'Fatties' Article: Not a Good Idea, Marie Claire

(Newser) – Marie Claire should have seen this backlash coming: The Internet is not happy with Maura Kelly, the Marie Claire writer who authored “Should Fatties Get a Room? (Even on TV?),” a post about new sitcom Mike & Molly. Among the ill-advised comments Kelly made about the show, which follows a couple who met at Overeaters Anonymous: “I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room.”

After being called, among other things, “fattist,” “ignorant,” “cruel,” and “uneducated,” Kelly apologized and blamed her mindset on her own body image issues. Even so, “How could she think this was acceptable?” writes Sadie Stein on Jezebel—and how could Marie Claire think so? “It's that, as much as anything else, that's worrisome: that a mainstream magazine with a wide reach and an ostensibly progressive outlook could think, in 2010, this was okay to write and implicitly endorse.” Click here for another reaction.