Marie Claire blogger Maura Kelly took heat from all over the Internet yesterday after posting a rather vitriolic blog about the CBS sitcom “Mike & Molly”. Her post was titled “Should ‘Fatties’ Get a Room? (Even on TV?)” and her answer was, in short, that yes, overweight people should stay out of her line of view, because they gross her out. She says that watching overweight people walking across a room is just as “distressing” as say, if she saw a “very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.”

You read that right! Kelly’s post has since received nearly a thousand comments and not surprisingly, most of them are pissed. Some commenters claimed they were so upset by the blog that they were going to cancel their subscriptions to the magazine, and one commenter even called for a boycott of Marie Claire until Kelly was fired. Yikes!

Unfortunately, instead of actually apologizing for a brash, offensive column, editor-in-chief Joanna Coles brushed it off, explaining, “Maura Kelly is a very provocative blogger. She was an anorexic herself and this is a subject she feels very strongly about.”

Ugh. So because she had an eating disorder it’s okay for her to bash on people she sees as ‘imperfect’? Weak excuse. And, if you ask me, it indicates a potential relapse into said eating disorder, what with all the fat-hating.

Coles made it clear that she, like blogger Kelly, has not even seen the show, but is “concerned about a show that makes fun of large people.” Oh, okay.

 Kelly has since updated the post, apologizing profusely for being “insensitive” and coming off as a “bully” (boy, that word is getting tossed around a lot lately). Cole  acknowledges that “her struggle with anorexia may have had a part in what she calls her ‘extreme reaction’ to the show.”  Yet, in Kelly’s update, she only points out that her friends mentioned the anorexia bit as being a reason why she lashed out, and says it’s “an accurate insight”…which to me, sounds like some serious backpedaling and/or trying to cover herself up after getting caught being a jerk. Not to mention, Marie Claire probably could have made a better choice than picking an anorexic girl to write a column about what she thought about obese people. Good work, guys.

Thumbs way down to the editors for letting this run – change the word “overweight” to “gay”, “black”, “Jewish” or really anything, and there’s not a chance in the world this column would’ve seen the light of day.

Tags: marie claire
Categories: What in the world?