The BBW scene is a niche market in the dating world. While most men seem to prefer busty blondes with skinny waists—a conditioned taste that they’ve learned from marketing— there are some men who prefer women with more substance. Just type “BBW” into any internet search engine and you’ll find a slew of websites dedicated exclusively to the BBW scene. And some fat girl porn.
Who visits these websites? The answer is mostly, but not entirely, BHM. That’s big handsome men, the male equivalent of BBW. My Denny is a BHM. He’s built for comfort, not for speed. He’s also a real handsome devil if I do say so myself. Believe me, I know. I’m a regular BHM connoisseur.
I must mention that not all lovers of BBW are necessarily BHM. I’ve known some real skinny (male) bitches who just love women in all of their wonderful quantity. I say, more power to them. They don’t mess around with a woman unless she’s weighing in over a hundred and eighty pounds. They like having something to grab on to.
It was September of 2005 when I went on that cruise. I asked best girlfriend from work if she wanted to go with me because she’s nearly as fat as I am. Well, she’s got a little ways to go before she catches up to me but she’s getting there. Her name is Millie and she’s Puerto Rican. I sold her on the idea by mentioning that the cruise was specially designed for BBW and the men who love them. All the guys on the cruise would be totally accepting of us. She was a little skeptical at first, but her resistance eventually made way for curiosity and we bought our tickets.
It was probably the best time of my life. I never wanted it to end. For an entire week I was free from the judgmental stares of fatphobic people. I didn’t worry about my body. I didn’t worry about how I looked in my swimsuit. No one cared at all how much I weighed. We left all the fatphobes on the pier and sailed away.
Everything was so fat accessible too. One of the things skinny people don’t understand is that the world is made with them in mind. Booths at restaurants are frequently too small for fat people. We prefer chairs. But then again, we don’t really like chairs with armrests because we can get stuck in those, and that can be an embarrassing situation. Beds are sometimes too small. Seatbelts may not be long enough without seatbelt extenders. I call attention to all of the aforementioned features of our fatphobic world on my radio show.
The BBW cruise did a spectacular job of making the ship accommodating. Never once did I feel awkward. All the facilities were made with fat folks in mind, from the deck chairs to the water slide.
With no one around to judge us, we fatties had a ball. We made a port call in Costa Rica. We visited Cozumel in Mexico, which was fantastic. Cozumel is well known as a scuba diving paradise. I could hardly believe my own nerve, but I decided to give it a try. Scuba was something I’d always avoided because I didn’t think they made wet suits in my size. How wrong I was. The Scuba instructor had a bunch on hand. He took us underwater for forty-five minutes. Never once did he make us feel uncomfortable.
They even had miniature golf on the ship. Millie and I had a blast with that. We swam in the pool and didn’t care at all who saw us. We must have gone down the waterslide at least fifty times, which is something I hadn’t done since I was like eleven years old. We lounged on the deck, working on our tans and drinking daiquiris until we were good and drunk.
And then there was the food—all you can eat and mouth-wateringly delicious. Breaded scallops and fried shrimp. Pasta, pizza, pork spareribs, and chicken drumsticks. Strip steaks, fried alligator tail, mahi-mahi, and mashed potatoes. Pudding and cake. Pretty much everything you can think of. They even had their own sundae bar. Millie and I ate like royalty on that trip and we loved every minute of it.
There were two formals over the course of the week—women in dresses and men in slacks and blazers. Before hitting the ballroom, Millie and I dolled ourselves up like the prom queens we never got to be. Fat people owned that dance floor. Millie and I danced until we thought we would drop dead of exhaustion.
I met Denny at the first formal. I remember the way he approached me, so reserved. Bashful, really. It was a slow song and the lights were turned down low. The disco ball scattered light all over the floor like little slivers of shattered glass. Denny asked me to dance in a shy, respectful way. He was such a gentleman, which is rare in this day and age. Very cute. Of course, I couldn’t say no.
