Life

A Daily Mail columnist wearing a fat suit to empathise with the obese was as bad as it sounds

Oonagh Keating. Updated July 15th, 2021

Daily Mail columnist, Liz Jones, isn’t known for her empathy. She’d hardly have kept that job if she were.

In an effort to try and understand the life of an obese person, she donned a fat suit and went about her usual life in London – visiting Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Rigby and Peller – underwear makers to the Queen.

You can read the full article here, if you want to put yourself through that, but we read it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

Despite having suffered with an eating disorder for decades, and claiming to have unlocked her empathy for overweight people, Liz Jones peppered the article with judgemental opinions, supposedly held by the people she encountered, but more likely projections from the writer.

Brace yourself –

“As I’d given my destination to the driver, I’d noticed his eyebrows shoot up as if to say, ‘Harrods? Really? Would Primark not be more apt?’”

“When I sit to tuck into some hummous at an outside table, I can see people thinking, ‘Why is she even eating?’”

“(S)mall children, stare at me with no sympathy at all, tutting, their parents open mouthed, as if to say, ‘Don’t you realise there’s a pandemic on? We need to save the NHS, not strain it at the seams, like your awful size 40 trousers!’”

It probably won’t suprise you to learn that she has written a novel about an obese woman, and the article dedicates many paragraphs to its content, making us wonder if it could just be possible that the real purpose of the experiment might be sales figures, rather than empathy.

Whatever her intentions, it really didn’t go down well.

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We’re inclined to believe Woodo in the world’s assessment of why people were staring.

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