Not Anorexic? You’re Probably a Nazi

As someone whose occasional bouts of self-loathing have nothing to do with my relatively normal-shaped body, I didn’t think I’d be susceptible to the pull of the weight-loss-obsessed website Elastic Waist, but watching their video on the derivation of the word “zaftig” really did make me a little bit bulimic. Zaftig, the host explains, is Yiddish for “juicy,” a phenomenon about which we feel profoundly ambivalent these days—just ask poor Jennifer Love Hewitt, who was roundly trashed in the tabloids this week when shocking photos revealed that her bottom half is as jiggly as her top. Helpfully, the Elastic Waist video goes on to offer a handy guide for how to react when someone calls you zaftig. Apparently it’s a “fat euphemism” (so it’s an insult) which describes the kind of body you’d see on a Greek statue (so it’s attractive); it translates roughly to “pleasantly plump” (so it’s bad) and can be used in sentences such as “Pamela Anderson is quite zaftig after being injected with all that silicone” (so it’s good, or at least it’s considered attractive enough that people pay money to emulate it and also to look at it naked in old issues of Playboy.) All of this could, I suppose, leave a girl unsure whether she needs to go buy some Snackwells or a push-up bra—or, duh, both—but the video derails these consumer urges with a sharp right turn into total insanity. Meet Frau Zaftigheimer, “the world’s zaftig expert.” She’s a Teutonic dominatrix, she’s built like a brick house, and for her, being zaftig is “a global movement” aimed at combating “the bony-ass models, anorexic celebrities and the media.” Frau Zaftigheimer explains all this while whipping her “2 o’clock” (because fat activism alone doesn’t pay the bills). Then she turns to the camera, and, as the Wagner swells on the soundtrack, says the following: “We shall create a master race of zaftig!”
Got that? If, like Frau Zaftigheimer, you’re a little worried about the way the media—like, oh god I don’t know, random example here, maybe websites about weight-loss?—perpetuates unhealthy body images among women, then maybe, like Frau Zaftigheimer, you are a Nazi. It’s rare for women-aimed publications to prove out Godwin’s Law (the rule that as discussions get longer and crazier, someone will invoke Hitler) but then again, they’re only just starting to take hold on the Internet. I’m sure that as publishers figure out how to make money off of women online, we’ll get used to hearing all sorts of fashion- and body-related stances being conflated with Nazism all the time. What makes this really mind-blowing, though, is that ostensibly the whole thing is a Hanukkah-themed video, Yiddish being the language of all those Hanukkah-celebrants who were systematically murdered by the same kind of Wagner-loving fat activists who tried to take over the world in order to rid it of Keira Knightly and her ilk. (Typing that sentence made my head throb.) Um, and a chag sameach to you too, guys!