ROXANE GAY IS a noted feminist and the celebrated author of Bad Feminist, An Untamed State and Difficult Women. Gay is currently on the publicity trail promoting her latest book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

In the memoir, Gay recounts her experience of gaining weight following a traumatic sexual assault and, as she writes, “living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese.”

As part of her book tour, the author appeared on No Filter with Mia Freedman, a podcast produced by Australian website Mamamia. The episode description, which appeared in podcast feeds, attracted widespread criticism on social media for making distasteful remarks about Gay’s weight.

Will she fit into the office lift? How many steps will she have to take to get to the interview? Is there a comfortable chair that will accommodate her six-foot-three, ‘super-morbidly obese’ frame?

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Not only that, but the website published details of the interview on Monday.

The now-deleted article, entitled ‘Why, for the first time, I have no photo from my interview with Roxane Gay,‘ described Gay’s weight as “a logistical nightmare” and disclosed details of conversations with her publishers, details of which didn’t really need to be in the public domain, if you ask us.

Her size is imposing and also a logistical nightmare for her. The requirements back and forth with her publishers who had brought her out to Australia to promote her books were extremely detailed.

How many steps were there from the curb to the door of the building? Were there any stairs? How many? How big was the lift and was there a goods lift? How many steps from the lift to the podcast studio? There was also a lot of talk about chairs – making sure we had one sturdy enough to both hold her weight and make sure she was comfortable.

Way to talk about a human being as though she’s some sort of curiosity, huh?

The comments were condemned for being fatphobic and dehumanising, while Roxane Gay labelled them “cruel and humiliating”.

In fact, she called the entire experience “a s**t show”.

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Fans jumped to Gay’s defence and called Mamamia out for their revolting remarks.

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Mamamia have since apologised for the podcast description, acknowledging that they “missed the mark in contributing to this discussion”. (You can say that again.)

Additionally, they have edited the podcast episode and removed references to details of their conversations with Gay’s publisher.

As a publisher that’s consistently championed body diversity and representation in the media, we believe the conversations sparked by Roxane’s book are vitally important for women, and are disappointed our execution of this story hasn’t contributed in the way we intended. We’re deeply apologetic that in this instance we’ve missed the mark in contributing to this discussion.

As soon as we became aware of her feelings about it, we took down the written post, edited the podcast intro and changed the podcast description to remove all references to the questions asked by her publishers and about details she said she found upsetting.

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