Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(22)

For the next year, he went back to posting semi-regularly about the horrors of the obesity epidemic with no discernible interruption, and I went back to ignoring him. Then, a whole lot happened in the same week. I dumped no-kissing-on-the-mouth guy. I kissed (on the mouth!) the man who, four years later, would become my husband. Then, Dan wrote a Slog post entitled, “Ban Fat Marriage,” using the supposed health risks of fatness as leverage to skewer some GOP dodo’s argument that gay marriage should be illegal because gay people supposedly die younger:

“Even if it were true—even if gay people had lower life expectancies (which we do not)—and if that ‘fact’ all by itself was a justification for banning same-sex marriage, why stop with gay people? Iowa should ban fat marriage. There are, according to the state of Iowa, more than 1.4 million obese people living in Iowa. That’s nearly 30% of the state’s population, and those numbers just keep rising. The social costs of Iowa’s obesity epidemic are pretty staggering—and those costs include premature death and lower average life expectancies for Iowans.”

I get the point. I understand that, in context, Dan presents “ban fat marriage” as an instructive absurdity. This post is still dehumanizing. It still oversimplifies the connections between size and health, and, unfortunately, some anti-fat bigots actually have suggested that fat people shouldn’t be allowed to have families (because of “the children”). Mainly, though, if you have a track record of treating my struggle with persistent disrespect and dismissal, then my struggle is not yours to use as a flippant thought experiment.

I threw up a quick Slog post:



Re: Ban Fat Marriage



Hey, Dan—so now that you’re equating the stigmatization of fat people with the stigmatization of gay people, does that mean you’re going to stop stigmatizing fat people on this blog?



Nothing. I waited a few days. Nothing.

I looked back over our old e-mail exchange—remembering how scary it had been to send, how roundly he’d dismissed me, and how quickly he’d gone back to posting fatphobic rhetoric. Passively attempting to earn my humanity by being smart, nice, friendly, and good at my job had gotten me nowhere; my private confrontation with Dan had gotten me nowhere; literally telling him “this harms me” had gotten me nowhere; taking a quick, vague swipe at him on the blog had gotten me nowhere. So I did what—honestly—I thought Dan would do: On Feb 11, 2011, I wrote a scorched-earth essay and, vibrating with adrenaline, posted it publicly at the tail end of a sunny Friday afternoon.

The post was called, “Hello, I Am Fat.” It included a full-body photo of me, taken that day by Kelly O, our staff photographer, with the caption: “28 years old, female, 5'9", 263 lbs.” Remember that, at this point in my life, I had never self-identified as “fat” except in that single e-mail exchange with Dan, and in private conversations with trusted friends. Even then, I spoke the word only with shame, not power. Never in public. Never defiantly. Something had snapped in me the week of this post. This was a big deal, a spasm of self-determination rendered in real time. This was the moment.

It read as follows (now with a few annotations and cuts for brevity):


This is my body (over there—see it?). I have lived in this body my whole life. I have wanted to change this body my whole life. I have never wanted anything as much as I have wanted a new body. I am aware every day that other people find my body disgusting. I always thought that some day—when I finally stop failing—I will become smaller, and when I become smaller literally everything will get better (I’ve heard It Gets Better)! My life can begin! I will get the clothes that I want, the job that I want, the love that I want. It will be great! Think how great it will be to buy some pants or whatever at J.Crew. Oh, man. Pants. Instead, my body stays the same.

There is not a fat person on earth who hasn’t lived this way. Clearly this is a TERRIBLE WAY TO EXIST. Also, strangely enough, it did not cause me to become thin. So I do not believe any of it anymore, because fuck it very much.

This is my body. It is MINE. I am not ashamed of it in any way. In fact, I love everything about it. Men find it attractive. Clothes look awesome on it. My brain rides around in it all day and comes up with funny jokes. Also, I don’t have to justify its awesomeness/attractiveness/healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is MINE. Not yours.*

I’m not going to spend a bunch of time blogging about fat acceptance here, because other writers have already done it much more eloquently, thoroughly, and radically than I ever could. But I do feel obligated to try to explain what this all means.

I get that you think you’re actually helping people and society by contributing to the fucking Alp of shame that crushes every fat person every day of their lives—the same shame that makes it a radical act for me to post a picture of my body and tell you how much it weighs. But you’re not helping. Shame doesn’t work. Diets don’t work.* Shame is a tool of oppression, not change.

Fat people already are ashamed. It’s taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front, thx. I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and “choices.” Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat forever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they’re trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it’s because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don’t even have yet? You know what’s shameful? A complete lack of empathy.