You can’t be more cruel. Football fans, or rather they should be called bullies and preachers of fatphobia, have managed to get Declan Rice – one of Arsenal’s stars – out of his mind by attacking him on the flank that hurts the most. Those network spokespeople who have taken it upon themselves with Rice do not mess with him because of his play on the soccer field, which would be normal as long as the insult is not bordered on. In this case, the player is attacked by insulting the person he loves most: his wife and mother of his son, Lauren Fryer.
Because? Because of the young woman’s weight. So simple and sad. The harassment has reached unbearable extremes, to the point that the player has had to come forward, on those same networks, to beg for his wife to be left alone.
Lauren, for her part, has deleted all her photos on Instagram in a desperate attempt to cut off those cruel comments, public and visible to everyone, about her physical appearance.
This is a clear case of fatphobia, of that discrimination and stigmatization that thousands of people suffer daily due to their obesity or overweight. And with social networks, everything is magnified. That is the perfect gallows to also insult, from anonymity, those who do not fit a specific physique.
What is new with Rice is that to attack the footballer, a campaign of harassment due to fatphobia has been deployed against someone very close to him, which in this case is the wife of the English international, a signing that has cost Arsenal 120 million euros.
The rivals of that team and also the ultras with the same colors as the player, have also tried to be ingenious (as if that excused them) with their harassment. Should we criticize this footballer’s game? Well, what better formula, those cruel Internet users have thought, than to do it with a simile between the body of his wife and what happens in the countryside.
Phrases like you have to have “very low standards” or “I could do better” exude a double meaning. To criticize him for what happens on the field, Rice is told that his game is at the level of the physical appearance of the person with whom he shares his life. You cannot, yes, be more cruel.
The player exploded and wanted to settle the controversy by publishing this message: “My wife is the love of my life and there is no one better for me.” We’ll see if he succeeds, because on the other side – on the side of bullies – it is clear that empathy is conspicuous by his absence.
In this story, another stereotype flourishes, also very popular on social networks, which relates soccer stars to super models. Lauren, who has shared a life with Rice for 8 years, breaks that pattern, which would give those fatphobes encouragement to mess with the young woman because of her appearance.
Marian del Álamo, psychologist and expert in eating disorders, confirms that social networks are, with these fatphobic messages, the most faithful proof “of the survival in this society of a normative pattern of the body.” Very specific canons have been established and anyone who deviates from that slender figure is the object of criticism. “The problem should never be attributed to people who do not fit into that pattern; “He who is sick and not well is the one who criticizes those bodies,” this psychologist makes clear.