The song they were playing eventually became ‘our song’. It was “I’ll Stand By You” from the Pretenders. I get a little weepy every time I hear that song.
For the rest of the cruise, Denny and I were inseparable. We were Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly, Tonto and the Lone Ranger. We did everything together. Millie respectfully kept her distance from us. She even met a little friend of her own, a skinny Latino guy named Hector who just happened to have a taste for BBW. Unfortunately for her, their relationship didn’t last any longer than the cruise.
Denny and I, on the other hand, were bound together with super glue. We were both pleased to discover that we lived in close proximity. He’s from Connecticut; Newington, to be exact. Not more than an hour drive from my house in South Hadley. Shortly after returning from the cruise he moved in with me.
After four and a half years, the initial euphoria has cooled off a little. We aren’t the same giddy, love struck kids that we were in that tropical paradise. Practical considerations of the everyday world have crept in but we’re still very much in love.
I don’t know what I would do without Denny.
Chapter Four:
Scales are for Fish
I can’t get up.
I can’t. My eyes trace the texture of the popcorn ceiling. I’m lying on my bed. It’s morning, a very cold February morning in New England. And I can’t get up.
It’s not that I’m too tired. It’s not that I’m just barely holding onto consciousness, resisting the temptation to be tugged back down to the warm comfort of dreamland. Not at all. I’m completely awake, eyes wide open. The little hamster wheel inside my head is turning at full speed.
I just can’t get out of this bed. Nothing I can do will make me stand on my two feet. I’m a prisoner here.
Denny…where’s Denny? I know where he is. He’s at the same place he is on every weekday morning. He’s behind the wheel of a big yellow school bus. He’s braving the weather this morning so that kids can get to school. If he were here, he’d tell me to get my ass out of bed and get to work. I need someone to tell me that.
I need to go to work. I need to take Nutter outside to do his business. I need to do all of those things that adults do but I can’t get out of this damned bed. The world is out there ; outside of my bedroom. I’d rather not see the world this morning.
What can I do? I could call in sick. It would be so weak of me, so irresponsible. But I could do it. And I am sick, in a manner of speaking. I don’t know what this is that’s gotten a hold of me, but it can’t be healthy. This kind of feeling must be a sickness. It wouldn’t even be a lie to tell them that I’m sick. So why does it feel like a lie?
The truth is that I despise my job. I work at a collection agency. I call people all over the country and give them a hard time about delinquent debts. People hate me. People curse at me. People tell me to stick all sorts of objects into all sorts of bodily orifices. There has been a lot of work to do at my collection agency these past few months. The years 2008 and 2009 were banner years for nobody except collection agencies. Two thousand ten is looking like another good one for us and no one else. Americans are up to their asses in debt and it’s my job to harass them into payment.
After doing this job for a few years I’ve learned not to take it personally but I still hate it. My dream is to get a paid gig as a radio personality. A nationally syndicated show would be nice. That way I could use my voice to fight against fat oppression rather than using my voice to harass people who have racked up more credit card debt than they will ever be able to pay back.
I reach for the cordless phone on the nightstand beside my bed. I shou
ldn’t do this. I’ve done this too many times before. I’m getting a reputation at work as the girl who always calls in sick. They must be catching on. It would be so unwise to do it again, but…I can’t get up.
When was the last time I called in sick? It must have been about a month ago. Yes, it was right after the New Year. It was a cold morning just like this one. I remember it specifically because I made a New Year’s resolution not to call in sick every time I couldn’t drag myself out of the bed. I broke my resolution within a week or so. I was very disappointed with myself then, but I just couldn’t get up.
If I keep this up, I’m going to get fired. I need to do the adult thing and get out of this bed, even if it takes all of my willpower.
My heavy hand slams down on the handset. I grab it and hit the button to hear the dial tone. I dial the numbers and listen to it ring. The voicemail clicks on, as I knew it would. No one’s there this early in the morning. I leave a message. I tell them I can’t come to work today because I’m sick. Sick as a dog. I wonder if my boss Patricia will believe me. Or will she roll her eyes and say, “Not again, Gabby”? Then I click the phone off again and let it fall somewhere on Denny’s side of the bed.
