say go back.
You gotta go back.
This episode isn't going to make a hell of a lot of sense without at least the context from the first part of the series. Last week, I recapped the story of I Love My Curvy Wife in detail and spoke to Curvywife Guy himself, Robbie Tripp. So again, if you haven't heard any part of the first episode, it would make more sense to just go back. But for those returning, you already know that In the summer of twenty seventeen, a Utah man named Robbie Tripp posted a photo of himself and his wife, his.
Wife Sarah Trip, at the beach.
Sarah, at the time was an influencer of in betweeners, or as she clarified, people who wore sizes that were between extremely thin models presented in the media and the plus size section, and this post was heard around the world.
I love this woman and her curvy body. As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for my attraction to girls on the thicker side.
It keeps going from there again. You can listen to part one and the curvy wife post went through what listeners of this show will now recognize as a pretty typical main character experience. Step one, the post goes viral. Step two, it gets a lot of positive attention. Step three a significant wave of backlash and negative attention. Step four optional but common, the surfacing of old offensive posts
from the main character. Step five, the public apology and disavowal of said posts, and ultimately what they do to maintain and build on this notoriety. And this all depends on who the main character is and whether they have aspirations to stick around. Some people just want to return to their lives. Think thirty to fifty Faral Hogs Guy, Think Coffee Wife. But others like Robbie and Sarah already had big ambitions in the influencing space after the Curvy
Wife post. Sarah Tripp continued to build her fashion and lifestyle commentary brand under the Sassy Red Lipstick banner and launched a series of bathing suit line collaborations. Meanwhile, Kurveywife husband Robbie Tripp became a rapper who just released the song hot Wife. And by the way, after part one, a bunch of you commented, does he know what hot wife means? And then I had to look it up and now I know what it means and I resent
you all for sharing that with me. Airhorn, Please, It's undeniable that there were elements of this story that really had staying power. People were talking about the curvy Wife post for months and years after the original post, and the phrase I love my curvy wife has more or less entered the permanent lexicon of people who were online and engaged with the story at the time. And the reason it's still around is because during its original circulation.
This story, intentionally or not, touched a lot of nerves, including, but not limited to, how men can talk about and objectify women, the idea perpetuated by the media that one should be praised for being attracted to fat people, how fat or curvy women are portrayed by the media, the terms curvy or fat and what that meant to the person that was saying or receiving them, and the wide range of feelings on how those terms are used personally
and politically, and quite frankly, a very specific strain of millennial cringe. And I'll be honest, I did not love the Curvy Wife post when it came out or now, but I was glad to have the opportunity to talk with Robbie Tripp about his thinking behind posting it in the first place, because it's my job to give main characters their chance to speak on their fifteen minutes of fame and reflect. It's just that our conversation didn't really
change my mind. In our interview, Robbie took repeated jabs at white, female, millennial snarky bloggers in New York, which I personally feels a lot of qualifiers added to dress up the fact that he seemed upset at any woman or really any person who was frustrated by his post and said something about it. And again, plenty of people took no issue at the post. Many felt empowered by it.
I've heard from a few people to this effect, and I don't mean to negate that viewpoint, but disliking the Curvywife post had nothing to do with being anti man or being a specific type of person. I looked back on, the backlash was coming from a pretty diverse group of very online people. So yeah, make of that what you will, and let's move on, because I think there's a more interesting angle to discuss the Curvy wife moment from this week.
And regardless of my feelings, Robbie and Sarah love each other. They recently celebrated ten years of marriage, and their marriage is honestly not something I'm interested in dissecting, no matter how many Instagram comments I get about it. Lest I be characterized as a white millennial snark blogger from New York,
which is only forty percent true. I want to talk in this episode about why the Curvy wife post really struck a chord during this backlash, and how that connects to how we talk about other people's bodies, and fat and curvy bodies specifically, because even if I understand that Sarah Tripp does not mind that her husband made this post about her, I still cannot find a read of this post that doesn't feel centered around Robbie's feelings and comes off as condescending to the quote unquote her women
he is addressing in the post. And a lot of people felt the same way. Body positivity and fat liberation movements had been going on for decades at the time of this post, but had in many activist opinion been co opted and deep politicized by mainstream culture in a way to either sell you things or tacitly make people feel either bad or confident enough about their bodies to buy something and nothing more. To feel good about your
body when you weren't. Finn was a brave act all of a sudden, the same way that Robbie saying he loved his wife was treated as commendable and not the bare minimum from a loving spouse. And this was a narrative that was really pushed by media outlets in the early days of this story, and not much is outside of Robbie's control. Even the term body positivity put pressure on people to feel good about their bodies, to demonstrate their worth and morality when very few people have a
day to day simple relationship with their body. A lot of people talking about body positivity ten years ago are now talking about body neutrality. And so today I want to dig a little deeper, understand this story outside of the realm of Robbie Tripp and talk to body positivity and fat activists to see why after seven years, this story still prompts such a response. Buckle in Curvy Wife guy Robbie Tripp and curvy wife Sarah Trip. Your sixteenth
minute continues now, welcome back to sixteenth minute. I thought I was doing a little better emotionally and then I just reread Charlotte's Web and it made me cry for truly three hours. If you haven't read Charlotte's Web recently, it is the most beautiful piece of American writing I've ever encountered. Hadn't read it since I was seven, and it just has so much to say about life and death and purpose. And here I am Jamie's book Club.
Please read this book for second graders again. You won't regret it.
But let's get back to the episode.
And so today we are continuing our discussion of the infamous Curvy Wife post of twenty seventeen, and once more at the top of this episode, I do just want to say that if this post works for you, that's totally fine, But this week I want to examine the backlash to this.
Story more clearly. Not every story I cover.
