We Are Fat and We Are Legion

by Benjamin Duffy

  The caller snorts. “Uh, no. What kind of question is that? I’m just a guy who thinks—”

  “You’re deluding yourself,” I interrupt. “And a lot of other people.” I jab at the button on the phone with a stiff finger, hanging up on him. “A damned fool,” I huff. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the voice of the corporate weight loss industry. Probably a paid operative.”

  I take a deep breath. He’s rattled me. I wasn’t in my right mind to start the show anyway. My nerves are getting a little raw with this diet. I need a break. “We’ll be right back,” I say.

  I cue “Fat Bottomed Girls”.

  * * *

  The first known radical fat liberation organization grew directly out of the feminist milieu. The two have a binding commonality that makes them nearly impossible to separate—both concern marginalized people taking control. Feminism has always been about female control over female bodies. Fat liberation is just one important variation on the same feminist concept.

  When I talk about the first known radical fat liberation group, I am not referring to the gender neutral, liberal organization known as NAAFA. I’m talking about women with fire in their bellies. Such a group of radical fat chicks formed in Los Angeles in 1971. The club began as an adaptation of radical feminist therapy, the purpose of which was to empower women to realize that their “personal” problems are in fact political and require political solutions. This particular group of women was waking up to the political aspects of the common problem they all shared: socially sanctioned bigotry against fat women.

  The ladies originally called themselves the Fat Women’s Problem Solving Group. Their stated goals were: “to develop self-respect for fat women; to take back our power over food and our right to enjoy eating; to support one another to reject society’s condemnation of us; and to act against our oppression as fat women.” Nearly forty years later, I’d say that those are still goals worth striving for.

  Early on, key members of the problem-solving group spun off to form a new organization under the auspices of NAAFA. They initially organized themselves as the Los Angeles chapter of the New York-based fat people’s civil rights organization but the West Coast women soon grew disillusioned with their East Coast cousins. NAAFA headquarters in New York shied away from radical activities, confrontational behavior, and flaming rhetoric. The newly formed Los Angeles chapter was, in their opinion, too hot to handle.

  The women in Los Angeles perceived the broader NAAFA organization as wimpy and compliant. The radical women on the West Coast had no need for such bourgeois liberalism. Furthermore, some of these early fat liberationists found NAAFA to be nothing more than a dating service for pairing up chubby-chasing men with lonely fat girls. The Los Angeles chapter of NAAFA was not interested in playing Cupid; they were passionate proponents of radical action. The group shed its NAAFA affiliation and re-branded itself the Fat Underground (FU). Yes, the acronym was very much intentional.

  FU had its own seven point manifesto, drawn up by fat icons Judy Freespirit (pseudonym of Judy Ackerman) and Aldebaran (pseudonym of Vivian Mayer). The manifesto pulled no punches, identifying the enemies of fat women by name and without hesitation: “insurance companies, the fashion and garment industries, reducing industries, the food and drug industries, and the medical and psychiatric establishments.”

  The Fat Liberation Manifesto boldly proclaimed, “We refuse to be subjugated to the interests of our enemies. We fully intend to reclaim power over our bodies and lives. We commit ourselves to pursue these goals together.” The manifesto closed with a call to action: “FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE…”

  Naturally, the fat liberation movement intertwined itself with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Its literature was distributed through campus women’s centers and feminist bookstores, its leaders considered themselves staunch feminists, its books were usually printed by feminist publishing houses, its lectures were often found at feminist conferences.

  Which is not to say that the most prominent feminists of the 1970s necessarily “got it.” Most were as tone deaf to fat oppression as chauvinistic men were to sexism. Sadly, members of one marginalized group do not always make the connection between their own struggle and the struggles of other marginalized groups. It’s all one big ball of wax.

  Almost without exception, the women at the forefront of second wave feminism were thin. Thin feminists just didn’t understand the issues that their fat sisters faced. Many considered fat feminism to be a droll offshoot of the “true” feminist movement. These feminists marched through the streets with signs that proclaimed, “Sisterhood is Powerful,” but they didn’t want to share that sisterhood with fat chicks.