I hate myself for what I just did. I should be my own master. I shouldn’t need Denny to put a boot up my ass. I should be able to do it myself.
But then again…I can’t get up.
* * *
The diet industry is a regular topic on my biweekly radio program. Exposing corporate lies is on the top of my list of things to do.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past twenty years, you’ve probably heard that America is in the midst of an “obesity epidemic”. Our “expanding waistline” has reached dangerous proportions. We’re losing the “battle of the bulge”. Yeah, right. Don’t believe it for a second. There’s a malignant force behind the fat panic that’s sweeping the nation. It’s called the diet industry.
The diet industry is an umbrella term, of course. It refers to anyone who’s making a buck off of our desire to have the “perfect” body. I try to make the point on my show that the “perfect” body is your body—whatever size or shape it may take on.
The industry thrives on poor body image. Without it there wouldn’t be a single Jenny Craig weight loss center anywhere in America. If we could miraculously cure the real scourge of our time—poor body image, mostly among women—the diet industry would go up in smoke. Poof. It has a vested interest in making people feel something less than human because they don’t have the proper dimensions. So long as they can make people feel like crap with every glimpse in the mirror, there will be money to be made.
Gobs of money. Each year, Americans spend about fifty billion dollars trying to achieve some kind of happiness that supposedly comes only with a size zero dress. The United Nations estimates that it would require about thirty billion dollars to launch all of the agricultural programs necessary to eliminate world hunger. If we all channeled our dieting dollars into hunger relief, we could feed every starving person in the world and still have twenty billion to spare.
But we’d rather spend our money on stupid crap that doesn’t work. We buy home workout equipment from spandex-clad infomercial salesmen. The equipment fits conveniently under our beds…and usually stays there permanently. We put our faith in Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, Richard Simmons and Susan Powter. We pay money for their seminars and buy their prepackaged meals.
Then there are the potions or pills (anorectics); all of which are snake oil, by the way. Some are useless but harmless, but others can do horrible things to our bodies.
Back in late nineteenth century, thyroid extract was prescribed as a weight loss drug. People just sucked the stuff right out of pigs’ and cows’ glands, then sold it on the market under names such as Marmola or Corpulin. Some doctors recommended that it be taken with potassium, others thought it paired nicely with arsenic. Arsenic is an industrial poison, by the way. As it turns out, the product worked wonderfully well. It boosted the metabolism so high that the body started to break down lean tissue, even solid organs, cannibalizing itself rather than just eliminating unwanted fat stores. I don’t think that was the desired effect when people bought the crap. They were certainly looking to get rid of their flab, not their hearts and livers.
By the 1940s, doctors were prescribing highly potent amphetamines to fat women. Speed. Some doctors wrote prescriptions for the stuff like aspirin. The drug was frequently dispensed as part of an amphetamine cocktail—a rainbow medley of pills sometimes combined with other drugs such as digoxin and belladonna. Belladonna is also known as deadly nightshade, a plant native to Europe and Western Asia. They call it “deadly” because it’s one of the most poisonous plants in the world. In small doses, belladonna causes very unpleasant hallucinations rather than killing its victim outright.
Charitable people tend to think that doctors recommended speed out of ignorance of its side effects. That’s only partially true. Actually, most of the side effects of amphetamines were quite well documented at the time. Many doctors simply believed that it was worse to be fat than to be a drug addict; not because of any actual health risk associated with “obesity”, but largely because of their own cultural biases. Even more than society at large, these doctors were shocked and offended at the sight of fat women’s bodies. They believed that it was better to thin them out first and worry about the detrimental effects of drug addiction somewhere down the road.
This peculiar pharmaceutical fad led to an epidemic of strung out speed freak housewives vacuuming their kids’ bedrooms at three in the morning. Amphetamines are a powerful addiction. Those little pills will turn your life upside down, ravage your body, and leave you begging the doctor for more. Trying to get clean from an amphetamine addiction usually results in a bodily “crash”—people generally experience withdrawal symptoms such as depression and lethargy. But at least they lose weight. A little bit.
