We Are Fat and We Are Legion

by Benjamin Duffy

  “There are legal issues here, of course. This Hooters is located in Roseville, Michigan, which I guess is a suburb of Detroit. Never heard of Roseville but the point is that this restaurant is in the only state that protects fat people’s civil rights under law. The Elliot-Larsen Act makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of height or weight in the state of Michigan.

  “But get a load of this—when a reporter went to the Roseville Hooters to interview the regional manager, a tremendously fat man, he directed the reporters to the corporate office. Guess what the corporate office had to say? They said Hooters does not discriminate on the basis of weight! Ha! I nearly wet myself! I’m thinking about swinging by Hooters on the way home to pick up an application. I can serve wings just as well as the next chick. Who do they think they’re kidding?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the red light on the phone blinking. “We have a phone call,” I say. “Hello caller, you’re on The Fat Majority with Gabby Medeiros. What’s on your mind?”

  “Gabby,” says a husky male voice.

  “That’s my name, don’t wear it out. Talk to me.”

  “Gabby, it’s me. Ron. We had coffee this weekend. Sort of.”

  I take a sharp breath of air. I panic a little inside. I never should have gone to that meeting. The whole thing was a huge mistake. “I remember,” I chuckle. “Sorry about leaving you hanging. Dog had to go to the vet.”

  My biggest fear is that he’ll spill the beans on air about my Weight Watchers visit.

  “No problem,” Ron replies. “I was sorry too. I wanted to talk a little while longer. I thought we could reschedule. I looked up your phone number but—”

  “It’s unlisted,” I interrupt.

  “I know that now. And I thought maybe you wouldn’t come back to the place…you know, where you were doing your research.”

  If he mentions Weight Watchers, I swear I’ll put a stake through his heart. “Yeah, that place. Not sure if I’ll ever go back.”

  “No problem,” says Ron. “Just let me know a time and place.”

  “Ron, I’m really not comfortable having this conversation on the air. Could you send me an email?”

  “Sure,” he replies.

  “It’s Gabby at Valley Liberated Radio dot org. I’d love to see you again. We’ll talk.”

  “Sounds great.” He hangs up with a click.

  I look at my watch. I could take a break. “Stay tuned for more of The Fat Majority. I’m Gabby Medeiros.” I cue “Fat Bottomed Girls” and exhale deeply. I cup my hands on my cheeks and flop down on the desk in front of me. That was a close call.

  I eagerly await Ron’s email. He’s a nice guy.

  * * *

  Fat liberation is a close cousin of second wave feminism. Not the offspring, as many people mistakenly believe. But a blood relative nonetheless.

  The link between feminism and fat liberation springs from the fact that women are more likely than men to be fat. Dieting is also, by and large, a female pursuit. At any given time, ninety percent of America’s dieting population is female. Furthermore, the mental meat grinder that fat women are put through—the gauntlet of guilt and self-loathing—is largely turned by male hands.

  Not that fat men don’t have their own struggles; they most certainly do. Denny could attest to that. Although fat men may have their own battles to fight, the situation in contemporary society is immeasurably worse for fat women. Women are expected, far more than men, to look “good”. It’s our job, and we will be judged by how well we rise to the occasion. If we fail to reach the cultural standard of beauty we are essentially failures.

  Hatred of fat women goes beyond mere sexism, crossing the line into full blown misogyny. How else do you explain the old bumper sticker, “Save the Whales, Harpoon a Fat Chick”? Fat hatred places its crosshairs on precisely what makes us women—our pear-like shape, our round breasts, our abundant hips, our bountiful thighs. Fatphobia tells us that we need to change these things, these characteristics of feminine fertility that were so revered in past cultures. Today’s women have to be dissatisfied with themselves simply for looking like women.

  Women have to change.

  In times and places far removed from our own (and in some subcultures lurking beneath the surface of the modern US), abundance was associated with fertility and fertility was associated with blessings. Women who are considered “fat” by our societal standards would have been considered voluptuous and desirable by theirs.

  Our society prefers deathly thin to bountifully round. The current cultural ideal of the female body is anti-woman because it doesn’t tolerate actual feminine shapeliness. It demands that women stop looking like women and start looking like…teenage boys? Yes, in a manner of speaking. Rather than appreciating the endowments of womanhood, fatphobic society attempts to force us into the mold of a pale, lanky, flat-chested, narrow-hipped, androgynous drone. Think of Kate Moss or the 1960’s modeling icon Twiggy. Other than eye shadow and mascara, there’s nothing there to indicate that the models are, in fact, women. They are sexless beings.

  The old image of beauty—the fertility goddess of bountiful sexuality—is actually still popular among men. Lads still go wild for fat women because they are totems of powerful sexuality. Of course, it’s hard to find a man who will admit his attractions in public. Millions of fat women have suffered the anguish of sleeping with a man only to find out later that he’s too embarrassed to introduce her to his friends and family. For one brief night there is passion, and then…he won’t even acknowledge that he knows her. They are strangers again.

