I remember so well my pre-school days of being taught that I should treat others the way I want to be treated. I’m not a Pollyanna about the fact that the pop culture media is not exactly prone to use this as one of their guiding principles, but sometimes they outdo themselves.
E!’s show Fashion Police is a great example of this. Hosted by four entertainment personalities (Joan and Rivers and Kelly Osbourne among them), this show really goes above and beyond. The attacks are so deeply personal, and so painfully detailed. Each of the four hosts of the show gets a chance to comment on how poorly these stars put together their ensembles, discuss how deluded they must have been to have thought that they looked good, and often spend some time looping into the star’s personal life as well. Take a look:
One of these hosts, Giuliana Rancic, interested me during a recent broadcast of the show, mainly because so much of her public persona in the past year has been about her own personal struggles. Rancic, a host for E! News, struggled with fertility issues in the past couple of years, and lashed out at those critics who offered claims that one of her problems may have been how vastly underweight she was. Rancic has also been saying publicly in the last few months how hurt she is by people’s comments about her weight and appearance, one time even saying that when people encouraged her to gain weight, her thinking went like this: “They don’t realize they’re being mean by saying you look good fatter.”
This, coming from someone who hosts a show with the explicit purpose of telling other people how they should or shouldn’t look, and who has also been known to make the exact same comments to other women about gaining weight (she was in a bit of a bind with LeAnn Rimes last summer), rings a little hollow as a plea to stop the media mud-slinging.
Granted, the show was started by Joan Rivers, who has made her career around mocking others and encouraging people to do the same to her – I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I certainly see less hypocrisy there than I do in someone decrying public commentary about their weight while simultaneously slamming others with insults about their appearance.
I’m sure these people are doing this all in good fun, much like you could say those who made comments about Rancic’s weight felt they were offering her real advice. But the bottom line for me always comes back to how it’s totally unnecessary to comment on someone else’s weight and/or looks at all, ever. We’ve all got better things to do.
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