I have a confession to make, which ought to surprise
absolutely no one who really knows me: I love terrible television.
I am not talking about the dredges of television, like “The
Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore” (though I once used to regularly watch
both). I like television shows that make me feel better about myself for the
fact that I will never, I repeat NEVER, be one of those people. I know I will never enter my child in a beauty
pageant, compete with other superficial bitches to “fall in love” with some
dude within two weeks, or get into full hair and makeup to have mid-day
cocktails with my frenemies for the chance to call myself a “housewife.”
And it isn’t necessarily that I only watch trash television
because it’s just compelling background noise. I can, in fact, learn something
interesting from some of these programs. The people on “Extreme Couponing” may
be suffering from an obnoxious form of OCD with their need to buy hundreds of a
useless product just because they can, but I certainly learned a thing or two
about how to shop with coupons and how to maximize the deals when they come
around. I may be fascinated by the amount of time the “Doomsday Preppers” spend
on preparing for a particular catastrophe that may never happen, but they have
some excellent tips on what to do to prepare yourself for when you will be out
of important resources for a few days, or even a few weeks, and what you may
need to survive that time.
No, when I say I love terrible television, I mean I love watching obnoxious people behave
terribly. I love watching delusional people attempt to convince the world that
their behavior is not only acceptable, but reasonable. I love watching a
mixture of beauty and insanity. Which brings me to my favorite terrible show on
TV today: Dance Moms.
I had heard about this Lifetime show through blogs, but had
not seen it until Lifetime ran a marathon of it one day during the first
season. I was hooked from the very first mid-episode scene. One of the
most obnoxious women I have ever seen on television was talking about some
costume with another mother before their daughters were to go on and perform a
dance. I don’t really remember what they were saying necessarily, but they were
having a superficial conversation, screaming match at all, in front of their adolescent
daughters, who were warming up for their dance competition. In the next
segment, their daughters took to the stage to perform a dance that was
beautiful, artistic, and full of life and love. These little girls were so
talented and charming that they just stole my heart.
However, that was immediately offset by the presence of
their dance company director, Abby Lee Miller. In Pittsburgh, Abby Lee Miller
is a big deal, or so she would have you believe. She is the leader of the best
competitive dance team in the nation. She is known throughout the dance
community for her choreography and training of top stars. She even coaches
multiple generations of dancers, as the mother of two of the dancers was once
coached by Abby herself when she was a child.
The show wouldn’t be interesting if this were a nice, sweet
woman teaching nice, sweet dancers. Abby is a bitch. She is a raging bitch. She
is a downright awful human being. She is a large woman who wears ugly jewelry,
spends entirely too much time tanning, and thinks Jennifer Anniston’s “Rachel”
haircut is still all the rage. To top it off, she has a scratchy voice that is
probably the product of years of yelling at her students, which she continues
to do to this day.
I hate to say this, but Abby is why I watch the show. It’s
true that the main reason I watch is the girls. They are so beautiful, so
sweet, and so talented, but that’s not what makes the show work. It only serves
to offset these terrible adults. I watch because I love the gall this woman has
to yell at tweens, throw things around in their presence, trash their parents
to their faces, and get into screaming matches with their parents in front of
them. It is not a surprise then, as it has frequently been noted on the show,
that Abby has never been married and has no children herself. Yet that does not
stop her from criticizing the mothers for being parents. She has the nerve to tell
the mothers they are being bad parents when they do something to support their
children that conflicts with her plans for them as dancers. I am constantly
fascinated by what comes out of Abby’s mouth, and I anxiously await the next
moment when she will say something ridiculous and mean. I hardly ever agree
with her, but she is so damn entertaining that I cannot turn away from her.
Now that “Dance Moms” is in their second season, the
craziness is on full tilt, and Abby is only getting worse. Because she has the
dancers and their mothers under contract, she thinks she can be the big bad
wolf and treat her dancers and the mothers like dirt. She has never made a
secret of the fact that she prefers one specific dancer above all others,
though the subject of why continues to be an ongoing storyline on the show. She
plays favorites, she holds grudges, and she generally makes life miserable for
anyone who is not among her preferred people.