Has backlash that, at least in my opinion, warrants a closer look, but in the case of this story, I think it also offers an opportunity to take a look at what body positivity and fat activism meant at this moment and what it means now. I'll be speaking with Tigris Osborne of NAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance,
and Kate Navarete of the Body Positivity Alliance. But before we jump into my talk with Kate, I wanted to give a quick snapshot of we're attitudes toward body positivity and fat liberation stood around the time that the Curvy Wife story went viral, and this is going to be a pretty rapid fire history. So for more nuanced and detailed work on this movement, and a link of fumore
works in the description as well. Fat liberation movements, which have gone by a number of names, including fat acceptance, fat empowerment, and fat pride, have been in the mainstream discourse since the nineteen sixties and is often characterized in movements alongside the major feminist movements of the last one hundred or so years. In nineteen sixty seven, Fat Power activists staged a demonstration in Central Park where over fifty people eight held signs with pictures of Twiggy and said
diet books on fire, Pretty punk rock then. NAFFO was founded in nineteen sixty nine by engineer Bill Fabri, who started the volunteer driven group in response to the discrimination his wife faced in her day to day life. A spinoff of this group, called the Fat Underground, began in
nineteen seventy two. Texts like Fat Power, Whatever You Weigh Is Right by Llewell and Lauderback in nineteen seventy and Fat as a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach in seventy eight continued to push the movement forward, along with Naffa's own Fat Manifesto in nineteen seventy three, which demanded quote equal rights for fat.
People in all areas of life.
Unquote. These groups were certainly considered radical at the time, but they were also often criticized as being flawed in the same ways that the feminist movements they worked alongside with were. While fat activism was and is considered a civil rights issue, NAPA had neglected to meaningfully include non white people and black people, specifically under the guise that fat activism was not needed as much in those communities,
something the organization has strived to rectify since here. I'm going to quote Tigris Osborne, the current executive director of NAFA, writing in a blog post on the NAFA website about how discouraging it was to see a dearth of people who looked like her when she first got involved in fat activism. And since I'm interviewing Tigris later in this episode, I asked if she'd read her own words.
So I'm going to share with you something that I wrote for the newsletter for the Nationalist Theiation to Advance Fat Acceptance or NAFA, a couple of years ago, and as I'm reading it now in twenty twenty four.
It still really holds true.
Here's what I wrote.
Some key moments we identify as the roots of fat lib are really really white moments. And throughout the history of the documented organized fat activist movement, what's often not documented, especially before the modern era, are the black people who were there. I've been going through old NAFA newsletters from the seventies and so far I've only seen one visibly black person who was unidentified in the photos.
A couple years later.
Side note, I've seen only a handful more as I continue that project of reviewing our old newsletters back to what I wrote. I haven't tracked them down yet, and I don't know if I will ever be able to track down that person. Maybe this person was having the time of their life at NAFA events, behave Sometimes I've had a great time despite being the only black person in a place. But at other times I've been incredibly uncomfortable but made the best of it, and other times
I've just been uncomfortable. I've felt all of those things as a black person in NAFA in the twenty tens and twenty twenties, so I can imagine what I would have felt in NAFA in other decades. We see black leadership in other social justice movements. At the time of NAFA's founding, what does whiteness have to do with why we don't see black leadership or even much black participation in early NAFA. What does anti blackness have to do with it? Is there simply more urgency of other issues
for black folks then now? Or is there discomfort in these spaces for black people then now? Or are black people simply not interested in NAFA then now? These questions feel rhetorical, but they're not.
By the nineties, BAT activists were picketing in front of the White House and becoming increasingly critical of the rampant fat phobia present in mainstream media. The nineties and two thousands are notable for rampant fat phobia that, whether you like millennials or not, did a hell of a lot of damage on how everyone, but particularly women and fems, were conditioned to perceive themselves. Anecdotally, I started dieting when I was eight years old. This was the era of
Kate Moss's grand ode to internalize fat phobia. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, and gave way to online communities that were centered around encouraging each other's eating disorders. And while NAFA had a persistent issue with a lack of black leadership and members. Fat activism was increasingly spearheaded by black and queer communities when it moved online. I remember hearing this poem from poet Sonya Rene Taylor when it first went viral in twenty eleven.
The body is not an apology.
Let it not be forgive me, not fixed to mattress when night threatens to leave the room empty as the belly of a crow.
The body is not an apology.
Do not present it as a disassembled rifle when he is yet to prove himself more than common intruder.
The body is not an apology.
Let it not be common as oil, ash or toilet. Let it not be small, as gravel stained or teeth. Let it not be mountain when it is sand. Let it not be ocean when it is grass. Let it not be shaken, flattened, or raised in contrition.
The body is not an apology.
A link the full poem in the description It's really beautiful. But even after fat activism moves online, there are similarities between fat activism and feminist activism during this period of time. In previous decades, fat activism had been either mocked or dismissed by mainstream outlets, but by the two thousands, the distinct online communities built led mainstream advertisers to view it
as an opportunity. What if we took this notion that all bodies are worthy of love, removed the politics from that notion, and sold it back to consumers. It's not quite that simple, but after the success of the original run of Dove soap real beauty ads starting in two thousand and four, body positivity stripped of politics became an
increasingly common marketing tactic. The original Dove soap ads were rooted in the language of body positivity, but didn't really offer any solution or action toward it outside of visual representation and buying Dove soap.
How long have we been chasing someone else's idea of beauty? Maybe one size fits all hair, it doesn't fit you. Rediscover the beauty of your own hair. Discovered Dove shampoos and conditioners.
But these ads were really effective. After the first series of ads featuring a group of women that were comparatively more diverse in race and age and less thin than women you were used to seeing in soap ads, Dove sales went up seven hundred percent. That's an ad from two thousand and four, but this campaign has lasted over
twenty years now. Different eras of Dove ads single out the ways that other brands photoshop and marginalize their representatives to make the consumer feel bad about themselves, and more recently have made short documentaries about how girls become critical
of their appearance, beginning at a very young age. And I don't mean to dismiss this campaign outright, because this is all true and makes a demonstrable difference to have out in the mainstream, But the common refrain is that cannot be the endgame.
