Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(32)

As a counterpoint, I would like to lodge a gentle reminder that air travel has been terrible for a long time. It’s terrible because a plane is just a flying bus, trapped in an eternal rush hour, with recycled farts and vaporized child sputum instead of air, seats barely wider than the average human pelvis, and a bonus built-in class hierarchy. Barring a brief period in the ’50s and ’60s, when airplanes were reportedly flying, smoke-choked bacchanals staffed by Bond girls wearing baby onesies, air travel has been a study in discomfort giving way to ever more profitable methods of making people uncomfortable. That has nothing to do with fat people’s bodies.

I’m sure some fat people are fat by their own hand, without any underlying medical conditions, but a lot of other fat people are fat because they’re sick or disabled. Unless you’re checking every human being’s bloodwork before they pull up Kayak.com, you do not know which fat people are which. Which means, inevitably, if you think fat people are “the problem” (and not, say, airlines hoping to squeeze out extra revenue, or consumers who want cheap airline tickets without sacrificing amenities), you are penalizing a significant number of human beings emotionally and financially for a disease or disability that already complicates their lives. Ethically, that’s fucked up.

That dude next to me didn’t call me fat to my face. I don’t even know if that’s what was bothering him, although I recognized the way he looked at my body (my body, not my face, not once, not ever). I can’t be sure why that guy was mad at me, but I know why people are usually mad at me on planes. I know that he disliked me instantly, he invented a reason to be a jerk to me, and then he executed it. More importantly, I see other people staring those same daggers at other fat people’s bodies every day, in the sky and on the ground, and congratulating themselves for it, as though they’re doing a righteous public service.

Even less popular than being fat on a plane, I soon discovered, was talking about being fat on a plane with anything but groveling, poo-eating penitence.

Not long after it happened, I wrote about “say excuse me” guy in a little essay for Jezebel, about holiday air travel, not expecting anything beyond the usual “eat less/exercise more” anti-fat backlash. It was a vulnerable story, and a sympathetic one, I thought, about the low-grade hostility that fat people face every day (and about the debilitating self-doubt bred by micro-aggressions—does this person really hate me or am I being oversensitive?), and I told it plainly, as it happened. I assumed that people could connect with me, the person, and potentially break down some of the prejudice that makes fat people such popular pariahs. The actual response caught me off guard, though it shouldn’t have.

Without considering for a moment that I might have interpreted my own experiences accurately—that this very simple and famously common interaction, an airplane passenger feeling resentful about sitting next to a fat person, might be true—readers bent over backwards to construct elaborate alternate narratives in which I was the villain. I was the one being rude, by saying “sorry” instead of “excuse me.” (What rule is that?) I had smothered him with my gut when I reached up to stow my bag. (Ew, as if I like touching people.) I had delayed the flight with my entitled, irresponsible failure to show up on time. (I was there within the boarding window, I just wasn’t early, the way I like to be.) I was the last person on the plane (nope). I was still drunk, looking for a fight, ranting and raving and reeking of booze. (What do I look like—a freshman?)

In the same breath that commenters were telling me I was overreacting, I was delusional, I was lying—a man couldn’t possibly have been hostile to me on an airplane—they were also chiming in with and commiserating over their own anecdotes about the horrors of flying near disgusting, smelly, presumptuous fat people. So which is it? Are fat people treated just fine on planes or is flying with fat people such a torment that it warrants a public crusade?

Part of writing is choosing which details to include and which to discard. Part of reading is deciding whether or not you can trust your narrator. The Internet made it very clear, very quickly, once my post went up, that trusting me was not on the table. I didn’t bother to mention, for instance, that the dude was sitting with his legs splayed wide in classic “MAN’S STEAMING BALLS COMING THROUGH” fashion, with his foot in the middle footwell (my footwell) where I’d stowed my backpack. (If I had, I would have been accused of feminist hysteria, the way women who call out subway “manspreading” have been.) I didn’t waste words on the fact that when they closed the cabin doors and it became clear that our window seat was going to be unoccupied, I moved my backpack to the window seat, where I’d already been sitting. So, yeah, I jostled the guy’s foot when I moved my bag, because the guy’s foot was blocking my bag. The guy didn’t even wake up. I thought it was tedious and unnecessary exposition (and, if you’re still awake at this point in this boring-ass paragraph, you’ll see that I was right). I assumed that Jezebel readers would trust that I am as I have always presented myself—a kind, pragmatic, nonviolent, reasonable human being—and read my story with a modicum of empathy, or at least the benefit of the doubt.

Within hours of my post cycling through the Internet sausage factory, I was barraged with bizarre fictions on Twitter: I had stumbled onto the plane drunk, delayed takeoff as I screamed at the guy to move, sat on him, viciously kicked him with my wide-calf boot, brutally beaten him with my backpack, continued to harass and mock him for the duration of the flight as he quivered in terror and pretended to sleep, then eagerly libeled him on the Internet. One particularly putrid community of misogynists threatened to “report me to the FBI” for “assault and battery in a federal airspace.” (LOL, go for it, sluggers.) They also coordinated a (temporarily successful) effort to Google bomb my name so that their “article”—“Fat Feminist Lindy West Goes Berserk Because She No Longer Fits in Airplane Seats”—came up on the first page of search results.