Let’s guess if the feedback below came from Great British Bake Off Judges or my editor:  

1. Underbaked
2. Raw, totally raw
3. The layers are there…at least
4. Good idea but not executed as well as it could have been
5. Crispy all the way through
6. This isn’t finished
7. It’s a bit boring
8. Not enough proofing
9. A work of art
10. Definitely a mouthful
11. Very rich
12. You had so much time to work on this. What happened?
13. Not bad
14. This batch is inconsistent
15. How whimsical
16. Disappointing
17. I could picture this in a Parisian shop
18. It’s perfect
19. Way too sweet
20. I expected more from you, to be quite honest

As a long-time Shirley Jackson fan, I was eager to binge the new Netflix show based on her book, The Haunting of Hill House. While I don’t love slasher films, give me anything in a creepy old house. The Shining wouldn’t be what it is without the Overlook Hotel. Settling in to watch, I expected to feel the usual emotions you feel viewing something scary—dread, fright, perhaps revulsion. But suddenly I felt an emotion wash over me that took me by surprise: anger. Anger over watching a character being forced to view the embalmed body of a loved one.

Told over a series of ten episodes, the visually stunning show is a reimagining of Jackson’s story, rather than a direct adaptation. Jackson’s group of strangers meeting in Hill House to take part in a paranormal study are now a nuclear family, the Cranes. Olivia and Hugh Crane purchase Hill House with the intention of remodeling it over the summer, then flipping it for a fortune so that they can build their “Forever House” for their family of five children. Hill House has other ideas however.

The Cranes are haunted not only by their experiences that summer, but by the lasting devastation of grief. Director Mike Flanagan tells their tale in present time mixed with flashbacks that reveal how they became the fractured adults that they are. The show has received mainly positive critical reviews, and is currently the most popular user rated Netflix series.

Living a life damaged by grief is something I understand well. When I was eleven, my sister died. I usually just tell people that she died in a car accident, which is sort of true, but really, she drowned. It happened in Colorado, during the spring thaw when the melting snow on the mountain peaks turns peaceful, meandering rivers into dark, raging torrents.

Living in a tiny coal mining town, restaurants and teen-age entertainments were both in small supply, so one April evening, she and a few friends decided to drive a few towns away for pizza. The driver lost control of the car, and in the mountains, when that happens, you either drive into the side of the mountain or you plunge off the other side, over a cliff. He swerved to the cliff-plunging side that had a spring-swollen river at the bottom. I don’t know if my sister drowned in the car or was thrown from the car into the river. I suppose it doesn’t really matter—the outcome was the same. She was seventeen.

In the Netflix series, Shirley (Crane sibling #2) is a mortician, running her own funeral home with her husband as the business manager. In the first episode, we see her counselling a child named Max, who does not want to view his dead grandmother lying in her coffin. Max has been seeing the ghost of his grandmother at night, who shows more signs of decay with each visitation. Shirley tells Max that viewing the open casket of his grandmother will give him the opportunity to say goodbye, to have closure. Shirley tells him that she has “fix[ed] her, that’s what I do.” She will “look just like you remember her — just like she’s supposed to.”

These reassurances do not work on Max, as we see in episode 2. At the funeral, Max is still firm in his resolve to not view the open casket. “I don’t want to,” he insists. But for some reason, he must look. Shirley tells him, “If you don’t, you’ll be upset later. I promise. This is a good thing, and you’re a good boy.”

We don’t learn if Max does view Grandma or not, but most likely he was forced to do so. The show at this point flashes back to Shirley as a child, at a funeral, unwilling to view her mother’s corpse. Young Shirley gives in, and is amazed at how her mother looks lying against the satin. “You fixed her,” she says to the funeral director, highlighting the seminal moment to her becoming a mortician. (Likely the kittens and her need to control played a role as well).

Watching these scenes with Max resurged feelings of frustration and anger that I thought I had long let go of. Why won’t anyone listen to him? Why does he have to see his Grandmother’s dead body? Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?

Like Max, I was very certain that I did not want to see my sister lying in a coffin. I did not want that to be my final image of her. Like Max, none of the adults around me listened to me either, believing that they knew what was best for me. “You need to say goodbye to your sister. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” “She’ll just look like she’s sleeping.” “It’ll be okay.”

Unlike the dramatic, stylish gloom of Shirley’s funeral parlor, the one in which my sister’s casket was displayed had bright white walls, her burgundy carpeting, gold detailing, and multiple blinding flood lights; there was nary a shadowy nook to be found. No spaces for lurking specters. No place to hide from well-intentioned spectators. Bouquets and wreaths of flowers lined either side of the room. The peppery scent of lilies was so thick, you could taste it; to this day, I am triggered by their smell.

