As you know, American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert recently got skewered for his raunchy performance during the American Music Awards (he open-mouth kissed a man, grabbed one woman’s crotch and rubbed a male dancer’s face in his groin.) In other words, a boring night at home for Madonna. But because he’s a man, and a gay one at that, his shenanigans have landed him in much hotter water. (This is hardly his first controversial performance – Details magazine recently printed a racy series of pics of him in flagrante delicto …with a woman, I might add.)
Whether you were offended, titillated or unaffected by Lambert’s hypersexual moves, the fact remains that many, many Americans took serious offense. ABC received over 1,500 complaints and subsequently canceled a scheduled live performance by Lambert on Good Morning America later in the week. (In response, CBS's The Early Show welcomed him with open, ratings-hungry arms.). In hindsight, Lambert told Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show, "I look back on it and I go, OK, maybe that wasn't the best first impression to make again, the first second impression. I mean, I had fun up there." His main concern: That audience members and fans at home felt disrespected.
But in the wake of the scandal, Lambert has revealed something far more personal than the mea culpa he delivered: When he was in high school, he was seriously overweight.
"I suffered from a little bit of an ugly-duckling complex in my early 20s,” he said on Sirius satellite radio. “When I was in high school I was 250 pounds and that creates some stuff ... some body image stuff, some confidence issues. And I got a lot of my confidence from the validation I got as a performer.” Perhaps, he self-analyzed, his onstage AMA antics were emblematic of him moving past these body image issues.
This made me think of a study that came out last year which showed that overweight women are more likely to have sex with men than "normal weight" women. At the time, Dr. Bliss Kaneshiro of the University of Hawaii School of Medicine said, "These results were unexpected and we don't really know why this is the case." In response, Jezebel.com cited a Kate Harding (of fat acceptance blog Shapely Prose) quote about the “only thin = sexually attractive” mentality and how truly wrong it is.
“Rant on!” Jezebel’s Jessica blogged. “It's sort of bizarre to me that researchers would choose to study this in the first place. ‘This study indicates that all women deserve diligence in counseling on unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention, regardless of body mass index,’ Dr. Kaneshiro said. Uh, no shit? I mean, did they really need to do a study to prove that all women need to learn about their bodies, even if they're fat?”
I totally get Lambert’s connecting being newly thin with feeling more free to express his sexuality. That doesn’t mean I in any way think people SHOULD be sexually limited by their weight, mind you – I’m just saying I understand where he’s coming from. How could I not? I live in the same world he does, one filled up with “skinny equals sexy” messages and a pervasively-held frame of mind that heavy men and women should shun themselves, cover their larger expanses of skin and are somehow undeserving of love. When we see a couple holding hands and one member is very thin and the other is very big, we always do a double take (granted, it’s far more acceptable when the man is the heavier one). And I do think thin women can get away with wearing far sexier items of clothing, showing more leg and dancing on tables at clubs, than their heavier counterparts. I mean, come on, TV had to make a separate dating show for plus-sized women and the apparent ONE MAN who loves them. So it makes sense that, after losing the very weight that subjected him to this kind of “hide yourself, repress you sexuality” mentality, he might wanna let loose a bit.
The only thing that really surprises me here is that Lambert’s plus-sized past hasn’t emerged before this. I think any female star in the same crazy limelight would have had all of her dirty laundry aired by now. If Carrie Underwood had weighed 250…or even 190…pounds in high school, it would’ve been splashed across every magazine within a month of her winning AI, if not during the actual competition. Her new bod would be the subject of cover stories, morning news segments, before-and-after slideshows and probably a new diet book. Maybe all the hype over Lambert’s sexuality is what pushed his prior weight battles to the back burner?
