Fat Chance

If you are ever in a swimming pool and feel compelled to toss your toddler niece repeatedly up in the air in order to effect the highly gratifying splashdown, and your shoulder breaks free of its moorings, and you end up in physical therapy for 5 months, and your orthopedic surgeon says “Hey, how’s about a Medrol DosePak?” take it from me. The correct response is, “I’d rather you plunge that giant needle deep into my rotator cuff like you did last time.”

For I am three days into my six-day course of the aforementioned oral steroids, and I am not myself. I am, in fact, Dave Attel combined with something that slimed out of the Hellmouth in Sunnydale to feast on blind orphans. I am stoned, I do not sleep, and I am pretty grouchy, even for me.

Which is how I came to watch half an hour of cognitive dissonance called “Mo’Nique’s Fat Chance” last night on the Oxygen channel. “Mo’Nique’s Fat Chance” is The World’s First Plus-Size Reality Beauty Pageant, or something like that.

Mo’Nique, a flamboyant, full-figured C-list celebrity, seems like a nice girl. She’s sick and tired of skinny chicks getting all the perks. Her young life’s dream has been to host a beauty contest for fat girls. She emotes warmly on the subject. “We are the majority! We’re gonna change the WORLD!”

Cut to a commercial for, I kid you not, Weight Watchers.

In the run-up to the pageant Mo’Nique auditions her contestants American Idol-style. Once they get to Hollywood, they all bond, laugh, giggle about their love for steak, hug, cry, and get makeovers. A lot. Mo’Nique loves them all and they all love her and they all love each other. “Fat girls are great!” is the refrain. Well, that’s swell. But they can’t just leave it at that, because who cares about a bunch of fat girls who aren’t desperately trying to capitulate to the patriarchal mandate?

Nope, a beauty pageant is a beauty pageant. The thing just won’t die.

The point of the show is the “drama” that unfolds as these completely overwhelmed women are by turns infantilized by Mo’Nique and her team of makeover artists, manipulated into bonding with each other, and finally made to rend these bonds asunder as they compete for the privilege of being crowned Miss FAT (“FAT” stands, somewhat unpoetically, for “fabulous and thick.”).

Mo’Nique, alas, has not changed the world. She’s just arranged for a few more women to be objectified as sexbots on national television. I threw a book at the TV as she announced the “lingerie competition.”