Britney Spears Is NOT Fat

This post, written by Amanda Marcotte, originally appeared on Pandagon

This is probably a sign that I'm out of the loop on occasion, but I thought the problem with the Britney Spears performance at the VMA was that she looked about to totter over from being so stoned or hungover or whatever. But I flicked on the radio today and it was on a talk sports show and the host was ranting and raving about how fat she was, and he sounded personally offended, like she shat in his face.

I was halfway convinced she looked fat so I went and looked at a picture of her and there appears to be no indication of rolls of fat or even of a dress size touching the double digits.

Apparently, there's a lot of anger out there that Britney Spears was "fat" on TV. I can't help but suspect that the vast majority of the straight men having huge, spastic fits about how Spears betrayed their masturbatory cycles with her fat ass, if presented with a woman who looked like that in real life, would make asses of themselves trying to fuck her. Maybe I'm wrong, but there's a hint of disingenuous posturing to the fatass-Britney statements. Like maybe this has almost nothing to do with Spears herself and everything to do with enjoying the social permission to project all sorts of misogynist feelings onto a woman who asked for it by playing up ridiculous sexist fantasies all the way to the bank.