What happened when Rutgers hosted ‘An Evening with Mary Lambert’
The event had been trolled by student posting jokes about obesity
If you’ve read “Students troll Mary Lambert event page with body image jokes” or looked at the RUPA (Rutgers University Programming Association) event Facebook page, than you know that Mary Lambert was getting a lot of uncalled for negative comments.
Being the cool cat, spoken word artist that Mary Lambert is, when she finally arrived at Rutgers last Wednesday, she responded to her trolls with a poem.
Her killer opening line was: “Dear Facebook Comments, Fuck you,” which of course got the whole crowd cracking up.
Lambert’s shameless humor and witty remarks received tons of laughs from the audience. But her jokes weren’t only entertaining, they were insightful and shed light on a lot of important issues. She said, “It’s weird that we’re like, ‘Boo fat people!” and like, ‘Yeah Monsanto!”
Lambert inspired the crowd with her guidance for self-acceptance and unconditional love for the body. She showed pride in loving her body and called on the audience to do the same. She recognizes the unreasonable societal responses to the issue of obesity and joked: “I keep hearing this phrase like ‘The war on obesity,’ ‘Fight Obesity!’ You want to fight fat people? We will crush you!”
The pop singer explained that the media executives create a thin-obsessed culture and sarcastically pointed out media-based gender stereotypes: “Guys have a lot of sex and never cry. Girls are sexy, but playful and quirky, and the ‘girl next door,’ but also a freak in the sheets.”
She scoffs at the unattainable ideals glorified through celebrity influence and emphasized the problematic underrepresentation of minorities in the media: “Some of us (celebrities) act and film in TV and very often we are portrayed in the aforementioned standards of beauty and good and whiteness. Which begs to ask, what about the rest of us? And there are a lot of us.”