Why is there an assumption that children don’t know what they need?
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While I wasn’t physically dragged to the coffin, and absent of support from any adult, the continual emotional pressure eventually broke down my defenses. I finally was a “good girl” and went to see how the mortician “fixed” my sister.

She lay on white satin, in a white dress. You might have thought she was sleeping, if you viewed her from a distance. But up close, no amount of pancake base or pink blush could cover the green and purple bruises. She was swollen, caused either by drowning or embalming. The glue used to keep her eyes shut was visible. Her face was in a grimace, and nothing about her looked peaceful.

As I stood beside her, the hope that it was all a horrible practical joke and she might sit up — alive — all dissolved when I clasped her folded hands. Hands that had brushed my hair a thousand times, turned the beloved pages of hundreds of books, and caught lizards just to make me laugh, were now the icy hands of mannequin.

As my delusion shattered, a fellow mourner came up beside me and said, “Oh, look at her! She looks like a sleeping angel.” Unable to face such obvious posturing and lies, I ran outside to wait on the steps until it was time to drive to the cemetery. I didn’t say goodbye, because she was neither there nor gone for me.

The act of burial — placing a dead person in the ground with intention — is indisputably traced back 100,000 years to a group burial in Israel and possibly goes back 250,000 years, to a Homo naledi find in South Africa. Paleoanthropologist Paige Madison describes the desire to bury the dead as a part of the human ability to think in the abstract:

“Humans use symbols to communicate and convey these abstract thoughts and ideas. We imbue non-practical things with meaning. Art and jewelry, for example, communicate concepts about beliefs, values, and social status. Mortuary rituals, too, have been put forward as a key example of symbolic thought, with the idea that deliberate treatment of the dead represents a whole web of ideas. Mourning the dead involves remembering the past and imagining a future in which we too will die.”

As humans began creating more complex living arrangements, so too, did the rituals surrounding burial become more elaborate. It’s difficult to tell if the earliest burials were secular or involved any spiritual meaning, but soon, funeral rites took on a religious element, typically involving a belief in an afterlife. The development of social hierarchy also played a role in the development of how we bury our dead. The higher up the social ladder, the more elaborate and costly the service.

The specific traditions widely vary, across time and cultures. Since the Civil War, embalming and underground interment within a coffin has been the traditional burial practice in the United States. While embalming does delay decomposition, the notion that viewing the body somehow helps with the grieving process is not scientific, as noted by investigative journalist Jessica Mitford in her exposé, The American Way of Death. Rather, it’s a justification put forward by those who have a financial stake in encouraging embalming: the funeral industry.

As an adult, I took a class on grief. Part of the course work was a field trip to a funeral parlor. It was a large blue Victorian house that had been converted to part living space and part business, much like Shirley’s set up on the show. Keeping with the Victorian architecture, the interior decoration was heavy wood, silk-lined walls, and sumptuous fabrics of deep peacock-blue. The air was vanilla scented. It could have been an upscale bed and breakfast.

Our tour guide was tiny, with a sleek business bob and black-framed glasses. She was a recent graduate, joining the family business right out of college. “Third generation mortician!” she chirped. “I know I look really young, but I’ve been around this business my whole life. A lot of morticians are multigenerational. I guess we like to keep it in the family.” She was “passionate about helping people in their worst time.” After touring the viewing room, the coffin showroom, and business offices, we trooped downstairs to see the embalming rooms.

Walking down the narrow stairs, I began feeling the short breath, racing heart and sweatiness of a panic attack, knowing I wouldn’t like what I was about to learn. The pull to know what had been done to my sister was stronger and I kept going, doing calming breathing techniques. Downstairs was completely different world than above. Hospital doors, Dijon mustard-colored walls, dim fluorescent lighting, and cement floors. Odd chemical smells, plus something undefinable replaced the vanilla. It felt cold. And here? There were dark corners.

The embalming room looked much like it did in The Haunting of Hill House, except I remember more hoses and sprayers hanging from the ceiling. When I learned about all the draining, and injecting, and filling, I felt a screamless horror. I viscerally knew that my sister would not have wanted any of that done to her body. A body that she was so meticulous in maintaining. Not only was her death violent, but it felt like she had been further violated, after death.

Seeped in a commercialism that has largely removed meaningful ritual from burial rites, the funeral industry in the United States rakes in many billions of dollars each year. With the cost of cremation being many thousands of dollars less than embalming, funeral homes have a vested interest in steering their clientele in the direction of chemical preservation. Still, the number of people choosing cremation in the U.S. continues to rise.

According to the Cremation Association of North America’s 2017 industry statistics, the number of people cremated vs embalmed was 51.6%. Reasons behind the growth are varied, from cost to decreased religious stigma against it (the Catholic Church opposed cremation until 1963). Concern for the environment is shaping people’s choices as well, with the growing awareness of the toxicity of embalming chemicals leaching into the soil and water.