It's not enough.
So after Dove's success, other brands jumped on board the SS body positivity, including brands that had been notoriously fat phobic in the past. Looking at You, Victoria's secret put Amamas Prado.
Myself proud to be who I am, proud to be, proud to be, proud to be.
Brands like Airy, Oley and famously Barbie in twenty fifteen suddenly featured a wider range of body types than ever before, and every time it prompted controversy in the mainstream media because in one sense, this was a wider range of body representation than mainstream audiences were used to seeing, but there was never a political goal attached to this representation.
The goal was to sell products more effectively. And it's during this era of body positivity in the early to mid twenty tens, that Sarah Tripp launches her blog Sassy Red Lipstick, and it was a fashion blog. It wasn't launched with the intention of being a source for body positivity, but over the years, Sarah would often be candid about her relationship with her body and being this quote unquote in between her making a name for herself in an
industry and an influencing space that was obsessively thin. She wasn't trying to or explicitly doing activist work. She was speaking honestly about her own experiences and certainly as the blog continued, she opened the floor to women of all sizes, so body positivity was discussed. But it wasn't like she was doing on the ground organization work and wasn't aspiring to.
She was and is an influencer who loves her body, and that's great, but it does provide some context or when the Trips were suddenly made the faces of American body positivity, while some fat liberation activists were kind of annoyed about it because not only were the Trips not activists, there was also this glaring issue of inclusivity and this persistent issue of CIS white bodies within fat activism being centered.
Sarah Tripp is a CIS white woman from a lot of money, and while that doesn't negain any body discrimination she's experienced in her life, it does make a difference in the ways that she and her husband were subsequently able to turn this into a career, because, as has become obvious over time, the way that black and brown women are treated online and in the real world is
with continued degrees of mistrust, neegging, and even violence. Thankfully, there are and always have been, many people working in that space that aren't SIS white people. I don't mean to erase them. I am curious to ask whether this story would have gotten the attention and media prioritization it did if the couple and the bodies at its center weren't SIS, straight and white.
And I can't stress this enough.
This is not Sarah's fault, right, She was just trying to exist and have a career online and this became a launching point that she told Rebecca Jennings was very uncomfortable and anxiety inducing for her because Sarah wasn't inviting this conversation about her body and didn't personally prompt it. It was her husband and the media who started this conversation.
So on one end, her body is being centered without her consent by the media, and on the other end, there were fat activists who seemed frustrated with Sarah's body were not being fat enough to warrant such an outsized discussion. And so my next interview was with a person who had an especially fresh perspective on the curvy wife saga because she was a child when the story happened. My interview with Kate Navarette. When we come back, welcome back
to sixteenth minute. I found a white eyebrow hair this morning, and here is my interview with Kate Navarette of the Body Positivity Alliance. This interview has been edited for time and clarity.
Enjoy.
My name is Kate Nevadet. I am the founder and executive director of Body Positive Alliance, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the representation, fair treatment, and equity of all bodies, regardless of appearance or identity. We started back in twenty nineteen as a local high school club and have since expanded to a nonprofit and have been operating for about four years now as of five oh one and c three. And in my personal life, I
am a current undergraduate student at Emory University. I'm a business major, and I'm super passionate about all things pop culture and I think that what we're about to talk about today dives really deep into that, and I'm excited to chat.
I know that you are.
So you're a college student and we're talking about a story that happened seven years ago.
Now, the Curvy Wife Saga. You were a full child for this.
I think I was about twelve when this happened. Yeah, I think. I think twelve is painful to hear. But the truth is the truth.
So were you familiar with the story at all? I was not.
No, this is all news me.
I'm really interested to get your take as a first time I love my Curvy Wife Saga experiencer. What do you make of this story?
What's really interesting is that, at first glance, I think, in the line of work that I do, I was really quick to judge. I think that at first glance it seemed kind of odd whereas I think for people who maybe don't have as much exposure to body positivity would jump toward more reaction of admiration our praise, which I think is what a lot of people did at the time. It seems like when this came out there
were certainly some good components to what was posted. I mean this bringing attention to how women are marginalized based on narrow appearance ideal or fighting conventional norms of attractiveness, and supporting the idea that you can experience love regardless of what you look like, you know, even like finding things that traditionally aren't considered attractive, like fatness in the Western world attractive. I thought there were good nuggets overall.
I just thought it was really odd from just a personal lens of it felt weird for this to be
coming from the perspective of this woman's husband. I think that was what stood out to me immediately is something that was a bit off putting, because if this was a woman speaking to her experience dealing with body image and talking about her journey marrying someone who more narrowly falls in line with those ideals on the like male end of the spectrum, and then also you know over again, like overcoming this personal struggle, that would be something that
I think would be really endearing and really positive for people to see. But just this whole idea that it was coming from him, and it was using such I wouldn't say vulgar is the right word, but using just language that was so body focused and also at the same time giving himself kind of a pat on the back for liking curveer women when that's just something that some people do. I think was it was a bit odd.
I think I'm teetering on icky. But for the time being, just with what I've seen, it has felt kind of odd.
If this was a post by a woman talking about her own body, I feel like it's not it's not even a news story because it's.
A man talking about his wife.
Like you're saying, right, it feels like a very conventional trend cycle, slash media headline, whatever you want to call it. It seems like he's kind of made a career off of this, almost not you know, I look at his profile here, He's about half a million followers. He has continued to produce content around liking curvy women and celebrating curvy women. But again, it just feels really objectifying. It's weird.
