Aren’t We All A Little Insatiable?


I believe everyone and everything deserves a chance. Which is why I watched “Insatiable” on Netflix. And I think you should too, in fact I think everyone should. This isn’t a revenge body story, it’s a story for anyone who remembers being tormented by their peers about their weight. It’s a story for anyone who felt like they were less than because of their weight. The series is centered around Patricia Bladell, or “Fatty Patty” to her peers, a high school student who is shunned and ostracized by other students for her weight. Patty is depressed, and eats her feelings as she watches every Drew Barrymore movie ever made. Things change for Patty after she initiates a fist fight with a homeless man, who taunts her for eating a chocolate bar despite being overweight. After the fight, Patty’s jaw is wired shut leading to an all liquid diet for three months, causing her to lose about seventy pounds.


There is essentially no difference between “Insatiable” and any other 80s or 90s rom com we grew up watching. Perhaps it’s the fact that we’ve all been Patty at one point in our lives. We’ve all gone home at one point in our lives and pinched at the extra skin, sucked in our tummies, looked at our extra jiggly parts in the mirror and longed for the day we’d head into the brick prison we called high school, and got complete and total satisfaction from watching our tormentors jaws hit the floor at our new body.


This satirical series never claimed to be body positive. It claimed to be an angry “coming of rage story”, and that’s exactly what it is. We needed this. An angry story of what it means when we place a higher value on outer beauty and not inner beauty. What it means when we feel like our bodies aren't our own. It’s a cautionary tale, of what happens when we feed into revenge instead of working on ourselves. Patty may have lost the weight, but she didn’t lose the “weight” of being Fatty Patty.


The show isn’t perfect, and is problematic in a lot of other ways, but I think it meant well.