I’ve chosen cremation for myself because I don’t want anyone I love forced to see my death face; I want them to only recall how I looked alive.

My mother and I have only talked about this issue once, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t recall who brought it up, or how or why we discussed it. What I do remember is that I wanted her to know I was angry over being forced to view the open casket. I wanted — at least — an acknowledgement that my autonomy had been overlooked, that maybe a mistake had been made.

“I told you then that I didn’t want to see her, and now I’ve had to live with that image of her dead stuck in my mind since then. No one would listen to me!”

“I just had to see her one more time.”

“Then why couldn’t you look at her back in a private room? Instead of demanding that everyone see her? That I see her?” My resentment was like a pin popping a balloon; my mother’s entire body deflated. Looking at the ground, she mumbled, “I don’t know. I just couldn’t think really about anything at the time.”

In that moment, she seemed so tiny and fragile—something I could either choose to set carefully down or hurl at the floor, smashing to bits. Witnessing her hurt, I felt ashamed for only focusing on myself, and decided to let the anger go. I thought I had until it flared up while watching The Haunting of Hill House.

While the final episode is the one most negatively reviewed, I believe it gets it right. In order to move past grief — at least enough to heal and learn to live on — the raw honesty that comes from a moral inventory is needed. I’ve never wavered in my certainty that seeing my sister in her coffin was not right for me. I still wish one person had listened, and helped me, rather than being coerced into what other people thought would bring me closure.

However, I did need to let go of my anger, because I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted in my mother’s situation. The possibility that I might find out is my own Bent Neck Lady. I don’t fear my own death, but I am afraid that I will know the nightmare of burying my child, that I will have to make the impossible decision: embalming or cremation?

And does either choice really matter? Death’s outcome is the same.

It’s not that I want to burst the Queer Eye bubble. I adore its heart-warming loveliness and energetic embrace of diversity, and the way they fill their subjects with confidence fills me with joy. But behind those French tucks and that exposed brickwork lies an uncomfortably materialist message. Queer Eye might seem a liberal millennial dream, promoting messages of self-care and acceptance, but the solution to its participants’ problems is often just to throw money at them. In Queer Eye it’s okay to be gay and it’s okay to be a man with feelings—but only if you have all the right stuff to go with that.

Of course, Queer Eye is not the only makeover show that does this; much of the appeal of the genre is in seeing transformations that you could only dream of, while creating pathos by giving these expensive overhauls to those most in need of it. The premise is always that this new house/wardrobe/garden/car will solve the participant’s problems and change their life. Extreme Makeover and Ten Years Younger use pricey cosmetic surgery as their tools, while Property Brothers and Grand Designs pour their money into lavish refurbishments of houses. Perhaps Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked, premiering in 2006, made makeover TV’s materialism the most literal when he asked the female participants to stand half-dressed in shop windows at the end of each episode to show how much their body confidence had grown.

Queer Eye might brand itself differently from the classic makeover show, but its materialist focus is the same. The Fab Five—Jonathan (grooming), Tan (fashion), Bobby (design), Karamo (culture) and Antoni (food), the team of queer experts who guide the transformations on the show—are always ready with good advice, personal anecdotes and a sturdy shoulder to cry on. They insist they are there to help their “heroes” be their best selves, and lead honest, empowered lives. Yet in the world of Queer Eye it doesn’t matter if someone is struggling to come out to their family or needs to rekindle a romantic relationship, the solution is a fancy new wardrobe and a designer haircut. The big reveals of each episode still relate to a flashy makeover of their clothes, hair, and house, with a sidelined section on their “cultural” development (still as vague as it was in the original iteration of the show) and how they’ve learned to cook one incredibly simple dish using reasonably expensive ingredients. To become a better person you need to have expensive material goods and be attractive, no matter your social background.

Queer Eye might brand itself differently from the classic makeover show, but its materialist focus is the same.
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Take William from Season Two’s “A Decent Proposal” as an example. William works at Walmart, as does his girlfriend Shannon, to whom he is planning to propose. Quite clearly they’re not going to be living a highflying lifestyle. The couple live in a trailer home that’s been decorated with love, if not expensive taste. Yet the Fab Five’s reaction to the home is classist, and shows real misunderstanding of living on a low income. When they first enter Bobby seems scared to touch anything and a sofa that was bought for $30 at Goodwill is deemed a rip off. But what shocks the Fab Five the most is that William and Shannon are using furniture that Shannon had previously owned with her ex. To them this is terrible, unacceptable, a cause of William’s difficulty in romantically committing to Shannon; perhaps it’s merely that, on a low income, the couple don’t have the option of turning down perfectly good furniture for emotional reasons.

