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Analysis
“If you want to be skinny, get rid of your fat friends. If you want to be pretty, get rid of your ugly friends.”
That’s advice from TikToker Karmalita Fox about the “law of proximity” in a viral video she posted a few weeks ago. In it, she goes on to say that “if you start hanging out with your fat friends too much, all of a sudden it’s gonna be normalized to get Taco Bell at 2 a.m. in the morning.”
Fox’s comments are extremely fatphobic and based on harmful stereotypes about fat people. Fortunately, a majority of the comments she got recognize that: One commenter said her remarks were “high school girl drama,” and another posited that with her theory, she’s probably not friends with anyone kind.
Many fat and plus-sized TikTokers took their critiques a step further and stitched Fox’s video to explain all that is wrong with it.
“‘Ugly people’ and fat people aren’t your issues,” TeeKay, a TikToker whose channel focuses on makeup and beauty says in their stitch of Fox. They also guessed that Fox feels “ugly inside.” “You don’t deserve fat friends or skinny friends or pretty friends or ugly friends.”
Christine, a TikToker who writes about fat liberation, pointed out that implying that all fat people go to Taco Bell at 2 a.m. is untrue—and that using it as an excuse to not befriend fat people “is weird.”
And a takedown of Fox from TikToker April J explains how capitalism, diet culture, and fatphobia are all intertwined.
“One of the main points of having friends is building community,” April J says. “Approaching your personal friendships and leveling up is always going to end in disaster and danger.”
Why it matters
In another TikTok, Fox explains that “if you want to be liked, stay fat.” Because “when you’re thin, you represent the beauty standard,” so people are constantly jealous of you.
“People don’t like to be reminded of what they lack,” Fox says. “You pop a hole in the bubble of what makes them feel of value.”
What worries me is not that Fox thinks these things and posts them online, but the amount of likes she receives. On both of her videos mentioned she had almost 110,000 likes at time of publication.
Feeling superior because you make other people feel less valuable is a sign of insecurity. It seems that we need to be reminded of that more often.