  As the tasteless, despicable, unforgivable, old joke goes, “Fat girls are like mopeds; fun to ride but you wouldn’t want your friends to catch you.” I regret that clothing manufacturers liked that slogan so much that they’re now silk-screening it onto t-shirts. Personally, I think anyone who would wear such a shirt might as well wear one the reads, “I’m an asshole.”

  Some men compete with each other to see who can “bag” the fattest girl. The one who sleeps with the fattest woman “wins”! This disgusting practice is usually called “hogging”. Of course, the men never call the women back the next day because the whole ordeal is supposed to be a big gag. Funny, ha ha. Hogging is a favorite pastime among lame-ass frat boys with penis insecurity issues, or so I’ve heard.

  I’ll have none of it. I’m confident in myself that I can forthrightly proclaim that I am no one’s “moped”, nor will I ever be.

  Particularly craven men often find themselves unable to admit, even to themselves, that they are attracted to fat women. They deny that they have slept with fat women. They are incapable of admitting that they enjoyed it. They seek out a million defense mechanisms to avoid confronting their attractions to fat women.

  Think of my one night stand at UMass with Zack. He and his friends really split their sides laughing at the “fat chick” he had “porked” over the weekend. As if he didn’t enjoy every minute of it. Of course he did. The night of our encounter, he was as passionate as any man I have ever been with. Yet he had to make a big joke about it in front of his friends. Laugh it off. Ha ha.

  Men are fundamentally conflicted about the fatness of their lovers. It’s their conundrum, but our problem—they like us to be fat but they demand that we be thin. While many men do appreciate abundant femaleness (consciously or unconsciously) they also impose upon us the male-generated image of what female bodies are supposed to look like—slim, pale, and boyish.

  Many men are literally afraid of larger women. Fat women are imposing in their sexuality and their sheer presence. Consequently, women are expected to shrink themselves physically, to make themselves petite and slight so that they can be brushed aside at the whim of male convenience. By constricting women’s body sizes, they can eliminate women’s symbolic expression of power.

  The bodily guilt that fat women experience comes directly from the patriarchy. It punishes women who have appetites that are “out of control”. Don’t be dece
ived by the phrase. It doesn’t mean that we fat women have appetites that are outside of our own personal control. To the contrary, fat women are presumably fat (according to their cultural prejudices) because we eat exactly what we want!

  What they mean is that fat women have not yet renounced control of their own appetites to the domineering patriarchy itself. No, it’s not that fat women are out of control, it’s that they are outside of the matrix of external control. Fat women have wandered off the reservation. They choose to live outside of the system that subjects them to emotional violence as a penalty for dietary disobedience. Such troublesome women supposedly commit the transgression of indulging their own appetites rather than the appetites of men. Actually, lots of fat women are on starvation diets and therefore “indulge” nothing of the sort.

  Chapter Twenty-Four:

  Invincible Gabby Medeiros

  Ron told me to meet him here at Skinner State Park. I’m sitting in my car at the bottom of Mt. Holyoke. There’s a little strip of beaten-down earth along the road where people can pull off and park their cars. If people want to drive up the side of the small mountain, they have to pay two dollars. I hope Ron doesn’t suffer under the illusion that I will be walking with him to the summit. If that’s what he thinks, he’s got another thing coming.

  I see Ron approaching in a small white car. It’s a warm day, the sun is shining, and his window is down. I step out of my parked Nissan and wave my arm at him. He sees me and waves back.

  “Hey Ron,” I say, as he parks his car next to mine. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you too. Hop in.”

  I get in the car, not bothering to question gender roles this time. He pays the two dollars to a young man in a fluorescent safety vest. The man’s face registers disgust at the sight of two fat people out on a date. I’m used to it but it still hurts.

  Our little car winds up the curving mountain road, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. I hope Ron can handle the sharp turns as I am not prepared to die today.

  “Glad we could meet again,” Ron says. “You left so suddenly the other day.”

  I flush with embarrassment. I’m still not sure if he believed the veterinarian fib. “Yeah, well…the dog, you know.”

  “I understand. I used to have an Irish Setter.”

  “So you asked me about marriage and kids. Now you tell me.”

  “Oh geez. That’s a long story,” he replies with a weak smile. “I was married for twenty years. We got married young, before we even knew who we were. We both changed. The last few years were like living with a stranger. The only thing we shared in common was the kids. Even if we didn’t like being husband and wife, we still had to be mom and dad to our three children. So we stuck it out for a little while longer”.

  “Tell me about the kids.”

  “The youngest is my daughter. She’s sixteen. Then there’s two boys, aged eighteen and twenty-one. The middle boy just told me last week that he wants to go into the Marine Corps when he graduates from high school next month.”

  “Sheesh. And what do you think about that?”

  “Naturally, I’m scared to death. He’ll be over in Afghanistan for sure. I’d rather not see him get hurt, but then again, I support him in whatever decision he makes. He’s a grown man now.”

  Thoughts of Denny dance in my head. Denny, the strapping young Marine. “Where does he get it from?” I ask. “Were you in the military?”