Only Antoni seems to acknowledge that they work so much they might not have time to create the perfect home environment for themselves. William and Shannon seem like a sweet couple who deserve a bit of luxury; but surely the waxing, dermatology consultation, and expensive clothing the Fab Five advise aren’t a standard that two Walmart employees can keep up? The finale of their episode is a showy proposal at an open-air cinema, complete with fancy picnic and a cheesy film made with the help of the Fab Five. It’s adorable, its loving, and it made me cry—but isn’t it the love between William and Shannon that matters, not the financial ability they have to put on a huge proposal?

When Are We Going To Get Over Biphobia?
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It’s a recurring theme throughout the show that the wholesome encouragement and message of self-confidence must be accompanied by the purchase of new material items. Season One’s opening episode “You Can’t Fix Ugly” centres on Tom, who has gone through multiple divorces and is still in love with his ex-wife, Abby. He clearly needs a confidence boost and perhaps some lessons on how to show a romantic partner you care, but alongside these the Fab Five also do the standard appearance and house makeover. Apparently his recliner chair is disgusting (it kind of is) and his house is a mess (it also is), so it gets a huge redesign from Bobby. Wouldn’t it be better if the Fab Five just tidied up what Tom already has, rather than buying brand new expensive items? Instead it’s repeatedly made clear in the episode that this physical transformation is crucial to a successful relationship, betraying the materialist heart of the format.

It’s the fact that so much of Queer Eye is brilliant that makes its central failure so underwhelming. The program has been lauded for how it tackles modern masculinity, encouraging men—whether they be bearded divorcees, nerdy comedians, or Burning Man addicts—to acknowledge their emotions and feel free to be vulnerable. Even the gruffest are hugging left, right, and center by the end of their makeover, proudly telling those closest to them how much they love them. Queer Eye does men’s rights the feminist way, allowing men to do the things they feel their gender identity has told them they can’t. It’s also tackled racialist police violence in its first season, and had a trans participant in its second season. I’d never claim Queer Eye provides the most radical or comprehensive analysis of these issues, perhaps particularly in the case of its race debate, but it doesn’t shy away from talking about difficult issues.

Wouldn’t it be better if the Fab Five just tidied up what Tom already has, rather than buying brand new expensive items?
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Yet Queer Eye’s materialism and consumerist ethos undermines its good work and laudable intentions. Toxic masculinity, racism, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people are deeply tied into the capitalist materialism at the heart of Queer Eye’s makeovers. A capitalist society is always willing to let individuals suffer if it makes the boss at the top just a tad more money. LGBTQ+ people are often the victims of this; we see that when the price of AIDS medication increases because of the greed of pharmaceutical companies, or in how LGBTQ+ venues are being pushed out of London and other big cities as property owners hike up inner-city rent. By combining liberal TV with materialist values, Queer Eye reflects the trend of “pink capitalism,” in which companies profit from targeted inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community, whilst simultaneously benefitting from the ways heteronormative capitalism exploits queer people.

The history of pink capitalism is a sad reflection of how quickly businesses will jump upon a radical social movement. As widespread homophobia declined around the 1990s, businesses recognized the spending power of LGBTQ+ people—particularly gay men. Queer couples often benefited from two paychecks and no children, sometimes making their disposable income uniquely high. At the same time, openly queer people became less likely to be turned away from well-paying jobs and, eventually, LGBTQ+ culture even became trendy and desirable to those who didn’t identify as anything but straight.

If Not For Capitalism, Would I Still Have Been Abused?
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Western cosmopolitan culture is now welcoming to queer people, and for a business to be anything but welcoming too—at least in the public eye—is often detrimental to their success. Never is that more obvious than during Pride season, when everyone from Spotify to Burger King to Google will jump on the queer bandwagon in the hope of appealing to an audience that broadly accepts diversity. Sure, its nice that companies no longer overtly hate queer people, and that queer employees get a chance to organize and march with company floats, but the LGBTQ+ community aren’t merely consumers. As backlash to the commercialization of pride will tell you, Pride started as a protest not product placement.

Unfortunately, in a capitalist society, everything costs money, and sometimes chucking a whole load of cash at something can make a difference. Season One’s “Hose Before Bros” and Season Two’s “God Bless Gay” both involve the Fab Five getting involved in community projects, helping with a fire station’s fundraiser and doing up a church’s community center respectively. But even then shouldn’t the state be funding fire stations and community centers, not Netflix? And for the individual transformations, the focus upon stocking their lives with shiny new things just seems lazy. It reinforces the worst messages materialist capitalism has for us and this show has the potential for more than that.

While the Fab Five do sometimes incorporate old belongings into the makeovers, wouldn’t it be powerful if this happened more? Queer Eye could tell us that the foundations of a new life are all around us if we just have the right mentors, adding rather than detracting from the other inspiring messages the show has to convey. In 2018, let’s separate materialism from self-worth and make life transformations about more than pricey goods and services. In choosing not to do this, Queer Eye falls into the trap of complying with capitalism, not challenging it. It’s time Netflix changed this—and we got the heartwarmingly subversive Queer Eye we deserve.

