Unhealthy, deluded influencer gets real and feels better; NY Times sides with the followers she "betrayed"
Two major sins on the political left: admitting to promoting a mistaken idea and escaping the media-enforced inversion of "healthy" and "unhealthy"
On February 24, The New York Times ran a story about someone in the online performing arts who is winning, at least for now, a personal-adversity battle. For years, this woman was obese, and not only clung to but widely promoted the idea that her size wasn’t detrimental to her overall well-being. Then, despite her professional life being radically opposed to any weight-loss efforts she might undertake, she slimmed down and feels better today.
Twenty years ago, these facts would have prompted the NYT toward a different framing than the one in play now:
OLD-SCHOOL WELLNESS: This woman is a hero for escaping the beckoning of the brainwashed, lowest-common-denominator herd. She’s healthier—just look at her and listen to what she says!
NEW-SCHOOL “WELLNESS”: This woman is on a dark journey for not succumbing to the resentments of the brainwashed, lowest-common-denominator herd. She’s a bitch—just look at her and listen to what she says!
The author, Katie J. M. Baker, divides her subjects into two factions: Dronme Davis, and everyone in the world who thinks Dromne Davis is, like, a total traitor for facing the facts about obesity and admitting that she had been sending an incorrect and damaging message, consciously or otherwise. Baker sides enthusiastically with the “is, like, a total traitor” camp, with her faux-grave shitpost of an essay in “The Paper of Record” serving as a kind of thrashing, zaftig version of a classic suburban Mean Girl in its own right, directing rather than presenting the sentiments.
Because this story is in The New York Times and the writer is Katie J.M. Baker—a U.C.-Berkeley grad who on her LinkedIn profile promotes herself as an investigative reporter and an unabashed political activist at the same time, an unusually candid step even for an NYT hack—the essay demands that readers make certain conceits that normies, unprompted, will not and cannot.
For example, most younger NYT readers cannot imagine a world without Instagram and its ass-waggling, frantically circle-jerking anti-heroes, while a normie who understands the Internet knows that the word “influencer” is always associated with insincerity. There are no exceptions. This doesn’t mean that every single thing an influencer says is a lie, although this is often close to true; it just means that the message and its deliverer are both fraudulent, so consume this shit at your own risk.
The implication is that no one has any more reason to be disappointed in, or point blame at a “fallen” “influencer” than someone who forks over money to a psychic or a penis-ill mill (by the way, use the code BOTP when checking out and get a 30% discount) and finds out he or she made an error in judgment.
But the main point of the essay, story, or whatever this is was not the specific characters or their seething, high-fasting-glucose-powered melodrama. The point of an essayist is what he or she does, and this essayist tells readers if you’re mad at fat people gone thin, you should be, because they’re the wrong ones. Now find a more steadfast fat influencer and have some faith in the program. This is evident in the ways Baker casually pathologizes Davis’ weight loss—for example, using the term “relapse” to capture the entire process because Davis has disclosed, or claimed, a history of an eating disorder of some sort.
It’s also easy to step back declare with uncanny accuracy and precision that anyone who uses Instagram for more than fifteen minutes a day is a lost cause anyway, and that everyone involved in the story is either a bullshitter or a dunce-yawping mark who deserves whatever grief they get. But these people all wandered into the framework of a dehumanizing online culture they didn’t create or set out to use as a tool of anti-human messages.
But corporate outlets joining in the soften up, eat up, and take that pill with FOOD, motherfuckers! clamor—despite such crap having become de rigueur in the NYT and The Washington Post in recent years—remains an unsatisfying reality. On that basis, we must declare Katie J.M. Baker (First of her Name, no doubt) to be a twat (not for the first time, I’m sure) for her overarching intent: denying that obesity, all else the same, is a path to a far greater range of medical and psychological outcomes than other body types.
This post (find the URL on your own if you must) seems to be from a typical anti-Davis pundit:
Whether this kind of blogging phenomenon is funny or not is up to the reader. But it’s impossible to not find the humor in this kind of playfully bleak reporting by the NYT and its nihilistic editorial direction, too. The headline-subhead combo alone invites ridicule even from blunt-force parodists:
I wouldn’t rule out any of the following in the same outlet before the end of the year, but I suspect that, at least for now, they would strike even most “body positivity” advocates as over-the-top: