by Kelly Jensen
To be clear, FAT!SO? is not a perfect book, and I’m thrilled more books—both fiction and nonfiction—that respect fat people are being published, especially those by Black people, Indigenous people, People of Color (BIPOC); disabled folk; poor people; LGBTQIA+ individuals; and people from other marginalized groups, and I hope there are many more to come. In particular, I can’t recommend The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor highly enough.
But oh, the shame I shed that day in Seattle. Not all of it, not nearly. But I had a new word to try on for size.* Language is powerful. It can provide connection and validation. It can also cause hurt and shame. My shame of the word fat was a mirror of the shame of my own body that was so deep I couldn’t even name it. Changing my reaction to the word fat, and embracing it, has been a vital part of loving my fat body. I’m grateful that there was a tool for me when I needed it, and I’m excited for books like the anthology you’re reading right now. The more we share honestly about our bodies and listen to others talking honestly about theirs, the closer we get to self-love.
Diets don’t work. (Check the science.)
You are amazing right now. (Without a single change.)
You can choose to love yourself for who you are. (Not despite it.)
Good luck. (You got this.)
*All puns intended.
Thin by Yao Xiao
My Body, a Crime
by Mars Sebastian
My name is Marissa, but many thousands of people just call me Mars. I became a social media influencer after two hashtags I created (#BlackoutDay and #LoveforLeslieJ) went viral a few years back. It’s not difficult to get a sense of who I am from a glance at my profiles. I’m a Gemini; I’m a woman. I am many things. I’m also fat, and I have had binge eating disorder for a decade.
This is my first very public admittance of that fact. I felt shame because I thought that eating disorders were just for skinny white girls and that my suffering meant I was just being weak, so I kept quiet. Years of enduring fatphobia and experiencing erasure from discussions of disordered eating, combined with the urge to maybe not feel so alone, are pushing me to speak now.
Here goes.
I don’t remember the time before I was hyperaware of my body and how much space it took up. I was always a tall, chubby kid from a tall, chubby family. I remember being envious of my smaller friends by the time I was eight years old. I learned early on that the nature of who I was informed the way the world treated me. I felt the weight of the world’s fatphobia, misogyny, anti-Blackness, and colorism before I even truly knew myself. In a society that prioritized and rewarded very narrow ideas of “beauty” and measured worthiness based on those constraints, I, a fat Black girl, didn’t stand a chance. What people called “beautiful” didn’t look like me. The images that were shown to me in stores, in magazines, and on television sold me the idea that thinness and whiteness were gold standards of beauty.
I know that I hated my body by the time I was ten.
Middle school was a hellscape. I got called “cow” a lot. Big b*tch. By high school, I despaired that I was not thin, light skinned, and “pretty” enough to secure what I’d been taught were measures of success for a teenage girl.
At fifteen, I was so weary of my peers’ ridicule and the damaging messages I absorbed while just navigating the world as a bigger girl that by the time my father started watching my plates, my relationship with food had already soured. “That’s a bit too much,” he said to no one else in my family but me, the fat teenage girl in a fat family. How was that fair? With every person in my family being overweight, why was I singled out? How could he lecture me when his portions were at least double mine? Looking back, I realize he genuinely did it out of love and concern for my health. He was dealing with weight-related and genetic illnesses, and since I was his first child and only daughter, comments about my portions became a love language of sorts. Diet culture prevented us from learning how to talk about weight and health in ways that were helpful, productive, and safe. How could he have known better? My dad’s intention aside, the casual monitoring of my portion sizes stung, and the habit of obsessing over what I ate stuck. Family meals started to taste like sawdust. My portions slowly grew bigger out of resentment, and I was already too far down a road I still have trouble navigating.
The first time a boy I liked complimented me, he told me he admired my “thunder thighs” and my breasts but joked in passing about my stomach. I learned that only parts of my body were “correct.” Curvy girls were preferred, but “no, not like that.” Another lesson came when my peers ridiculed a classmate bigger and darker than I was. I don’t remember her name, but I remember the way her face contorted as she tried not to cry. I was too scared to speak up. Instead, I pledged I’d never be like her. I learned that no one stands up for girls like us.
My senior year of high school, I was cast as Maria in West Side Story. I was a talented and capable soprano, and with the encouragement of my teachers, I learned all of Maria’s music and lines. Halfway into rehearsals, and close enough to the show that we’d begun preliminary measurements for costumes, my teachers suddenly changed their minds. Shocked and embarrassed, I watched as girls lighter skinned and thinner than I was became Maria. I, along with other dark chubby girls throughout the ensemble, was benched. My consolation prize was singing a solo midway through the show as a nameless character. Girls like me weren’t leading ladies. No matter how talented I was, my look wasn’t right. Fatness wasn’t acceptable. My skin tone wasn’t beautiful. The fact that I dared to exist and take up space as a tall, fat, darker Black teenage girl? I would never win. I’d never be the thin, lighter-skinned, popular girl adored by many for her grace, beauty, and charm and rewarded with popularity and a parade of suitors for being all the right things.
“Beautiful” was unattainable, and I became stuck in a loop of completely giving up on it and then desperately chasing it. I would eat way too much in one sitting out of stress and hopelessness and then starve myself later. To avoid comments like my father’s, I did my best to avoid eating in front of people. “I’m not hungry” became a reflex, as ingrained as hunger itself. I learned to completely ignore when my body told me it was too full or starving. It was only when I couldn’t bear the pain of overeating or the dizzy sickness of starvation that I relented and fell into the cycle again.
I was seventeen and a freshman at NYU when a doctor put a name to my suffering and obsession—binge eating disorder. With my diagnosis came overwhelming relief and the grim determination to get to a place where my eating disorder couldn’t reach me. It had gripped me for so long, silenced me, and gnawed at my sense of self. I became the meals I skipped. I became the foods I ate in secret. I became my ever-climbing dress size. Weight gain was the last thing I wanted, but it happened. It’s not a story that’s particularly uncommon, but as a fat girl with an eating disorder and as a person who gained weight because of their disorder, I’ve felt unseen for years. Almost a decade after my diagnosis, I am heavier than I have ever been, and I’m still struggling to recover.
We hardly speak about fat girls having eating disorders, and we haven’t made space for fat Black girls and women to be seen and supported without ridicule. Not only does the world largely regard fatness as something to be avoided, but fat Black women are ridiculed within our communities as sloppy and unattractive, are made mammies and caricatures due to anti-Blackness, or are fetishized for our Blackness and our bodies. It’s additionally frustrating that the most far-reaching “body positivity” spaces continually center white women and lighter-skinned Women of Color, most of whom will also fit into constraints about what type of fat bodies are more acceptable than others.
I’m hoping to challenge these constraints and start a wave of healing by being open with my story. I’m still recovering; I’m still fighting against all the ways this world tells me I’m unworthy. The stress of existing as I am sometimes manifests as relapses.
I’m still trying, though, because I’m angry, and I’m ready to end the abusive relationship I’ve been in with my body due to fatphobic and racist standards of beauty. I’m ready for fat girls and women to be free. I’m ready to be free.
To close, a note to the unseen:
Dear You,
I am you, and I am with you. I am with you when you avoid mirrors. I am with you when you cry. I am with you when fatphobia goes beyond just feeling unpretty. When it causes the world to value you and your opinions and your labor and your life less.
I am with you when you imagine the Thin and Happy™ you. A smaller girl who walks into any store she wants with confidence. Who never panics while looking for the plus section. Who eats in public without second or third thoughts.
I am with you when you wonder if you’ll ever be sexy outside of being fetishized. I am with you when you shroud your body in clothes that don’t flatter you because you can’t afford to be plus sized and fashionable.
I am with you when your thin friends and family embarrass you, even when they mean well.
I am with you when you are in pain. When you overeat from the stress and strain and feel awful. When you skip meals. When you purge.
We are worthy of wellness. We are worthy of recovery. Your body, your struggle, is not a crime.