Yet I am now catching on to a major flaw of Abby’s. She is
mean, she is cruel, and she is unpleasant. She is hardly the first person in
reality television to possess all three of these characteristics. (In fact,
these days it’s a requirement before the producers will even look at you.) But
the problem with all of that is that she is also fat. Abby probably hasn’t
danced in a good twenty years, causing the ol’ metabolism to slow way down. It
happens to a lot of people. It is what it is. Being fat is probably what drew
the casting directors to her in the first place. She is a stereotypical villain,
a la Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” or Fat Bastard from “Austin Powers.” But
since this is a show based on real people, and not characters that they are
scripted to play, Abby is who she is, which is a mean, fat bitch. Surely the
editing lends a fortunate hand to this portrayal, but if she doesn’t give to
the producers, they have nothing to edit later.
Why is this a problem? I don’t live in Pittsburgh, I don’t
have children who dance competitively, and I can change the channel at any
time. However, if I am going to waste my time with trash television, as I
clearly do, then I might as well learn something from it. What I have learned
is that in many ways, I am on the outside of myself, looking in. I too am not a
tiny lady. I am a big girl, I have been all my life, and it’s possible that I
may always be. I have had moments in my life where I have been a complete
bitch, not out of having a bad day, but out of having a bad personality. People
didn’t want to be my friend, and I was single for painfully long periods of
time. While I didn’t get into yelling matches with people the way Abby does, I
certainly did not shy away from running my mouth in ways it never should have.
I was as obnoxious as Abby was, but in a different way.
This is a problem because society doesn’t allow you to be
both fat and a bitch. It can be argued that fat people are more discriminated
against in our society than other group of people, including colored or gay
people. There are anti-discrimination laws to protect minorities, gays, women,
and the disabled, but none to protect fat people. There are no provisions in
hate crime statutes that protect fat people from being harmed. Fat people are
constantly teased and made to feel bad because society thinks being fat is a
choice that person made. Had they not eaten that burger, ice cream, pizza,
etc., then they wouldn’t be fat. They wouldn’t be using their fatness as an
excuse for their disabilities they now claim they have, like diabetes, which
causes everyone’s health care premiums to skyrocket. I do not mean to suggest
that Abby Lee Miller has diabetes or is a part of the health care problem in
America, but she is absolutely discriminated against as a fat person. I know,
because I have the same thoughts others have. And others have had those same
thoughts about me. They don’t have to say it to my face for me to know. When
you see the faces people make at you often enough, you begin to recognize when
they’re trying not to make them.
Fat people have to work that much harder to get others to
like them or notice them, because they have already been written off by society
as useless human beings. That is why fat people work to be smart, creative, or
articulate. If they choose not to be physically attractive, they can certainly
choose to be creatively or mentally attractive. They can show the world that
just because they are not as physically beautiful as society thinks they have
to be, that they are still valuable. That is not easy to do. That is why fat people,
especially fat women, do not have the luxury of being bitches. Fat women, more
so than fat men, have to work so damned hard to be attractive to people,
especially if they want to lure potential mates. People look right past fat
people all the time. Tyra Banks once donned a fat suit in public for an episode
of her talk show, and came back crying about how people never looked at her,
wouldn’t make eye contact with her, wouldn’t smile back at her, and looked at
her with shame when she ate in public. The difference is, she was still a nice
person, and she got to take the suit off at the end of the day.
Abby does not have that luxury. America now knows that Abby
is a fat bitch, and for that, she will spend the rest of her life trying to
overcome that image. The show does not do anything to counter that impression,
which is unfortunate because she is turning out beautiful dancers. So she will always
be the fat bitch. And she will always serve as a reminder that fat is ugly in
society. It might have been different if Abby were nice, but there does not
seem to be anything about Abby that is nice, caring, or compassionate. Is this
the result of editing? Probably. But we have come to accept perception as
reality, and therefore the perception that fat and mean are synonymous
continues to perpetuate.
Because I want to learn something from all of my trash
television, I will take from this that if this is what society sees from
watching Abby Lee Miller, then this is also what they see when they see me
acting the same way. Abby broke a cardinal fat girl rule by being a bitch, and
because she is on television, that is going to be her legacy. I am lucky that I
don’t have a camera crew to document when I have a shitty attitude. But the knowledge
that I don’t have the luxury of being both fat and a bitch makes me very aware
of which of the two I can choose for the time being. It will be a lot harder to
get rid of the fat, but it is much easier to decide not to be a bitch. And in
the long term, getting rid of both will be a personal reward that society will
get to celebrate with me, instead of judge me for.