I can’t remember what my friend Sophie and I were talking about that night in the spring of 2011. I know our families were having dinner together; I know I had just lost 30 pounds in three months, and would lose at least 10 more. What matters, though, is that for whatever reason, I said, “I’m not fat anymore,” laughing, expecting Sophie to grin and agree.

She didn’t. Instead, she gave me a response that I have not forgotten in seven years. Her face contorted into confusion, pure in its immediacy, framed by the platinum hair I so envied. Sophie looked me in the eye, without a trace of hesitation, and said the most shocking thing I’d ever heard: “You may be skinny now, but you were always slim.”

I don’t know how I responded. It’s possible I didn’t say anything. I may have laughed and brought up something, anything, else. But Sophie’s words have replayed in my mind too many times to count in the seven years since she said them—when I’ve tried to fall asleep, when I’ve hung out with friends, when I watched the trailer for the upcoming Netflix series Insatiable.

You were always slim, she said, the first person who ever told me that, when I was 14 years old.

When I Get Back To My Body
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When I think about the shows and movies I watched as a kid, only one features characters comfortable in their fatness, lovable at any weight: Dumbo, whose lovable, fat characters are elephants. The first human—or, at least, humanoid—fat characters I remember were villains, whose fatness seemed to correspond with greater deficits in character. The Powerpuff Girls’ Big Billy is as rotund as he is stupid: even when he wants to help Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, his weight and idiocy prevent him from doing so—until he can save the day by eating. Fuzzy Lumpkins, another recurring antagonist in The Powerpuff Girls, first enters the series by attacking Townsville with a weapon that turns everything into meat, and plans to eat the city. The Powerpuff Girls can only defeat him when he turns sweet Bubbles’ hair into a chicken drumstick, an affront on her appearance which enrages her so much, she gets a full action sequence beating him to a pulp.

And then, of course, there’s Ursula. Her hugeness in The Little Mermaid makes her a looming, frightening figure, so sharply contrasted with beautiful Ariel, whose waist is smaller than Ursula’s arm. In “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” Ursula convinces Ariel she uses her magic for good by talking about the time she made a fat mermaid skinny, which helped her get a boyfriend. It’s a small moment, but one which sets the tone for women’s weights in the movie. When Ursula turns herself into a human to win Prince Eric, armed with the voice he fell in love with in the first place, she can give herself any body imaginable. She makes herself tall, white and skinny.

These characters didn’t tell me all fat people were evil: I knew from my own experience that wasn’t true. I spent most of my childhood snugly chubby, and I adored my parents, who were both fat. However, these characters did tell me fatness was gross, fatness was wrong, and fat people should be considered unlovable. My parents unintentionally spread that idea, too. They hated their own, fat bodies, and fed me a steady stream of well-meaning encouragement to lose weight as a child. Part of that encouragement came from my doctor’s advice, but part of it came from their feelings, externalized: they didn’t want me to look like them.

When I think about the shows and movies I watched as a kid, only one features characters comfortable in their fatness, lovable at any weight: Dumbo.
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Although I loved my parents, their self-loathing told me I should not love their appearances. I took that self-loathing as my own. When I was 14—and 13, and 12, and 11—I felt like a beached whale. In reality, Sophie was right: I’d never been fat. Before I began losing weight that year, I weighed 132 pounds and stood at 5’1. I had a BMI of 24.9—just below the overweight range, but still, below it. I’d developed the kind of healthy lifestyle my doctor had always encouraged. I’d found exercise habits I enjoyed, such as swimming and biking; I began commuting by foot more; I ate enough food to make me happy.

It’s ironic, in retrospect, that those months of early pubescence were the physically healthiest time of my life. Back then, whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, all I could see was ballooned fat, suffocating me. That body dysmorphia was severe enough in suburban Ohio, where I grew up. It became worse in the summer of 2010, when I was still 13, and my family moved to Paris, France.

I had been chubby in Ohio, but so had plenty of other kids: my fat didn’t stand out much. Paris was different. A 2009 study at France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies found French women were the thinnest in Europe, with the highest proportion of clinically underweight women on the continent. Even at a private, international school in Paris, my classmates reflected this study’s findings. I was objectively one of the heaviest girls in my grade.

To their credit, none of my classmates called me “fat” to my face, but I felt isolated by my weight all the same. I couldn’t wear the same trendy fashions that everyone else did. I felt self-conscious eating anything in public because of France’s intense, ingrained stigma against eating too much. The country’s Catholic roots have popularized the notion of gluttony as a sin: portions are small, snacking is rare, and fatness is seen as a character flaw that any Jacques or Julienne has the right to talk about.

