Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(23)
And if you really claim to still be confused—“Nu uh! I never said anything u guyz srsly!”—there can be no misunderstanding shit like this:
“I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact—being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly—characterized as ‘hate speech.’”
Ha!
1. “Rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly” is in no way a “tame statement of fact.” It is not a fact at all—it is an incredibly cruel, subjective opinion that reinforces destructive, paternalistic, oppressive beauty ideals.* I am not unsightly. No one deserves to be told that they’re unsightly. But this is what’s behind this entire thing—it’s not about “health,” it’s about “eeeewwwww.” You think fat people are icky. Eeeewww, a fat person might touch you on a plane. With their fat! Eeeeewww! Coincidentally, that’s the same feeling that drives anti-gay bigots, no matter what excuses they drum up about “family values” and, yes, “health.” It’s all “eeeewwwww.” And sorry, I reject your eeeeeewwww.
2. You are not concerned about my health. Because if you were concerned about my health, you would also be concerned about my mental health, which has spent the past twenty-eight years being slowly eroded by statements like the above. Also, you don’t know anything about my health. You do happen to be the boss of me, but you are not the doctor of me. You have no idea what I eat, how much I exercise, what my blood pressure is, or whether or not I’m going to get diabetes. Not that any of that matters, because it is entirely none of your business.
3. “But but but my insurance premiums!!!” Bullshit. You live in a society with other people. I don’t have kids, but I pay taxes that fund schools. The idea that we can somehow escape affecting each other is deeply conservative. Barbarous, even. Is that really what you’re going for? Good old-fashioned American individualism? Please.
4. But most importantly: I reject this entire framework. I don’t give a shit what causes anyone’s fatness. It’s irrelevant and it’s none of my business. I am not making excuses, because I have nothing to excuse. I reject the notion that thinness is the goal, that thin = better—that I am an unfinished thing and that my life can really start when I lose weight. That then I will be a real person and have finally succeeded as a woman. I am not going to waste another second of my life thinking about this. I don’t want to have another fucking conversation with another fucking woman about what she’s eating or not eating or regrets eating or pretends to not regret eating to mask the regret. OOPS I JUST YAWNED TO DEATH.
If you really want change to happen, if you really want to “help” fat people, you need to understand that shaming an already-shamed population is, well, shameful. Do you know what happened as soon as I rejected all this shit and fell in unconditional luuuuurve with my entire body? I started losing weight. Immediately. WELL LA DEE FUCKING DA.*
The post went up. I left the office early and went across the street to get a head start on our Friday afternoon ritual, “Ham Grab,” so named because it consisted of getting drunk as fast as possible and then descending upon a meat and cheese platter like a plague of locusts with journalism degrees. As the comment section churned away—two hundred, three hundred, four hundred comments—I heard nothing from Dan all weekend; unbeknownst to me, he was off the grid in a cabin somewhere with no cell or Internet service. It would be a jarring welcome back to civilization. Oops.
The following Monday, Dan posted his response. It was three times longer than my piece—2,931 words, to be exact—accused me of “ad hominem attacks” and being blinded by my own emotional problems, and featured, as its centerpiece, this condescending bit of armchair psychology:
It sounds like you’re externalizing an internal conflict about being fat—you’re projecting your anger and self-loathing onto me, and seeing malice and bigotry where none exists, and perhaps that’s useful because that anger seems to be liberating and motivating. If having your own personal boogeyman on Slog helps you conquer your shame and love your body and this helps you break out of old, self-destructive patterns and habits (you can’t be losing weight now just because your attitude changed), then I’m happy to be your own personal boogeyman. But honestly, Lindy, you don’t need one. You’re stronger than that.
He said a lot of other things too, like “the bigotry in my posts exists only in Lindy’s imagination,” and “there are crazy fat people out there, Lindy… be careful who you crawl into bed [with] now that you’re a ‘brave’ hero to the FA movement,” and approvingly quoted a commenter who suggested that “apparently, Lindy isn’t very good with reading comprehension.”
It was exhausting—it just felt so static and pointless. We hadn’t moved an inch. The next day, there was a staff meeting about how I’d hurt Dan’s feelings, with no mention at all of the climate that had led me to write the post in the first place. I was livid. I thought about quitting, but the Stranger meant everything to me—it was the place where I found my voice, and the family that emboldened me to use it. At the time, I couldn’t imagine anything beyond that office, and besides, I loved working for Dan.
So, I dropped the argument (I’d said my piece, I stood by it, and a lot of people agreed) and we fell back into a normal routine. Gotta get the paper out. Meanwhile, I started getting e-mails from fat people, both friends and strangers, telling me that my post had made their lives better in small ways—emboldened them to set a boundary of their own, or take in their reflection with care rather than disgust. To this day, those e-mails make my job worth it.