A blogger who attacked Sports Illustrated cover girl Kate Upton’s sexy
figure, likening the curvy swimsuit model to a cow and a pig, is facing severe
backlash for her comments.
The unnamed female blogger, who acknowledges preferring the "skinny
aesthetic," wrote in a
July 8 post on the website "Skinny Gurl" that she has been
deluged with angry emails and threatened with rape and death.
The controversy first began back in June when the blogger wrote that Upton
was "confidently lumbering up the runway like there's a buffet at the end
of it," and also called her a "little piggie" with "huge
thighs, NO waist, big fat floppy boobs, terrible body definition … ."
She continued: "Did you know that
humans are 80% genetically
identical to cows? Well, allow me to prove it to you… ." That line was
followed by an unflattering photo of the back of Upton's lingerie-clad body on
the runway.
Since then, the fashion world's most
influential insiders have denounced the blogger and risen to Upton's defense.
"Running this site where you actually praise women for staying
emaciated and skinny and then to go out there and then track someone who has a
normal body, I mean, she's got issues," said Lesley Jane Seymour,
editor-in-chief of MORE magazine.
"She's laughing all the way to the
bank," supermodel and author Carol Alt said of Upton. "I would just
say keep your end up and keep moving forward."
Online, the hacker group Anonymous
launched a cyber attack against the Skinny Gurl website, forcing her to change
web hosts.
It's all resulted in some changes to her
site, among them the removal of the "Starving Tip of the Day" and the
addition of language that "explicitly prohibits the glorification or
promotion of self-harm."
She also wrote that she planned to add
resources for help with depression, eating disorders, and self-injury.
Explaining the idea behind the site -
which she says is "pro-skinny" but not "pro-ana" (for
pro-anorexic) - she wrote: "As a thin person, I was also annoyed by our
double-standards around weight. For example, people think nothing of telling a
thin woman - to their face, in front of an entire group of people - how skinny
they are and even to suggest what they should eat. But I've never seen the
reverse happen to an overweight woman."
The blogger writes that she was a model
in school and now works in the fashion industry.
"I take personal pride in keeping
myself thin (since people keep asking: I'm about 5'7? and try to stay around
100 lbs)," she wrote. She adds that she stays anonymous because she has
"a real-world profession with clients and partners and this is a
controversial subject, even in places like NYC and Hollywood."
While she acknowledged that she has had
her "own issues" with food and eating and that those issues had found
their way into the writing on her blog, she noted: "There's nothing wrong
with saying skinny is beautiful, just like there's nothing wrong with saying
curvy is beautiful, or red hair is beautiful, or anything else someone happens
to find appealing. It's an opinion, and we're all entitled to them."
For model Alt, the weighty war of words
is another example of the extreme pressure the fashion industry places on
girls.
"Sometimes in this business
people's expectations are a bit unrealistic and it's very hard to attain those
kind of expectations," she told ABC News.
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