The most striking moment, though, happened in March, just as the winds had begun to warm. One day in the courtyard during our lunch break, I saw a crowd of boys throwing paper balls at a girl in the grade below me. She was one of the other “fat” girls. She wore a pale, yellow shirt that clashed with her reddening eyes, and she was cowering against a wall, yelling at the boys. I couldn’t understand everything they shouted back, but I could make out the words grosse and laide—fat and ugly.

My legs froze, and I stood watching that scene until the bell rang and a friend dragged me to class. No one else had seemed shocked by the bullying; no one had tried to intervene on the girl’s behalf. Those ranks of cowards included me: I was too scared. I knew, if I tried to help her, the boys would attack me, too.

I decided to start losing weight two weeks later.

‘It’s Because You’re Fat’ — And Other Lies My Doctors Told Me
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Yet the bullying I witnessed wasn’t enough, on its own, to make me want to lose weight. The bigger problem was my loneliness. In Ohio, I had a close-knit friend group with whom I spent countless hours, friends I trusted with my life. In Paris, my 10-person class hung out together after school sometimes. But I couldn’t make forever friendships, one on one, the way my other classmates did. They would hang out with each other in pairs instead of groups, they would spend hours texting each other and exploring the city. I got along with all my classmates, I consider them friends to this day, but they made close, personal friendships without me. In the entire year I lived in Paris, only once did I hang out one-on-one with a friend.

I decided my fat was the problem. I thought of Big Billy and Fuzzy Lumpkins and Ursula, whose weights were indistinguishable from their villainy; I thought of Natalie in Love Actually, whose so-called “tree trunk” thighs made her unattractive to nearly every character in the movie; I thought of Fat Monica on Friends, who exemplified the potential of a fat person to find love only once they lost weight.

Everyone else at school had found their BFFs; everyone else was thin. To me, the pattern was clear. I decided to lose weight, my parents celebrated my decision, and eventually, my dieting spiraled out of control. I lost 40 pounds in four months. At my lowest point, I weighed 92 pounds.

After a year in Paris, my family moved back to suburban Ohio. I started to see a therapist, who helped, and slowly I gained back weight. But I was never quite able to regain the healthy lifestyle I’d had when I was a preteen. It took me until college to realize where I’d gone wrong. Not only had I never been fat, but—more importantly—people’s opinions of me, nine times out of ten, didn’t depend on my weight. When I started high school in Ohio, no one became my friend because I had a toned stomach or because they could see my ribs. My new classmates became my friends because I made them laugh, treated them kindly, and showed I cared about them. And they remained my friends when I gained weight, knowing my body had no bearing on my personhood.

Yet movies, TV shows and books keep perpetuating the idea that fat people can’t be loved. The latest example, coming to Netflix on August 10, is Insatiable. The show’s premise is simple: “Fatty” Patty (Debby Ryan, in an awful fat suit) is bullied for her weight in high school, until a punch to the face forces her to spend the summer with her jaw wired shut. When she comes back to school after those three months, she has miraculously lost 70 pounds, looks like a Disney starlet, and her classmates all but salivate over her. Newly confident, she sets out to take revenge on everyone who bullied her while she was fat.

Everyone else at school had found their BFFs; everyone else was thin. To me, the pattern was clear.
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In plenty of ways, Patty is a far cry from the Big Billys and Ursulas of the world. She’s the hero; she’s clever and determined; she’s meant to receive the viewer’s sympathies, not their disdain or disgust. But Insatiable would not exist without the assumption that fat people can’t be loved—fat women, in particular. To care about Patty’s revenge crusade, the viewer has to believe in the pain she is avenging: that almost everyone she knew really did hate and bully her because of her weight.

That’s not to say no fat person has ever experienced such cruelty. Insatiable’s creator, Lauren Gussis, has said her own experiences inspired the show. The bullying she suffered as a 13-year-old because of her weight made her develop an eating disorder and want to seek revenge. Indeed, Gussis called Insatiable “a cautionary tale about how damaging it can be to believe the outsides are more important,” and said she’s trying to share her “pain and vulnerability through humor.”

Maybe Insatiable does succeed in that. But when over 150,000 people call for a show’s cancellation before it airs, and when thousands post selfies with the #NotYourBefore hashtag, a commentary on how fatness is often depicted as a sad or undesirable “before” to skinniness, there’s usually a reason. Gussis’ statement, in which she admits developing an eating disorder in her drive to “look pretty on the outside,” is revealing. Skinniness does not make a person more beautiful. Fat does not make its bearers ugly. I understand Gussis’ anguish: I grew up convinced that fat was the antithesis of beauty, too. But I have spent years unlearning that conception of bodies, letting myself find beauty in our skins’ folds and creases instead. Gussis seems to have done the opposite: she has internalized the idea that fat people can’t be pretty, can’t be successful, can’t be loved. For all her good intentions, she remains trapped in a twisted, dangerous cycle of fatphobia.

