Playmate Dani Mathers body-shame trial should make others think twice
Last summer, Playboy’s 2015 Playmate of the Year, Dani Mathers, made headlines for a naked photo – not one of her, as you might expect, but one she snapped and then Snapchatted of an older woman undressing in an L.A. Fitness dressing room.
Mathers apparently found the 70-year-old woman’s un-Playboy-esque body worthy of mocking and snarked “If I can’t unsee this, then neither can you.” When she “accidentally” posted the photo to her public account, not just to one friend, like she claimed, she not only proved herself to be the meanest of mean girls, but may have broken the law.
Later this month, Mathers, now 30, faces a charge of misdemeanor invasion of privacy under a California law that prohibits the secret recording or photographing of an “identifiable person” in a home, changing room or tanning booth without the subject’s consent. Good. It’s not going to stop people from being horrible and uncharitable to their fellow man, because we’re horrible sometimes. But maybe it’ll make some of them think twice about sharing that horribleness on social media.
What follows is my original column about Mathers and her first apology, which was directed at everyone else but the woman she photographed:
Dani Mathers, Playboy’s 2015 Playmate of the Year, says she “accidentally” posted a mocking Snapchat image of a woman daring to shower at an LA Fitness without first remembering to be skinny. So now Mathers has joined the pantheon of the sorry/not-sorry who’ve issued public apologies for behavior they thought was no biggie, like, three days ago.
She’s totally not the fat-shaming mean girl she proved herself to be when she was meanly fat-shaming somebody! She’s going to take some time to figure out just how she could have sunk so low. She became a model because she loves the female body and even though she was completely making fun of a female body, she would never make fun of the female body. (Okay….) And she means it!
As one of those overweight LA Fitness members who manages to shower in the locker room all the time without blinding anyone with my offensive back fat, I don’t accept Mather’s apology – She seemed more sorry that she mistakenly mocked this stranger to the whole world, rather than just one friend, and seems clueless as to why both things are wrong, even when you don’t get caught. Besides, it’s not me, or humanity, or the spectre of the female body she needs to apologize to. It’s the…
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