It's weird that this is coming from a male perspective because it's not exactly like either he's celebrating men or you know, people who like identify within the confines of his gender identity. He is exclusively celebrating women in a way that I think a lot of people would interpret
as fetishizing people with this particular body type. And I think, again, it's great to challenge norms of romantic attraction and challenge beauty standards and challenge the way that we're perceiving bodies, but again, it's really hard to do that without objectifying people, and especially when he's looking at it through clearly such
a sexual gaze. And again there's also this added component of he considers himself brave for this, which to me is so ridiculous, Like you are not brave for finding your wife attractive, you know, if anything like credits should go to her for her however, she has navigated the world. And also I just want to say too, she is, you know, not the largest woman in the world, right, like she pretty much has Like I'm you know, I've seen her, and you know, I'm not gonna like label
her body one way or the other. I believe in individual like autonomy there. But from what we can see on the census data of the average size of an American woman, pretty standard, right, And I completely understand that the ways in which women are portrayed in the media versus what the actual average American woman looks like, there's a huge discrepancy there. I will never discount that, and
in fact, I will do everything I can to challenge that. Again, this attribution of bravery courage for liking this woman, that's where I kind of feel the fetishizing coming in, because it feels like, despite you being considered ugly to everyone else, I still love you. And men, if you like ugly women out there like I do, it's okay. It's still perpetuating a narrow confine of beauty rather than trying to
expand it. And you know, that is one approach. I don't think liberation comes from expanding the definition of beauty. I think it comes from deconstructing beauty in its totality. But and then it also kind of begs the question, if I'm sitting here criticizing it, then how can we really tackle all these systems or all these nuances with one individual's response, we can't, we can't, he can't accomplish everything,
and I can't expecting too. But again, I think my overall thought here is just that it's uncomfortable that this came from her husband's perspective instead of her own, because I think that just again perpetuates objectification and misogyny. Honestly, that beauty standards create and uphold.
Something that always rubs me the wrong way about this story is just her like Sarah Tripp's removal from the story, because completely at the time this was posted, she was you know, I think she had a couple hundred thousand followers and she was an influencer for I think she could called it at a time like in between sizes where she was between plus size and has like normal store sizes in the way that it was presented, and that was sort of her whole beat was exploring that
and like, how do I find clothes that fit me? If you have the same sort of frustration while shopping, here is what I do. So she was directly interacting with this.
Yeah, it's also what you said too about her having her own Internet personality and you know, propagating something that's coming from really personal and probably pretty painful experience of trying to navigate shopping as a non standard sized woman. That's something that should deserve way more attention than you know, a man calling his wife hot, Right, Like, why are we even test? Holiday said in an article with people,
Why are we giving men trophies? Why are we giving men trophies for being attracted to women who don't fit conventional beauty standards. I think also if people are only attracted to what is considered conventionally beautiful or the beauty standard, that should signal to us that there is so much more we need to address and that there are so many problems out there in our society that need to
be tackled. And I think that's part of what he's saying, right, like the fact that he was quote unquote bullied for liking women who didn't fit this conventional norm. But again,
he there's been some other stuff that's come up. He has made transphobic tweets in the past, and I'm not sure what he didn't necessarily to rectify that, but he's made transphobic tweets towards trans women specifically, and that's something where I think to myself, if you're not going to support all women, then you're just sort of narrowly opening the door for a woman who's maybe like myself, closer to like a size twelve or whatever, you know, come through,
come through the door, and then quickly shutting it for everyone else. Right, it's not incremental progress. That just kind of creates a debate around incremental progress. But I yeah,
I just found it. I just found it really hypocritical, Like you are questioning and criticizing these beauty standards, but then also simultaneously putting messaging out there that would indicate that you don't support all women, and that again you're maintaining that narrow beauty ideal or just narrow idea of womanhood. To some extent, women just aren't appreciated in the media or listened to in the media in the same way
that men are. And so when a man decides it's okay for a woman to love her body, then we're allowed to love our body, right, Like, yeah, we need permission to feel attractive or to feel worthy of love. And that's exactly what this post exemplifies. And it's so transparent as to what the media cares about, which is the perspectives of men, white men at that white straight men. That's incredibly frustrating. And he's making a career out of this, which is, I mean, just kind of disgusting.
If I'm being honest, this is clearly the wrong approach.
Can you tell me a little bit about the work that you've been doing and how it sort of evolved in the four years that you've been doing it.
Definitely, I got my start doing body positive adocacy work really inspired by my personal struggle with body image and ultimately the struggle of the people around me. I noticed that this was an issue that was really pervasive in my community, and I started a body positive club as a sophomore in high school and drew like a pretty right just like a decent community. It was friends, I like got my favorite English teacher to sign on as
our sponsor. It was very casual, and we just had an opportunity to talk about body image in a way that I hadn't really done before, and in a way that I had increasingly started engaging with online because I was really trying at this point to recover from my eating disorders. And so what ended up happening was the pandemic hit around March of sophomore year of high school, and I started doing public addicacy work online, not dissimilar from what Sarah Tripp was doing. I was advocating for
body positivity on TikTok. I amassed a small but mighty following from that, and I got some really cool opportunities
because of it. But I just was led to this place of feeling very objectified, and especially being that young, being fifteen and sixteen and doing this work, it felt a bit uncomfortable for me to be doing, especially so new into my recovery, and ultimately I wanted to do something more substantive, and so the path I took then was to expand my organization from just a club to a nonprofit, and we've been operating as a nonprofit ever since, you know, and I started a podcast surrounding it, speaking
with activists in the space, and really over time developed a broader understanding of body positivity that went beyond feel good about yourself and you know, we can we can help you with your relationship with food, to what are the systems in place that are making people feel bad about their bodies and also contributing to the oppression of people based on their physical appearance, and how can we address,
educate about those and deconstruct them. And so our work now focuses much more on the socio political context of body positivity, as is true with the original intention of the movement, which emerged as a byproduct of fat liberation during the Civil rights era in the United States. And I really found that this approach just opened my eyes in a way that I had previously not been exposed to, in a way that surface level and mainstream body positivity
is failing to encompass. And it's because this part of the movement, and this radical part of the movement, it's not as palatable and it's not as digestive as some of the mainstream messaging that we're seeing. And so while it's great to say that everyone is beautiful, we should also be challenging the idea of beauty in and of itself, right, the idea that we need to be beautiful or need
to expand this definition of beauty. And it's tough because in the society we live in, expanding the definition of beauty is really the most realistic path forward to liberation, right, like representation and the importance of representation, but also behind the scenes, there need to be people who are deconstructing
this idea altogether. And so my messaging now more so revolves around the idea that you should be allowed to feel good about yourself and feel good about the way you look, but you should also know that you are worthy and you are good beyond the way that you look. And so I think in this respect, I understand I
don't know. I wouldn't say I necessarily understand his intention, but I understand why his wife was okay with it happening and what maybe felt like positive validation for her, And I want to say this without being patronizing or like infantilizing her. I also think, though, that there is arguably a need for transparency and the real motivations behind
maintaining this. And is that something that's monetary or is that something that's the basis of ideology, because if it's based on ideology, that could use some correcting, right, multiple things can be true at the same time.