That cycle has infected almost every part of our lives. Our culture is oversaturated with fat jokes and narratives about overweight people’s—particularly overweight women’s—inability to be loved. We perpetuate this standard through negative representations in media, showing viewers over and over again that skinny bodies are aspirational and overweight bodies are not. A 2012 study from Durham University in the U.K. found that such exposure, called a “visual diet,” directly influences our perceptions of acceptable weights: seeing a series of large or small bodies, presented as aspirational or not, changed participants’ preferences for different body types. These perceptions, in turn, affect how we treat people with “unacceptable” weights, and the consequences can be devastating. Overweight women are significantly less likely to be believed if they report rapes or sexual assaults, obese patients often receive worse medical care than their thinner counterparts, and overweight people even face hiring discrimination, which is not illegal in the U.S. And that’s not even mentioning the social ramifications in day-to-day life activities such as dating.

Insatiable is a cog in that cycle, contributing to the stigmas and mistreatment overweight people face everyday. Even worse, it masquerades as a progressive, uplifting show, targeting young women most susceptible to its misguided messaging. When I was 14, I would have loved Insatiable. The premise would have given me hope: just like Fatty Patty, I could lose weight and get everyone to love me, too.

Skinniness does not make a person more beautiful. Fat does not make its bearers ugly.
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I am healthier mentally in every way now than I was when I lived in Paris. Still, I have a lot of work to do. I hate taking or looking at photos of myself because of the fat on my arms, chin and thighs. I’m too self-conscious to join #NotYourBefore, because to do so I’d have to share photos emphasizing my fat, and that idea nauseates me. Almost every day, I think with regret of the time Sophie told me I was slim, had always been slim, and how I couldn’t believe her.

I am self-aware enough now to understand how much media like Insatiable, which seem so innocuous, damaged me. Media with messages like Insatiable’s—that overweight people are ugly by default, that overweight people can’t be loved—nearly destroyed my life. Insatiable is an irresponsible, ill-conceived television program that can’t possibly be funny enough to make up for the harm it will cause. If Netflix does air it, against tens of thousands’ of people’s objections, they hold the blame for the children they will hurt.

Jessica Huang’s friendship with a white neighbor centers the Asian-American experience in a way I’d never seen before on TV.

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The season 1 finale of Fresh Off the Boat solidified Jessica Huang as one of my favorite characters on the air today. At the start of the episode, Jessica holds a dish of macaroni and cheese with bacon bits and panics that she and her immigrant family have assimilated too much and too quickly to the United States. The rest of the episode centers on this dilemma and what it means for the Chinese culture she treasures so dearly. This sort of crisis was one I had never seen before on mainstream television, particularly from an Asian American character. Now wrapping up season four, Jessica still challenges the Asian narratives I’d seen before, particularly the Asian BFF trope.

Growing up, when I saw any Asian woman or girl on TV, even as an extra, my head would snap to attention. Even if I didn’t consciously think about representation at the time, the lack of Asian characters was obvious, and made me internalize our invisibility even more. As a Korean adopted into a white family, the characters I saw on TV were some of the most intimate looks I had at Asian American family life. Living in a mostly white neighborhood, my friendships mirrored those I saw on TV — friendships like Rory Gilmore and Lane Kim’s on Gilmore Girls or, later, Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang’s on Grey’s Anatomy; I, too, was the only Asian friend among a group of white peers. However, it wasn’t until recently that I realized all these friendships were of a kind. They enforced the Asian BFF trope — and warped my perceptions of my own racial identity.

Similar to the trope of the “sassy black friend,” the Asian BFF is an often-tokenized attempt to include a person of color on screen. The Asian BFF rejects her Asian heritage, and the character’s identity revolves around attempts to emulate whiteness. Lane Kim was in a band, dated white men, and was even kicked out of her home by her tough Korean mother who tried to keep her steady on the Christian path towards a nice Korean husband. Similarly, Cristina Yang’s surgical career is in defiance of her own Korean mother’s traditional wishes. Yang is a confident, rounded character but her ethnicity is rarely mentioned — her character wasn’t even supposed to be Asian in the first place.

The Asian BFF rejects her Asian heritage, and the character’s identity revolves around attempts to emulate whiteness.

In attempts to perhaps avoid stereotypes, the Asian BFF trend creates new ones about the assimilated, rebellious Asian-American woman and her persistent efforts to gain access to white culture and spaces. There is nothing inherently wrong with these character’s quests for identities separate from the ones in which they grew up. It’s downright expected for coming-of-age stories. I saw much of my own artistic drive reflected in Lane Kim, and I saw the unwavering support my friends have for my ambitions reflected in Meredith Grey. But when encouragement to break away from one’s culture and join the “American” (read: white) culture is all we see, inadvertently or not, it pushes the narrative that Asian-ness is “less than” or undesirable. According to a recent study, even on shows with Asian-Americans and Pacific-Islanders (AAPIs) as regulars, these characters rarely get storylines that explore AAPI-related issues.

