There’s Never Been A Better Time For ‘Dietland’

When Sarai Walker’s novel Dietland was released in 2015, much of it was damn near revolutionary. This tale of body acceptance, female revenge, and empowerment predates the #MeToo movement, but its small-screen adaptation couldn’t be more at home in 2018. Might the ideas have felt a little fresher on television in 2015? Sure. But at this moment – a time where we’re looking to amplify the voices that have been silenced for decades – Dietland hits home in even more ways than it did upon the book’s release, and is still starting a revolution in its own right.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but a TV adaptation of Dietland may not have found its feet as quickly in another year. The indictment of the toxic fashion industry, our obsession with thinness, and abusive men feels right at home in the midst of #MeToo and #TimesUp, and even picks away at things we’ve still been too afraid to bring into the discourse in recent months. Our culture of fatphobia is still alive and well, and the quest for unattainable beauty isn’t going anywhere. Enter Dietland, a series that gives us a fat hero whose journey doesn’t involve becoming thin to realize just how fabulous she is. Plum is the perfect protagonist for a culture still too afraid to embrace fatness and genuinely promote self-love at all sizes. It may have taken us too long to get here, but she’s arrived, and attention should be paid. We don’t get to embrace half the things that have been taboo and ignore the others that make us uncomfortable. Our problem with body image is very real, and it should be addressed in the same direct manner with which Dietland depicts it.

When Walker wrote Dietland, she envisioned it as something of a Fight Club for women, a chance for females to form their own social rebellion and fight back against the abusers who had taken away our bodies, our minds, our dignities. Calling something like Dietland timely because of its airing during the #MeToo movement may be true, but perhaps all things seem timely because this abuse has been inflicted on women since the world began – we’re just now learning to talk about it. We’re living in a time of peak female rage, where a floodgate of fury has broken open and years of oppression have been exposed. Dietland may take things to a violent extreme, but it’s a smart manifestation of the anger still simmering in so many of our hearts, an example of the extreme that women have been pushed to after suffering at the hands of this toxic cycle for so long.

Dietland is certainly juggling a lot more hot topics than any other series would dare to touch, but it plays like controlled chaos, an encapsulation of the current climate where the focus is shifting every single day. Is a lot of it extremely on the nose? Sure. But these days, we could use more directness. It’s the fear of talking about these things that created a world where Dietland is quite nearly a reality.