The last thing I wanted to ask you about I'm ten years older than you, but also so much of the way that I perceived my body for better and for worse, Like the Internet, both empowered and encouraged an eating disorder that was, you know, raged for me throughout high school into college, and the Internet was instru mental in me finding people that were extremely like critical in
my recovering and healing from it. I would love to hear a little bit about, you know, whether it's your experience or people you've spoken with through your advocacy, how you know we conceive our bodies with the internet, how and if you have any feelings on how to form a healthier relationship with perceiving your body on the internet.
Totally, and I really resonate with what you said. The Internet was arguably a large contributor to my body image struggles and why it developed my eating disorders, but it also, again like you said, was instrumental in recovery. Some of the early recovery influencers that I found, especially because I was recovering during the pandemic, Exposing myself to this changed the trajectory of my life and I'm so eternally grateful
for that. And I think that a lot of my life has been spent trying to navigate what social media can look like in my life, and that's a journey that I'm still on. I've been on social media for more than half of my life now. I got my Instagram account when I was nine years old, and I'm now again. Like I said, funny, I've been around the Internet for a while now, and I've also I've taken breaks from it. I think there's no shame in taking a break from social media. There's this constant fear of
missing out, but I promise that there is. There's so much more to life than what is on a screen. And I also think that something that I've done because often I think this guilt of sometimes, you know, as someone who struggled with binge eating disorder, find myself kind of replicating the same behaviors when I'm using social media, which is to say that I am scrolling for a
really long time. Then I feel really guilty about it, so I delete social media the next day, and then I re downloaded, and then the same cycle repeats over and over. And something that I really tried to incorporate recently is setting aside like five ten minutes maybe fifteen each day to go on social media and making that time intentional and it doesn't have to be the same time every day, but making the time that you're spending
on social media intentional rather than a passive scroll. You know, while you're waiting in line for you know, a public bathroom, or just like you know, you're sitting at lunch and your friend hasn't showed up yet. In these waiting moments, I think can be something that plagues our mental health, but being intentional about it is something that's really important. And I also think to the same degree, be intentional about what you're consuming. If you are looking at people,
even friends, who make you feel bad about yourself. I think the mute feature is great for friends because you don't have to unfollow them, but you also don't have to see their content. I do this with people. I'm not going to be not going to name names, but there's people that you follow, even that you're friends with, that you're close to and you love, and a door that you look at their Instagram and think, oh my gosh, I need to look like that, then mute them. It's okay.
Set boundaries. Put yourself first, you know. I think that's what's really important here. And sometimes it's really difficult to
control what we see. And I also, I'm going to be realistic, right we live in an age, and especially when you're my age, like a college student, you need to be on social media for clubs and for communication and whatever it may be, especially in my case, like maintaining long distance friendships, which I'm sure a lot of us who totally you know, our adults can relate to. And so I see the value in it, and I think that suggesting we all delete it entirely is not
productive or feasible. But again, being intentional with your usage, moderating your usage is really the biggest thing that I can offer as a piece of advice. And also just know that we're all figuring it out. Being kind to yourself and knowing that even if you doom scroll, you don't have to completely cut yourself off. It's okay, And we're all figuring this out together, and we're all guinea pigs in this new age of communication and life, and it'll take some getting used to for sure.
Thanks so much to Kate, And you can learn more about the Body Positivity Alliance in the description when we come back. Tigris Osborne of NAPA, Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I have been watching YouTube videos theorizing about why Mormon influencers specifically, are so successful.
And it's blowing my mind.
And this is part two of our Curvy Life series. My final talk is with Tigris Osbourne, the executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She's been entrenched in fat activism for a long time. She's a gen xer and has a different free and post internet take on this story. And as always, this interview has been edited for time and clarity. Here's our chat.
I am ty Chris Osborne. I am the executive director of NAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.
So yeah, we've already sort of started diving into the curvy wife saga.
Were you aware of this story when it first happened.
I was.
I wasn't following it super closely because to me, it was just like just another fat admirer guy talking on the internet. And I've seen a lot of that over my years. Before I became involved with NAFA and became more of an activist and advocate in the fat space, I was a plus sized nightclub promoter and so I started a club in Oakland in two thousand and eight called Full Figure Entertainment that was, you know, a nightclub
party for plus sized women. We used to say bodied ladies and their friends and fans of all sizes, And so I was exposed to a lot of guys who are sort of like waving the flag of like, I love big women, and so to me, he was just like another guy waving the flag of I love big women. And the main thing I remember thinking at the time was, your wife is not even that big, dude, This is not like you're really gonna die on this hill of I love big women, and she's only big compared to
like the most mainstream of beauty standards. So that's what I remember my reaction being at the time.
That's something that I've heard come up a lot, and it totally makes sense, and I feel like, does even more to pull curvy wife into.
This story kind of against her.