—Mars
What’s the difference between body positivity and fat acceptance?
Body positivity and fat acceptance can be seen as sister movements, but the way that each achieves its end goals differs.
The fat acceptance movement began in the 1960s. In the era that brought revolution to race, gender, feminism, and sexuality, fat activists also spoke up, advocating for the rights of fat people and revolting against size discrimination.
Where the fat acceptance movement was part of the radical shift in politics, the idea of body positivity became the more watered-down version. Over the last couple of decades in particular, body positivity has been based on the idea that all bodies are good bodies and that every person has something—or multiple somethings!—they’re not especially happy about when it comes to their physique. Instead of focusing entirely on body size, it is based on the idea that there are countless ways our bodies can be judged. Body positivity includes fat bodies beneath its umbrella, but it often leaves out those with bodies outside an “acceptable” range and has instead focused on more media-friendly, average-sized bodies.
Body positivity has its benefits, though. For many, it’s the first step in understanding how politicized our bodies can be. The body positivity movement can help people better understand the history of size discrimination and of how bodies became the target of capitalism, can lead to encounters with those who’ve been advocating for radical size acceptance, and may move more people toward taking part in fat acceptance.
Non-Skinny People Who I Think Are Sexy as Hell
by Tyra Banks
I like a bit of booty on my models, my missies, my matrons, and my men. I think these people are some fine-ass human beings.
Ashley Graham: This statuesque supermodel stunner [was] also [an] America’s Next Top Model judge and [is] my girl! She’s the queen of the Curve-a-listas!
Zach Miko: The first supermodel to come out of Brawn, IMG’s plus-size male model division. Chiseled, chunky, and oh so funky (and oh so fine as hell!).
Christina Hendricks: A redhead with curves so hot they could start fires.
Kate Upton: My Sports Illustrated cover girl sister from another mister.
Vince Vaughn: 6'5" and looking good, boo. No beanpoles here.
Amber Rose: A beauty and a booty on a mission to stop slut shaming. I can definitely get behind that behind.
Dascha Polanco: Orange is the new black, and bootyful is the new beautiful.
The bearded man in the plaid shirt sitting next to me at this Malibu café right now as I type. (Damn, your thick lumbersexual ass is fine, boo!)
This piece was previously published in Perfect Is Boring by Tyra Banks and Carolyn London.
Loving On Me Is Prayer: Queer Journeys into Black Girl Self-Love
by Junauda Petrus-Nasah
“Junauda, are you ashamed of your body?” my mom asked me one morning. I was about twelve years old, getting ready for school, and we were in the bathroom of our small house. I was taking a bath in our claw-foot tub, lying on my stomach to hide my developing body from her opinionated eyes, and she was peeing. (Modesty or privacy was never an option in our home of Mama and her four daughters and one bathroom.) I told her I wasn’t ashamed of my body, and I was lying. But I knew that was what she wanted to hear.
She saw right through my response and continued her inquiry.
“Junauda, you should love your body. I wish when I was your age that I knew how beautiful my body was.” She spoke with a regret that made me pay attention. In that moment, I tried to imagine my mom as a girl like me, having feelings about her body. I was in the cooling bathwater, hiding the signs of my impending womanhood, while my mom, a Trinidadian woman with dark skin, striking features, and impenetrable self-esteem, even on this inglorious throne, implored me to see myself as stunning and complete. This moment, in all of its awkwardness, left me with a seed of insight: that I should love myself—love my body—even if it didn’t seem possible then.
My mom didn’t know what I was navigating in my middle school life. Every day in seventh grade in 1993 was like hood fashion police. Deonte wearing the same pants as yesterday! Look who got on sneakers from Payless? Junauda got hair too nappy for relaxers, pink lotions, and hair gel! Who got high-waters on? Raphael try to be like Kris Kross but got tight-ass, high-water overalls that he wear backwards with one strap swinging and look busted? Who got socks with holes in it? Who in this classroom had sex before? Who smelling all musty and ain’t put on deodorant? Who ain’t matching? Got plaid and paisley on and faded hand-me-downs? Who got a hairstyle look like they in the third grade? These questions, posed by popular and grown-ass eighth graders during any given class—where were the teachers?—always stressed and panicked my young soul.
