She is an openly queer plus-size model turned actress who has spent her whole career as an inspiration to so many plus-size women, including myself. Meanwhile, the depiction feels incongruous with Ferreira’s history and previous interviews. But regardless of what’s going on behind the scenes, I feel a sense of loss and anger looking at a character I once loved. Rumors and controversy have followed Kat, Barbie Ferreira, and creator/writer Sam Levinson over the course of this season. Frankly, her absurdity seems more clumsy than creative. Instead, her character is flattened, turned into an emotional mirror at best and a mindless sidekick at worst. The undoing of Kat’s progress doesn’t feel nuanced or intentional in a way that could be a radical depiction of her self-love journey and the depression that she’s experiencing.
Seeing Kat invent a terminal brain disorder as an excuse to break up her short-lived relationship really shattered her fierce, no-filter, and sometimes straight-up bitchy persona into a million debased little pieces. To say that I was speechless would be an understatement. That girl in the green eyeshadow wasn’t Kat.
She ultimately proclaims that her confidence from the previous year “wasn’t even real.” This portrait is not nearly as aesthetically pleasing or imaginative as the art cinema references in which some of the other characters were gorgeously depicted in episode 4.Īs frustrated as I felt with that bland vignette of Kat in the car with Ethan, which ironically was headed nowhere, the sixth episode is what really shook me to my core.
This limited source of agency is the exact picture in which Kat’s character has been painted - her desirability ignited her self-assurance, which was subsequently extinguished as her relationship unraveled. I was still allowing society to pull my strings and for men’s opinions of me to shape my self-image. If I had to be more of a cynic than a romantic, it’s possible that this is the reason why Kat chose Ethan in the first place and thus is feeling so dissatisfied.Īfter many bad experiences, I finally realized that desirability isn’t really power. Our gratitude should trump that so-called and aforementioned self-worth. This mindset also contributes to abuse, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct, like Kat being coerced into having sex and the video being released without her knowledge or consent. He said I was perfect the way that I was and all my friends thought I should feel so lucky that a guy actually liked me. One guy I met in college, who I had never expressed interest in nor did I have any, felt the need to police my eating habits one day because he didn’t want me to gain or lose any weight. Almost every guy who’s ever been interested in me has felt the need to explicitly assure me that they like fat girls or make comments about my weight in general. This mindset led me to suffer through so many horrible hookups with men I didn’t even find attractive out of fear that I couldn’t do any better. Therefore, we are “supposed” to be grateful that anyone is willing to proclaim their interest in us publically. On the flip side of that, or possibly an extension of it, is how we are then taught to settle because loving fat women, however common, is still socially taboo.
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