Well, yeah, and there's always that sort of question of where the male gaze fits into body positivity, right, like how much are feelings and especially at that point in the trajectory of body positivity, so like how much our feelings are influenced by what men think of our bosodies and or how much we do not care or only care when it's our own man, but don't need anybody else kind of going around making pronouncements, and you know, I think people have a lot of really mixed reactions
to a moment like that based on where they are in the trajectory of learning to you know, love and embrace their body for whatever it is. And you know, body positivity is interesting because we've been using the phrase body positivity for decades, like fat activists and and you know, and other advocates for sort of body freedom have been talking about body positivity for decades. The organization the Body
Positive is I think twenty five years old. But when we think of body positivity or we're really talking about what happened on Tumblr and Instagram around body positivity in
the twenty ten ish era. And so in that time, body positivity went from being sort of like the most rebellious you know, the bipock people and the queer people and the disabled people and the people with you know, visible differences in their bodies and faces, and then you know sort of like inched its way over to people who kind of look like models already but are just a tiny bit bigger or a tiny bit different in
some way. And I think those folks need positivity too, they're living in the same culture as the rest of us, but the way that they are disenfranchised from the culture is a little bit different, or sometimes drastically different. And so I think a lot of reaction from people in fat activist community if they knew anything about curvy wife guy, was that sort of like, here we go again, centering someone who is barely outside of the norm and making
a whole big deal about that. And then, you know, especially folks who have a more feminist or womanist orientation, we're just sort of like, and we got to be validated by some dudes, right, Right.
This is something I've wanted to get a little more into because you've been working in this space for so long now, that moment in the twenty tens where body positivity is kind of corporatized, I feel like, in the way that we see a lot of movements corporatized, and you know how you see pride flags outside of banks and all of this stuff, Right.
How did you have to move with that moment?
Because this story feels sort of like a very kind of sanitized presentation of anything, and so I'm curious, you know.
How you sort of navigated that shift.
Sanitize is an interesting word I think. I think I think the word I would use is depoliticized, like or a political It's just like I'm going to say a
nice thing about bodies. I'm not going to talk about any of the politics of why we don't usually say nice things about bodies, or how these bodies are actually treated out in the world, like or the access Like I'm not out there, you know, fighting for more access for my wife so that she can have better clothes or you know, more job opportunities as a plus sized person. I just love her and I want to sing about that, and like I want to sing about how I love
myself too. I'm not hating on this man for loving his wife. I mean, there is a little bit of a sort of like you actually want a lot of congratulations for something that you are just supposed to do. But there's a little bit of that. But in terms of like how it sort of represents what happened with body positivity. Part of the challenge is we want the concepts of body positivity or in our case, you know, fat liberation, fat activism, fat rights movement, we want the
concepts to get more mainstream. That's the point of the work. But when they get more mainstream without any of the politics still attached, what you get is like a really hollow version of what it is.
Right.
I want anthems. I want to shake my butt to songs that sound like they are written by people who want to see me shake my butt, although I still question with him whether he actually wants to see me shake my butt at you know, my size twenty six butt is not the same as his wife's butt, But
that's neither here nor there. Like you know, I want the fun times and the good times too, but then I want the people behind that to show up when there is real work, So like I want the Robbies of the world to sing the anthem and then to also give money to fat activist causes and show up when there's a rally and sign the petitions and do
the testimon like you you know you could do. I love my curvy wife as a senate testimony when we're fighting for a civil rights law, right, And that's kind of what it is, the same thing with the sort of mainstreaming of body positivity. It takes all of the fun parts, It takes all the feel good parts and blows them up, but it leaves all of the work behind, all of the struggle and commitment. But that is where
body positivity started, right. It started with again, fat activists, queer people, especially like Lee readership, from black women and fems in internet spaces, and from feminists and queer women and non binary fems, and like, you know, all of these folks who are living on the margins, folks who are disenfranchised from our systems of power. If you leave all those folks behind, then what you have is just a bunch of slogans and a feel good campaign.
So it's the liberation aspect in the political work that is sort of absent from these kinds of stories.
And I'm curious also how this.
Applies to a media perspective, because something that always kind of struck me about this story is that, yes, Robbie made this post, but no one forced the media to cover it in the way that it did.
Yeah, I mean, it really became a sort of like a juggernaut of you know, like this little body positivity moment or whatever. And I think some of that was just the media fumbling around looking for anything to capitalize
on the popularlay of body positivity. And you know, and it's a little bit of a as they say, a dog bites man story, right, like, we're you know, we're supposed to be like what he actually loves something that everybody else doesn't love, and we're supposed to be like, oh my god, he's such a hero for standing up for his wife this way. And a lot of people
genuinely felt like that. You know, a lot of people genuinely like revisiting the story and seeing comments from people about how it made them feel to finally have somebody not be closeted about liking a person who was like them, because a lot of plus sized women in particular, and I'm sure that this happens across like genders and sexual orientations in some way, but but I think especially like heterosexual women dealing with this gender men, there are a
lot of plus size women who have experienced the dude who likes them in the dark, but who does not like them in public, you know, who will not tell his family and friends who will not certainly won't make a big pronouncement about it. And there are a lot of guys who have genuinely been like harassed by their friends or you know, or left out of social situations because that was their preference. You know, I've known guys
like that. I had a partner who spent years with his friends like teasing him all the time because he liked bigger girls, and even at NAFA, you know, our origin story as a civil rights organization is a story of a man who was passionately in love with his wife and wanted to make a better world for her because he was seeing all the ways that anti fatness was affecting her like emotional landscape, but also was affecting
her in the practical world. And he was thinking about things like the jobs she was confined to when she wanted to get a job in their town, and he was thinking about things like wanting to buy her a blouse for their anniversary and not being able to find anything at all in the town where they live that would fit her. But he will also talk about being a very young man and his friends talking, you know, teasing him for wanting to take a chubby girl to
the prom. He's eighty two years old. And when he tells that story about the prom date he wanted to go on, you can you can feel the way that he felt, you know, othered and shamed by the other boys in his life, and and that that's the story that a lot of men who date fat women have And so I think it was really affirming for a lot of women, the you know, the curvey wife letter. But I also think it was affirming for a lot of guys. And there is something important and powerful about that.