Doctors prescribed amphetamines mostly to adult women but sometimes to children as well. Fat kids as young as six or seven were sometimes prescribed the same drugs as fat housewives. There are still people alive today whose 1950’s era childhoods were a blur of amphetamine cocktails. Some recall hallucinations, probably triggered by the belladonna contained in their pharmaceutical smorgasbord.
The amphetamine craze faded out in the early 1970’s. Speed was out and protein shakes were in. The diet du jour was Dr. Robert Linn’s so-called “last chance diet”. Notice the appeal to desperation— the last chance diet. Dr. Linn’s diet permitted no fat or carbs of any kind, only a putrid protein shake consisting of chemically predigested cowhide and tendon, artificial flavoring and sweetener. The good doctor probably got the ingredients for next to nothing, as slaughterhouses routinely throw away loads of these worthless byproducts. Dr. Linn, in all of his glorious narcissism, named the horrible concoction after himself. He called it Prolinn.
His regimen allowed between three hundred and six hundred calories per day. That’s about half as many calories as prisoners at Auschwitz got in their daily diet. This most faddish of fad diets declined rapidly in popularity when fifty-eight people died as a result of it. Autopsies revealed that the diet had atrophied the protein in the victims’ heart muscles.
But that couldn’t happen now, right? Well actually, yeah it could. The miracle weight loss drug of the 1990’s—a combination of fenfluramine and phentermine, known commonly as Fen/Phen—turned out to be almost as bad. It wasn’t until 1997 that researchers found a link between Fen/Phen and valvular heart disease. That put a damper on the Fen/Phen craze. The FDA asked drug dealing corporations to take it off the market voluntarily and they complied, but not without a flood of lawsuits from their victims. In 1996, the drug was hotter than the Macarena; in 1997, they couldn’t give the stuff away. Ephedra followed right on the heels of Fen/Phen. This old Chinese herb was a common ingredient in diet pills because it stimulated the metabolism and constricted blood vessels. It was also sometimes used as
a performance enhancer. Unfortunately, its side effects included irritability, insomnia, vomiting, tremors, seizures, and death. Yes, death. A pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, Steve Bechler, mysteriously dropped dead during spring training in 2003. He was only twenty-three years old. The autopsy revealed ephedra to be the culprit. Another pitcher, New York Yankee David Wells, was hospitalized in 1996 with an irregular heartbeat after taking Ripped Fuel, an over the counter drug containing ephedra. Doctors were forced to stop Wells’ heart and restart it with a defibrillator.
Ephedra was banned by the FDA the year after Bechler’s death. The FDA commented, “No other dietary supplement on the market has stirred as many warnings and frightening medical histories as ephedra. It has been linked to deaths, to strokes, to heart arrhythmias and even to psychotic episodes.”
And the beat goes on. Despite the dangerous products that the diet industry has sold us in the past—thyroid extract, amphetamines, cowhide beverages, Fen/Phen, and ephedra—we still think that the next product they roll out will be different. Better. Safer.
Or maybe not. I have a sneaking suspicion that the teaming hordes of fat Americans are so desperate to be thin that they just don’t care if it’s safe or not. They’ll take the risk if it means they can feel good about the way they look. They’ll seek out products that they know will kill them, and they’ll pay handsomely for it because these elixirs satisfy a socialized need to be accepted. Big companies cash in on this need.
And that’s the problem.
Chapter Five:
I’ll Stand by You
I’m glad Denny drove home because I’m feeling a little drunk as we burst through the door of our house. I had a few glasses of wine with my dinner. My face is flushed red, my skin a little bit hotter than usual.
Denny took me out for Valentine’s Day. Tonight is actually the thirteenth of February but also a Saturday. Neither of us has to wake up in the morning so we can just sleep in.
We Are Fat and We Are Legion Page 3