Fresh Off the Boat is different. Jessica Huang, played with sharp-edged heart by Constance Wu, is unapologetically both Chinese and an immigrant, packing noodles in her children’s lunches, dressing up as Chinese Santa, and taking the family to Taiwan for the summer. Jessica’s comfort and pride in her Asian identity alienates her from her white, cliquish neighbors (who today would definitely be part of the 53% of white women who voted for Trump). At one neighborhood gathering, Jessica passes around a plate of “stinky tofu” only to have the plate return to her fuller than it started. She starts to succumb to the pressures to fit in, pretending to be interested in what these women are interested in without reciprocity. Finally, she does find a best friend in next-door neighbor Honey, who is also alienated from the neighborhood clique due to her status as trophy wife. This friendship flips the Asian BFF trope on its head in more than one way.

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First, despite Honey’s fulfillment of Western leading lady beauty standards, it’s Jessica who is the confident leader in their friendship, while Honey is often passive and meek. In one episode, Jessica serenades Honey with a rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” and when a touched Honey tries to join in, Jessica pushes her away, reminding her that “this is not a duet.” Honey stumbles away passively as Jessica continues to bask, centerstage. Jessica is not only no white woman’s backup singer, she’s also a strict soloist.

Beyond this dynamic, Honey values the parts of Jessica that she loves most about herself, including her culture. In fact, it’s this that makes Jessica realize how much Honey’s friendship means to her. At one point, worried what being friends with the neighborhood outcast will do for their floundering restaurant business, Jessica’s husband tells her she can be friends with anyone else. “Swing a cat, hit a white woman,” he says. And yet this proves harder than it sounds as the women of the neighborhood whisper that Jessica’s brownies are sliced so evenly because of communism — she will always be the perpetual foreigner to them.

Meanwhile, Honey eats Jessica’s stinky tofu with gusto, a small but symbolic act. While I’ve seen strong interracial female friendships before, witnessing a white woman take an interest in and support Asian culture without it becoming a spectacle or exoticized felt special. Instead of the familiar assimilation narrative, I watched Honey willingly enter Jessica’s space and find room for herself in the life of a Chinese woman who loves who she is and where she’s from. Yes, I certainly identified with Jessica in this moment, but I also saw myself reflected in the neighborhood women and Honey. For so long I had shunned a part of myself because I thought it was less important. But thanks to new narratives like this one, the voices of the neighborhood women have faded into Honey’s, affirming that the tofu is delicious — that the entirety of me matters.

With this foundation in place, the question becomes: Where will their friendship go and how deeply will it tackle their differences? The season four premiere centered on Jessica and Honey as they took on Best Friends Week on Wheel of Fortune. Different expectations about how long Jessica and her family will stay at Honey’s home while Jessica negotiates their lease cause conflict that comes to a head in front of the wheel. Honey explains that she told Jessica to stay as long as she wanted only because of her southern politeness, while Jessica reveals that, where she’s from, you don’t have to thank family. The episode ends on an emphatically cheesy note as the women make up, yet Honey’s unblinking acceptance of Jessica’s reasoning never diminishes Jessica’s upbringing or invalidates her explanation.

This moment illustrates the show’s potential to explore the challenges of interracial female friendship while maintaining its mainstream appeal (which gives it the power to reach a broad, white audience). It can stay lighthearted while still challenging the assumption that Honey will be an unwavering white ally to Jessica. I’m glad to see Honey eat the tofu and accept Jessica’s cultural norms, but I also want to see what she does when she’s the accidental perpetuator of casual racism, or when a rich client implies they would rather work with Honey than Jessica. At a time when white female allyship with women of color is under scrutiny, the show has a chance to participate in the conversation through the unique dynamic it has created between these two women.

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The development of my racial identity is still something I grapple with as an adult. Everything I saw for so long in books, TV, and movies showed being Asian as something to rebel against or ignore, but if friendships like Jessica and Honey’s existed back then, maybe I would have seen that part of myself differently instead of falling in line with the single story. Maybe I would have bristled when my friends told me I was “pretty much white.” Maybe they would have known better than to say that in the first place.

The existence of the Jessica-Honey friendship still means something to me today. It means there’s space that can be cleared for us at center stage. It shows how our white friends can and should support the sometimes challenging efforts to stay true to ourselves. Simply, it’s refreshing to see the lives of nice white women take a backseat to our own lives — and that they might even be off screen somewhere, forgotten for an entire episode, as we live and grow and love ourselves all on our own.

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