We just have to do more.
With it than like a two minute segment on the Today Show patting him on the back for loving his wife right right.
And because it's the Internet, some people, you know have talked about curvy wife guy as if he should be you know, drawn, and quartered others have been overly.
Defensive of him. And then there's people at the heart of this story. So it's just inherently a mess.
Yeah, And I'm just like, I don't want to like, I don't want to be the champion of curvy wife guy, but I also don't want to be the crucifier of curvy wife guy. Like I think, especially for folks who've never been introduced to a more radical politic, or even a politic at all, around body acceptance, body liberation, body sovereignty, Like people who would be like, what are you talking
about when you say those things? It just feels like a really nice thing sometimes if you are the person who's always been told you weren't good enough by the media, by your family, by other people you tried to date, whatever, to see somebody kind of champion the like, I think you're good enough and and I think it's still true. Like looking at his stuff now, like was looking I was looking at his YouTube channel, and I just wandered into the comments, and you know, on the folks who
are following him. Now you know, there's no like, let's have a meaningful conversation about whether this is objectification of women or whatever. There's mostly just people being like, I feel so relieved to know someone feels like this, or it's about time to hear some of the guys who feel like this actually admit that they feel like this instead of slinking off into a corner somewhere, or you know, being real obvious when they're trying to holler at me.
But then when I want to go out to brunch, they don't want to go right, So become you become the guy who is the champion for curvy girls. But all you do is make booty anthems. Okay, I mean, we need some booty anthems, that's great. You know, what do you do when you do want to take your curvy wife out to brunch and the restaurant doesn't have a chair that fits her? What are you doing about? What are you doing about that? Are you that dude?
R hey?
Are you?
Are you that partner?
You know, there are a lot of couples like Robbie and Sarah, and there are a lot of guys who they're response to having been told that their attraction or adoration of larger women at whatever range of that larger means, like, there are a lot of those guys who have been like their reaction to having been told that they were wrong is to double down on it. And they've got the I love my you know, I Love Curvy Women t shirt and they've got and there is an audience
for that. There's an audience for people who see the guy in the I Love Curvy Women t shirt and are like, hooray, finally someone. And then there's like a whole segment of people who are like, oh my god, here this guy, like, you know, how is he trying to manipulate women with this? Or how is he trying
to make himself popular? With this or how is he like it's never you know, there are a lot of reactions of like, it's not actually about the women, it's all about him, and I think that was part of the real time reaction from a lot of people.
I would love to take some time to talk about what NAFA is doing and has done that does address that political angle, because for whatever reason, if this story like appeal to someone at the time but did like lack that political angle, let's get them into it.
Let's talk about it.
Yeah, And to be fair, I want to also just like be transparent that there are lots of moments in napa's history where NAFA was doing the feel good thing, where NAFA was just you know, doing the the community building thing of connecting people, including connecting people for dating. I mean historically there was actually a program called NAFA Date that was about helping match people to you know,
to someone that they wanted to be with. Or there were people who would come to NAFA conventions, you know, hoping to find the love of their life. They weren't coming to you know, to see how we can protest at the airport for better airline seating. NAFA was doing that, but there were people who were coming that were not that, and sometimes there were quite toxic people who were coming
who were not that. We perfect that at NAFA either, just because our origin story starts in a you know, starts in a place with a romantic couple that was actually where the and are actually did show up as a real ally, That's not what all the dudes did, right, That's not what all people did. But what we hope we are doing better today is approaching things in a much more intersectional way so that everything at NAFA is
not built around heterosexual dating relationships. And I would like to see more cis gender men come around to help do the work. And what some of the work looks like is just fun community building stuff because we need places to celebrate fat bodies, and at NAFA we always use the word fat. We really believe in destigmatizing that word by using it in neutral and celebratory ways. And wherever you are in this sort of spectrum of fatness, like, you're welcome in our spaces.
But we want to always.
Remember that the people who are on the larger end of that spectrum are facing different kind of societal barriers and different kind of systemic challenges than people who are more like Sarah the Curvey wife, Right, We want to always remember that in our work. One of the things
that we are doing is working on legislative change. So we co founded the Campaign for Size Freedom with our friends at FLAIR, which is the fat legal advocacy organization, and it works towards supporting the passage of laws that add height and weight to protected classes under anti discrimination law. The political work that we're doing within the system is all about that. It's all about, you know, advancing civil rights law so that big bodies are protected by those laws.
And we also know that legislation and liberation are not the same thing, right, and that working within the system can only do so much, so we try to support other kinds of grass proofs, organizing a small and definitely under resource movement. I mean, another thing we're doing is talking a lot about getting more funding for this very important issue. So many people think of they just think of body positivity, and they think body positivity has solved.
Everything for larger people.
They either think body positivity or ozembic is going to be the solution to every problem that fat people face, and neither of those things are true. So we work a lot on narrative change just to get people to change their minds, But we also work on narrative change to get people to understand that this is a movement that needs funding, just like other social justice movements need funding.
The last question I had was because this is a story that is now seven years old, which is but yeah, the story is from twenty seventeen.
Now we're in twenty twenty four.
In that span of time, ish, have you noticed any meaningful changes in the way media handles these stories?
Has it improved, has it worsened you? How do you feel?
Well?
I mean, one thing the media did since twenty seventeen, between twenty seventeen and now is just decide that Lizo was the solution to everything, right, Like Lizzo is fat representation or Lizzo is you know, curvy representation. That's all we need. So if we've done our Lizos, we don't have to talk about anything else. And you know that's complicated, right. There are a lot of complications around Lizo for a variety of reasons. And from a like purely representation standard
love it. We we've also seen a lot more representation in body positivity. We've seen some of those you know, businesses that sort of co opted body positivity and helped corporatize it, I think was the word you use. We've seen some of them be a little bit, a little little little bit responsive to the feedback that they were not doing enough. Don't you think it's so much better now?