  Legend has it that world-renowned feminist Gloria Steinem was slow to accept her fat sisters into the movement. Steinem was not fat; in fact, she was slender and beautiful by late twentieth century American standards. As the visible face of feminism, Steinem adopted a look that was both chic and independent. Her outfit nearly always included a miniskirt and aviator sunglasses. Steinem was sexy, which made feminism sexy by extension.

  As co-founder of Ms. magazine, she was exalted to iconic status in feminist circles. Steinem did not want fat women on the staff of her magazine. Some people believe that her quiet discrimination was a response to piggish anti-feminist detractors who snarked that feminism was a movement for dowdy, disgruntled women who wouldn’t be feminists if they could just find boyfriends. As the story goes, Gloria nipped that criticism in the bud by hiring only “good looking” women (by the standard of the time and place) in order to give feminism a face-lift. She wanted women’s lib to be aesthetically pleasing, to be associated with sexiness, and ultimately, with slenderness.

  Slim feminists could hardly see the violence inherent to dieting. It was their blind spot. They rightfully challenged the practice of female genital mutilation in Africa as misogynistic. They called attention to the discontinued practice of foot-binding in China as oppressively patriarchal. They understood the tortuous sexism that nineteenth century western women suffered when wearing corsets and girdles so restrictive that they caused organ damage and deformed bones. And yet these same feminists saw nothing wrong with dieting, a practice every bit as vicious. They hardly thought of it in the same way, largely because many of them were dieters themselves. (Steinem drank Metracal diet shakes to lose weight). Under no circumstances could they see dieting, like foot-binding and corsets, as a horrific restriction placed on women’s bodies as a condition of upward social mobility. Nor could they see that dieting weakened, sickened, and even sometimes killed women.

  Most of these feminists accepted the same slim supremacist assumptions as the rest of society. Although they were keenly aware of the sensitive issues surrounding race, sex, class, and sexuality, they could be incredibly crass when it came to fatness. Discrimination based on girth wasn’t really discrimination at all, they reasoned, because fatness is the result of personal failings. The idea that fatness is just part of the natural variation found in all species never occurred to them.

  Aldeberan, one of the founding mothers of fat feminism, confronted these types of attitudes at feminist conferences she attended. “Oh come on,” the slim feminists whined. “Can’t you just go on a diet?” Aldebaran was sometimes told to just shut up and lose weight.

  Nearly all feminist issues impact fat women harder than slim women. While all women face employment discrimination, fat women face the most severe discrimination. While all women are walking targets for rape, fat rape victims are frequently laughed right out of the police station under the assumption that no one would ever rape a fat woman. While women are more likely than men to be poor, fat women are the poorest of all. And so on.

  Over time, feminism began to change for the better. Its first feeble attempts to incorporate fat feminism into the mainstream variety were well-intentioned but nonetheless condescending bullshit. Feminist theory asserted that women were fat because they were oppress
ed by men and reacted by going on emotionally-driven food binges. Women of color, they believed, were more likely to be fat because they battled oppression on two fronts—race and sex.

  Nice try, but that’s not why we’re fat. We’re fat because of our genes, not because of imaginary “overeating”. Studies have shown that fat people’s eating habits are as varied as thin people’s.

  Every once in a while, some clueless women’s libber would come up with a new school of feminist thought concerning fatness. It invariably involved a feminist method of losing weight undertaken for properly feminist reasons. Fat women were supposed to believe that this new-fangled fatphobia was more enlightened than the last.

  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…

  Feminist Susie Orbach published her pioneering Fat Is a Feminist Issue in 1978. Ms. Orbach is about as fat as a yardstick, by the way. She claims she dieted for ten years, which I believe, though I doubt she was ever outside of any socially imposed range of acceptable weights.

  Actually, fat is not a feminist issue. Fat oppression is. Even so, Orbach almost seemed to be on the right track. Almost. She liked to think of her work as an anti-diet book (which is good), she rejected the idea that female fatness has something to do with laziness (which is very good), and she recognized the political aspects of fat female exploitation (which is great).

  But that’s where her locomotive goes sailing off the rails and crashing down into the abyss of wrong-headedness. She blames gender inequality for making women fat. She thinks that plenty of women who diet are secretly sabotaging their own weight loss for a number of reasons. Are you kidding me? According to Orbach, some fat chicks want to hide from society. Some have daddy issues while others have mommy issues. Some gain weight so they won’t be treated as mere sex objects in the workplace. A large number of women become fat as a way of rebelling against the powerlessness they feel as females.

  If this sounds like hooey, that’s because it is. Susie Orbach’s explanation is a steaming pile of dog crap. All of her arguments make the same tragically incorrect assumption that underpins all anti-fat prejudice—fat women could do something about their condition but they simply don’t. Orbach attributes this rejection of “healthy” eating to male oppression, so she thinks she’s discovered the perfect feminist explanation. Unfortunately, she never questions the central assumption that fat women are just skinny women with bad eating habits. It’s enlightened fatphobia but it’s fatphobia nonetheless.

  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, I believe that feminism has come a long way in its acceptance of fatness. Even Gloria Steinem, to her credit, has since repented. It took her a while, but I think she finally came around to our way of thinking. She now expends quite a bit of energy tackling the modern scourge of eating disorders. Compared to its starting point in the late 1960s, today’s feminism is radically enlightened concerning fat issues.

  Chapter Eighteen:

  In the Trenches of Fat Liberation

  I’m glad I stayed on such good terms with Denny’s mom. She’s a nice lady. As odd as it seems, I pick up the phone and call her. I ask if she’s heard about the break-up. She has. I ask her if we can meet some time for a chat. “What’s wrong with right now?” she asks.

  So I drive to Newington. It’s Saturday morning and the traffic is heavy. I bring a few peaches and a box of Melba Toast with me on the passenger seat. I nibble on them as I drive south. The traffic around Hartford is running like molasses. I nibble some more. It’s only the fourth day of my diet and it’s already driving me bonkers.

  I pull into Denny’s parents’ driveway. I know it well. Denny’s father is washing his car on this appealing Saturday morning. He insists I call him Bill. He waves to me. “Hey Gabby,” he says.

  “Hello, Mr…Bill,” I say. It’s so hard to call him Bill. “Is Mrs. Emory here?”

  “Yup. She’s inside. Just let yourself in,” he says as he splashes an arc of hose water on the roof of his Buick.

  I open the front door. “Hello?” I say.

  “Gabby?”

  This is a smidgen embarrassing. I’m the ex-girlfriend. What am I doing here? “It’s me. It’s Gab.”

  Denny’s mother emerges from the kitchen. She’s slightly fat. She reminds me a bit of my own mother, only less ethnic and more New England Yankee. “Oh, hello, Gabby,” she says as she hugs me and kisses my cheeks.

  “Hi.”

  “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Water? Juice?”

  I need a little buzz. “Coffee,” I say. It may be a vice, but at least it’s a low calorie vice. “Please.”

  She returns a moment later with a mug full of hot coffee, muddied a little with cream. I wish she hadn’t done that. There’s no telling how many calories she added with the splash of fat-laden dairy.

  “Thank you,” I say, accepting it. I’ll drink the coffee, but only out of courtesy.

  “I just made some lemon bars,” she says. “Can I get you one?”

  I’d love one of her lemon bars, I really would. But I can’t. “No thanks,” I say. I sit down on the couch and blow on the surface of the coffee to cool it off. I notice a framed picture on the mantle. It’s Denny in his standard Marine Corps photograph, dressed in that snazzy uniform the Marines have with the white hat. Not that I haven’t seen that picture before, I just like looking at it. There’s a faint resemblance between the Marine in the picture and the man I grew to love. Very faint.

  “So…” says Mrs. Emory.

