Why We Need Fat Liberation

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While I’m well-versed in why other kinds of equality work is needed, I sometimes feel shy about activism on behalf of my fat self. With so much misery around us, with immigrant children in cages, with police being given more and more power to murder, with reproductive justice under constant attack, etc, etc, is this important enough to devote paragraphs to? Even if the topic weren’t ready to haunt me until I type it out, I would still say the answer is yes. Fat-phobia is part of how we got president Trump, both literally and figuratively.

Forty-Five has a lifetime of evil to brag about, but he first crossed my consciousness as a fat-shaming creep at the beginning of  his feud with Rosie O’Donnell.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32EapqqutM This form of othering might seem more innocuous than other Trumpish horrors, but it’s really just part of a methodical, misogynist, white supremacist (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/fat-shaming-heather-heyer-white-supremacy) abuse campaign meant to frighten and cow us into obedience, meant to undermine women’s power and at the same time, democracy itself.

But this isn’t really about the stupid, hateful MAGA-monster, it’s about, as sooooo many things in this blog are, a cute boy. Monday morning found me in tears when a new friend, who is generally not super-careful about his relationship to privilege and on whom I’d been having a big friend crush, said something casually fat-phobic after I had already mentioned it to him a couple of times. I tried woke-splaining but he said he didn’t want to be “schooled.” He said that what’s offensive is subjective, and I said no, respecting others’ bodies is not optional, especially among friends. He asked me to explain and I refused, sick of trying to convince him to treat me like an equal. It was bad enough I was worrying about what I was wearing whenever I knew I’d see him, putting aside my Lindy-West-approved tent dresses for more “flattering” things, now I was crying in front of him too?

He eventually relented and apologized, and has done much better. I know it’s all part of the process of getting to know someone, teaching people how to be kind and thoughtful in ways that might not have occurred to them before, it still hurts. The emotional labor has a cost, and I am supertired of paying it.

Part of the reason I was feeling jagged Monday morning is that among the tsunami of bad political news, there was one thing that might not have registered as bad news to most. One of my most treasured heroes had slid subtlly rightward, and on top of that I had to feel guilty for being mad about it. On the surface, it should be good news: Roxane Gay had weight-loss surgery and she had leveraged that into a piece for ESPN about how she now has hope of reclaiming her pre-sexual-assault status as an athlete.

Being angry at ROXANE GAY for how she chooses to care for her body feels disloyal in the extreme, but that’s where we are. I’m not mad at her for having surgery or for returning to activities that feel better in a more-mobile body. I am angry that she has written a piece that not only implies that athleticism is not available to fat women, but also gives the body-colonizing twin evils of diet culture and rape culture the only narrative they find acceptable for fat women.

1.      Recognize that fat is a pathology, a result of personal trauma, but that it must be fixed for the public good.

2.      Apologize for the mistake of taking up space.

3.      Put your female body through pain and deprivation so that people can approve of you and welcome you back into the straight-sized fold.

As much as I root for my lost hero to prove me wrong, to feel comfortable in her skin, to swim her lighter laps to freedom, the thing about diet/rape culture is that no amount of shrinking will ever be enough. No matter how much we try to conform to their sadistic, abusive demands, we can never please those who would objectify us. Roxane Gay may trade fat for more catcalling (not that fat women don’t get catcalled, we do and we’re supposed to feel grateful) and will be beholden to public for the size of her body. Although, the fact that I’m writing this means that I think she already is. There is really no way for anyone to win here, except that fucking weight-loss narrative.

Funnily enough, I remember having a similar (though far less verbose) reaction when the woman I’ve come to think of was Roxane Gay’s opposite, Roseanne Barr, got similar weight loss surgery. That felt like a loss too. Back then, it was extremely rare to see a fat person unapologetically in the public eye. In my pre-teen eyes, Roseanne was so beautiful, so funny, and so clearly fuck-you-if-you-don’t-approve-of-my-body that she was a comfort to me as I started the process of understanding the demands that the world would put on my young body. I didn’t understand why the woman who’d coined the phrase “domestic goddess” would go through so much trouble to be thinner. I remember reading about her new portion sizes in a magazine, feeling slightly hurt and bemused.

Of course, Roseanne turned out to be an evil MAGA-monster herself, letting down my young self more deeply than a surgery ever could, so maybe the point is moot. But surely my young self got a message of that surgery, that who I was was okay until I could afford to upgrade. I’m sure young feminists (or “bad feminists” as the case may be) are taking the same message from Roxane Gay’s new piece. Who knows what they’ll do with the message, but it surely adds to the toxic soup of self-hating nonsense that women always have to face. In my kid-brain, Roxane was here to help us, but then she left us.

It isn’t fair of me to think of Roxane Gay’s self-improvement as a betrayal. It’s not fair to colonize another woman’s body with my needs and expectations at all. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that I, as one of her fat readers, am part of what she sees as holding her back, more poundage to be lost so that she can be her shiny new hopeful self. She never said that, it’s just part of the patriarchy’s narrative, but it hurts anyway.

Though we have never met, Roxane Gay has been in my head a long time as a protector, as a big sister, a powerful thread in the tapestry of support and love and self-love that I wrap around myself to preserve my sense of worthiness amidst a culture that tells me I am a project at best and worthless at worst. There are many other threads, but this one will be missed.

If my sense of belonging and self-worth can be rocked by other people’s medical choices, I would say it needs some reinforcing. As I diverge from my hero’s bodily journey, I wonder how many ways I can be kinder to my own, how many ways I can reach out to young women and femmes, how much I can do to serve this weird fight we’re all in, the fight to be able to eat what we want, to take up space, and to no longer apologize for existing. No narrative can take me out of that fight, especially when Dietland is a show. https://www.amc.com/shows/dietland/full-episodes/season-01/episode-01/episodes-1-2