Marie Claire writer Maura Kelly stirred up a veritable storm on the Internet this week with her post "Should 'Fatties' Get a Room? (Even on TV?)." In her article, Kelly asked if television shows should be able to show overweight people making out on television, since it makes people (read: her) uncomfortable. She explained that after watching an episode of CBS sitcom Mike & Molly, seeing the two characters together would "likely lead her to become physically ill," and that "I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other . because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything." She later compared watching an overweight person walk across a room to watching an alcoholic stumbling across a bar or a heroin addict slumping in a chair.Needless to say, a lot of people got very, very angry. Commenters flooded the article's page, calling for Marie Claire to immediately fire Kelly over her "hateful, sizeist remarks." Kelly later amended her post with an apology, citing her own struggles with anorexia and her obsession with being thin as explanation for her violent reaction to seeing overweight people on television. But as Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch's Emily Exton pointed out in her response to Kelly's article, "saying, 'I don't hate fat people-I'm just afraid of being fat myself' isn't much of an excuse."

Kelly's article, however, brought some interesting issues to light. With the majority of Americans currently overweight and a huge percentage of that number obese, what does putting those obese people on television mean for our culture and our standards of beauty? While Kelly calls Mike & Molly out for idealizing an "unhealthy" lifestyle, can't the same be said for House, M.D.; Weeds-hell, even The Secret Life of the American Teenager? Can anyone think of any television show short of Sesame Street where there isn't some glamorization of a lifestyle that any of our parents would tell us to avoid? What right does Kelly have to pass judgment on CBS for airing a show starring people with body types Americans can relate to much better than they can relate to any of the Desperate Housewives?

And to Ms. Kelly: as a writer, I sympathize with you. It must suck to have half the Internet clamoring for you to lose your job. But as a human being with a higher-than-ideal body mass index, I know I won't be reading Marie Claire again until you're gone.