  “Yeah?”

  “So, I heard that…”

  “It’s over?”

  “Yeah.”

  I sip my coffee. It’s still quite hot. “It’s true. I found him the other day at the bus garage. I tried to talk to him, but he was just so unreasonable.”

  “Denny’s always been stubborn,” she adds.

  “Uh huh,” I say. Actually, I had never considered him stubborn until the morning I surprised him at the bus garage. “It was like I didn’t even know him. Totally different guy.”

  Mrs. Emory sits on a comfortable chair across from me. “You know, he didn’t tell me why you two broke up and I didn’t ask.”

  I’d rather not explain, though I’m not sure how to say that in a nice way. “He was dieting,” I say. “He was really extreme about it too. It was very unhealthy and I—”

  “Well, he has lost a lot of weight lately,” she interrupts. “He looks great. Almost fifty pounds.”

  “Fifty pounds in two and a half months is not healthy,” I object. “That’s drastic.”

  She shrugs. “He’s just following the doctor’s orders.”

  I bite my tongue. Just following doctor’s orders. Nearly everything doctors do to their fat patients violates the first precept of medical ethics— Primum non nocere —first, do no harm. Doctors see their fat patients as things to be cut up and drugged. Doctors have been mutilators of fat people. They have wired fat people’s jaws shut and shortened their intestines, subjected them to treatments that will almost certainly fail and sometimes end in fatality. Just following doctor’s orders.

  “I…just worry about him,” I say.

  “I know,” she says.

  I want to educate this woman, to let her know the horrific things people do to their bodies just to lose weight. But alas, I am also on a diet. “He should just watch himself; be careful.”

  Mrs. Emory frowns. “True. You know, he wasn’t always fat.”

  I nod, “Yup.”

  “Well, I’m sure you knew that. You two were together for so long, he must have told you about his time in the Marines.”

  “A little,” I reply. Truthfully, he rarely mentioned it. It was kind of a mysterious black hole in his life.

  “He got out in 1992,” she continues. “He moved back in with us for a few months. He had some college money to use. I encouraged him to sign up for some courses, but he didn’t. It seemed like all he wanted to do was eat. His appetite was incredible.”

  I sip my coffee. “Come on. He doesn
’t eat that much,” I object.

  “He did then. I didn’t worry about it at first because I thought a young man just out of the Marine Corps could eat whatever he wanted and not gain weight. He kept it off for a little while, but then it started to creep in. His clothes didn’t fit right. I didn’t know what was wrong with him or why he was eating so much.”

  “How much…did he gain?” I ask.

  Mrs. Emory appears to be on the verge of tears. “I don’t know. A lot. Probably fifty pounds in the first year he was out. Another fifty the year after that, and the year after that. He just kept gaining.”

  I am at a loss for words. I try to say something. “I knew he liked to eat a lot, but…”

  “He stopped doing everything, too. He went out with a few girls when he got out of the military. But the bigger he got, the fewer dates he got. He just stayed inside more, reading books. He played chess with an old man down the street, but that was it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” says Mrs. Emory. “He used to have a beautiful chess board with all of these polished marble pieces. He’d pick it up and go play with Mr. Vetrano from down the street. Mr. Vetrano was an old man whose wife had died. Kind of a shut-in.”

  “He’s always been good at chess,” I say. “Denny has many talents.”

  A tear trickles down Mrs. Emory’s cheek. “It’s true. He used to enter tournaments when he was in high school.”

  “He did?” This is news to me. In all of the five years that we dated, Denny never mentioned this to me.

  “Sure. He won some of them too. I’ve got a few of his trophies in the attic. After he got out of the Marines, I thought he’d go back to the tournaments, but he didn’t. He only ever played with Mr. Vetrano. Then when he died, Denny stopped playing all together.”

  “He plays on the internet now,” I say.

  “Does he? That’s good.”

  I drink more coffee. “I miss him.”

  She’s crying now. “I know you do.”

  “Why are you crying?” I ask.