And like yes, and no, if you can you name anyone Curvey other than Lizo, because if you can't, then we're not on equal status with other, you know, celebrities, And I don't I don't want all of our definition of success to be built around celebrity culture either. But you know, but like, but this is the world we live in, right, and representation matters, and we're still dramatically underrepresented,
especially compared to our percentage of the population. We hear all the time about, you know, how many Americans are fat, and then we don't see any fat Americans, so that's not representation. So it's sort of like we've had some advances in talking about this stuff. I mean, I think there's been a lot of sort of two steps you know, forward,
two steps back. And of course I am loath to talk about this as the Ozembic era, but the reality is we are living in the world of ozembic and all of its ripple effects and the way that that dominates the media has tremendous impact on how we see fat people, whether we think it's okay to be fat, whether we think it's fat people's own fault that they're fat.
And also it dominates the politics because a lot of the money and energy is going into like the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies fighting over who's going to make the close billions of dollars matter the most in terms of covering these drugs, and then gets left behind in politics is no, there's not a miracle solution that gets rid of all the fat people. We still need to actually do political work to make sure that fat
people are treated as equal members of our community. So, you know, I wonder what would have happened if Curvey Wife Guy had debuted in the ozembic era. It is good to see people like like Pretty Big Girl Movement, the Dance Troupe, or like we do have some anthems that are coming actually from female performers, not from men objectifying women or even you know, celebrating women, but like people like El Bias, who's just gotta you know, I gotta love my body anthem. That is all about her
loving her body. It's not actually about men looking at her body and deciding whether they love it or not. Right, there's a little bit more celebration of that space, for that acceptance of that TikTok viralness of that, you know. And you know, you can ask questions about all of those two things too, but at least there's more of a diversity of voice. Especially younger millennials and Gen zs are are better at sort of you know, looking at the stories and being like, okay, but what else though,
or okay, but what's behind this? And I do think that there is some generational difference in reaction. It's not only a generational difference, but you know, in reaction to things like the actual curvy wife Guy post or just the sort of like the career of Curvy wife Guy after the fact. Like, I do think that there is some like we never got to see anything even remotely like this reaction from folks, you know, like my gen X cohort and folks who are older they can't even
imagine a moment like that. That then there is from people who've seen those moments throughout their life, and they might still want to deconstruct the moment or critique the moment, or you know whatever. But at least it's not the first time they've ever heard of it, right. If you've lived your entire life on social media, it's probably not the only time you've ever seen a guy be like, I love big girls, right.
Right, right.
And so there is a little bit of a difference there that again I wouldn't attribute only to generation, but I do think that that is part of the impact on how differently some folks see it. We do have more dialogue around like the male gaze and you know, and how media feeds it or upholds it or whatever, and where we just don't care. There's like a lot more, especially in social media, a lot more self created media by women and fems that is about how that's very
nice for you that you love curvy girls. Go over there somewhere and do your thing right, because over here we don't care what you think. We're just here to do that with just live in our best last with or without you and what you think.
Right.
I think there's a little bit more space for the anthems. I think there's a little bit more space for the people who don't care.
About the anthems.
I mean, I do think there is something to think about too, in the viralness of this and the fact that it was a white couple, you know, like there's always an aspect of race in how we think about which bodies are appropriate or whose bodies are desirable, you know, And there is this stereotype that also we saw in a viral moment around Test Holliday years ago that had to do with like people's assumptions about black men loving
bigger women. And and I do wonder like if a black husband had written that, if people would have just been like, yeah, well that's what black guys think and moved on, Like if if you know that racial element where it's like.
What a white guy who.
Likes big butts and he cannot lie, Like if there's like a you know, I think it's I think it's important to consider the question, both in terms of his race and hers, about like what where that contributed it to the moment blowing up in the way it did, And if you know, if that could have happened with different races involved. Definitely, if it could have happen and
with you know, different sexual orientations involved. You know, if this had been you know, a gay man writing about how he loved his curvy husband, like, would we have seen that on morning talk shows?
No?
Right, So you know there's not It goes way beyond this dude and his wife and their viral moment. You know, at the same time that he was going viral for that, there were you know, hundreds and and I would say thousands of men all over the country going to places like my nightclub looking for the curvy girl of their dreams, right, or looking for the super fat women of their dreams. Not just the sort of like you know, barely bigger than socially acceptable curvy girl, but like actually looking for
and preferencing you know, much larger folks. And he's just like, you know, he became the poster child for something that's not just about him. And there's way more nuance in the thousands of relationships that develop out of you know, that develop with those guys, at least in some of them, right, some of them are just gonna be caricatures, And he's kind of a character. He's kind of caricature at this point.
To me, if we got to hear more stories and see more stories about fat people in love, then it wouldn't seem like such and other people in love with fat people, people of all sizes in love with fat people. Then it wouldn't seem like such a breath of fresh air to people when we got to hear like the one guy who wrote a long caption on Instagram say that he likes his wife.
Thank you so much to Tigris and you can read more about her work and follow her and Nafa at the links in the description. And this concludes our two part series on the curvy wife saga. And again I realized that it is impossible to summarize the history of the fat liberation movement in the space of one podcast episode, so I encourage you to check out the links in the description and learn more. And to close out, I have a confession to make. I've had Big Girl Banger by Robbie Tripp stuck in my.
Head for three weeks. See you next time. Here's your moment of fun. Uh got hot wife?
Real nice? Oh, got a hot wife? What a good life?
What a hot wife?
Real nice? Hot wife?
Good life?
Okay, I've lost I've lost the thread. I can't Talk. This first.
Sixteenth minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans reganizing. Ian Johnson is our supervising produce U and our editor. Our theme song is by Sat thirteen and Pet. Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cat's fleeing Casper, and my pet rock Bird, who will outlive us all by bye