My clothes were always unremarkable, faded or hand-me-downs, and I had never kissed anyone (although I had an elaborate lie involving Raphael ready to spill if I was ever asked). I was always anxious I would be pulled into these interrogations. My family’s economics and immigrantness and my awkwardness added to the challenge of me fitting in, so I stood out as one of the frequent targets. I had desires for boys in my school who would never see me as pretty, and I had desires for girls, too, something I was curious and simultaneously ashamed about and hid away from myself and the world. School sucked so bad sometimes, I would beg the hall monitor to let me sit in her office to avoid being teased for my hair and my nerdiness.
But in eighth grade I decided to stop trying to make my older sister’s hand-me-down Girbaud and Cross Colours into an identity of a kid who wasn’t poor, and instead, I started to dress grunge. I had been inspired by a White girl who was in band with me, who started skipping school and dyeing her blond hair a new color every week with Kool-Aid. She’d stopped caring what everybody thought, and somehow that seemed like the answer for me. To not care what folks thought and indulge in the path of the outsider.
By that time, Left Eye from TLC, Aaliyah, Björk, Claire Danes, and D’arcy Wretzky from the Smashing Pumpkins were among my style icons. I crushed on their androgyny and quirkiness, how they seemed to define their own kind of power and sexiness. All of them beautiful and irreverent, but also not quite like me. I listened to alternative music that reflected the Black-girl emo that hurricaned inside me, the one that no one seemed to care about. My mom was mortified when I would dress like I’d borrowed somebody’s grandpa’s favorite bingo outfit after he was attacked by piranhas. “You finish dress?” she would ask every time I would present my newest outfit. After I’d say yes, she would offer her opinion.
“Junauda, White children
wear dem clothes, and people see it as a style. You wear dem clothes, they think your parents is poor, or we ain’t care about you.” The Caribbean-parent backlash was real. My mother couldn’t understand why I would purposely try to look raggedy. Was this the American dream she had worked so hard for? But I loved how I looked. It felt powerful to look like I didn’t care what anyone thought, even though I did deeply.
My eighth-grade year, my boobs were coming into formation. I was growing pubic hair and a thick ass, and every jerk on my block and at my school noticed and would holler some dumb and sexist insight to me about my body, which I was already devastatingly self-conscious about. In the early ’90s the fashionable bodies were “36-24-36,” a rare and sexualized ratio of bust to waist to booty. The other body type popular in media was so skinny that your hip bones and rib cage were visible, with no boobs or booty at all. Teen magazines, boys at school, men in my neighborhood, other girls at school, and the music videos I was watching, from hip-hop to grunge, all told me I had to have a specific body type to be lovable. This was also when I first learned about eating disorders, which seemed to me like a symbol of privileged-White-girl angst. They never felt relevant to me, even though shame and unhealthy habits, like eating sugar for comfort and extreme dieting, were settling into my psyche in insidious ways that would take years to release.
Brown and gap-toothed, I couldn’t see the beauty in me.
By the time my mom had spoken to me while I was in the bathtub in seventh grade, I had already internalized messages about the value and beauty in my femmeness and Blackness. I have a vivid memory of ripping up my kindergarten school pictures when I was five because I thought I was so ugly. I was young, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that way, with all my little heart. I had been playing with blond Barbie dolls, my dad had left my mom for a White woman, and those things, along with other messages I was getting about my Blackness from society and school, made me start to look at myself harshly. I was constantly in battle with my relaxed hair, which, despite the calming description of the process, burned my scalp, forcing my natural coils into brittle straightness. (I eventually went natural at fifteen, inspired by Lauryn Hill, and rocked a little Afro.) As a teenager, I hid in my hip-hop- and grunge-inspired uniforms of plaid button-ups, headwraps, and baggy jeans. This was a time in my life when I just wanted to disappear, and it seemed, instead, that more of me was appearing, growing, and maturing.