  “Me? Goodness no. They wouldn’t have taken me anyway. Too heavy. I don’t know where he gets it from. He marches to the beat of his own drummer. Me, I went to college at Western New England and majored in accounting.”

  “Is that’s what you do now?” I ask.

  “Yes. I work for an accounting firm in Springfield.”

  I’m a little hesitant to tell him what I do for a living. I never mention it on the air because I don’t want people to know. There’s no prestige in my line of work. Hopefully, he won’t ask. “Uh huh,” I say. “An accountant. Nice.” A brief moment of silence falls between us.

  “How’s the research going?” he asks.

  For a second, my mind blanks. What research is he talking about? “Oh, the research,” I say. “The weight loss clinic research.”

  “Yeah. How’s it going?”

  “It’s…” I fidget with the tails of my shirt. “It’s a farce. I lied, Ron. I wasn’t doing any kind of research. I was at Weight Watchers for the same reason you were—I wanted to lose weight. I just hoped no one at the meeting would know I’m the lady on the radio. I was kind of incognito. You found me out.”

  Ron squeezes the car over to the right so that we can pass another car coming down the narrow road. “Okay, now I’m really confused,” he says.

  “Me too,” I sigh. “I’m very confused at this point in my life. I just went through a difficult breakup. My boyfriend was trying to lose weight and I told him I couldn’t support him in it because I reject all weight loss schemes.”

  Ron nods. “You make that pretty clear on your show.”

  “He went ahead and did it anyway,” I continue. “He lost some weight. He’s still not a slim man by any standard but he’s losing weight.”

  Our car approaches the peak of Mt. Holyoke. Ron parks it carefully in a space just below the Summit House.

  “Did that make you feel insecure?” he asks.

  It sounds so terrible. “Not insecure, but I worried.”

  “Worried about what?”

  I sigh again. “I worried a little bit that he wouldn’t want me anymore if he got skinny and I stayed fat. Not that I was too worried about him losing tons of weight and keeping it off. This diet he’s on is as crazy and ineffective as the rest. His hopes for long term success are minuscule. But in the end, my plan backfired. I lost him trying to keep him.”

  We step out of the car. Families and couples are out enjoying the fine day in late May. Together we set out to climb the last few feet to the Summit House. Many years ago, the rickety old house was a functioning hotel and tavern reachable only by inclined tram or on foot. Now it’s open to the public through the state park system. Denny and I came here once.

  “So then you wanted to lose weight?” he asks. “To get him back or something?”

  Damn. When he says it that way, it sounds so pathetic. The lengths women will go to in order to keep (or get) their men. If I’ve learned anything from watching Judge Judy on my sick days, it’s that women do the stupidest things for love. I always believed that I would be true to myself regardless of any man. Then came Denny.

  “Not just to get him back,” I reply. “I remember one night after Denny left—that’s his name: Denny—I went out by myself to a pig-out place and ate myself sick. I was just trying to comfort myself with food. It worked okay until I got home and I just wanted to die because I ate so much. That’s when I decided to go on a diet. I wasn’t really in a clear state of mind at the time. I fell for the same trap that a lot of women do.”

  “Uh-huh. What trap is that?”

  “A lot of women have a strange mental relationship with dieting. It can become a form of addiction. They do it because it gives them a sense of control. They think they’re taking charge of something when they go on a diet. Actually, they’re relinquishing control of their eating to a pre-set menu and a pre-set schedule. They ignore all of their own instincts and just eat what the diet tells them to. But they feel better about themselves if they just stay hungry all the time and spend their money on junk that doesn’t work.”

  We step onto the Summit House’s wraparound porch. From where we’re standing, high atop the Holyoke Mountain Range, we can see the entire Pioneer Valley. It’s breathtaking today—the mighty Connecticut River flowing like black glass through fertile farmland. On each side of the house we overlook the rich, green canopy of oaks and maples. In the distance I spot the campus of the University of Massachusetts with its towering dormitories and twenty-six storey library. They look small from up here, like
a model of Tokyo in some Godzilla flick. I briefly recall my horrific semester at UMass before pushing it out of my mind. Oh, and over there you can see downtown Northampton!

  “You weren’t of a clear mind when you started this diet,” Ron says. “But you are now? Is that what I’m hearing? I’m confused. Did you come to your senses and abandon the diet?”

  “There’s more,” I say. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I also wanted to lose weight so I could find someone else. I’m not eighteen anymore and I’m certainly not what most men would consider attractive. I’m fat. I thought that if I could lose some weight, I’d be more attractive. If my fat power sisters ever heard me say that, they’d probably shoot me between the eyes. It’s antithetical to everything we believe in, kind of like heresy or something. But the idea went through my head.”

  Ron shrugs and leans his big frame on the wooden railing. “Nothing unusual about that,” he says. “You want to look your best to attract a new mate. What’s hard to understand about that? You’re certainly not the only one.”

  I blush. “Yeah, but I take issue with the idea that ‘looking your best’ means conforming to an external societal image of beauty. If ‘looking your best’ means looking like Barbie, I’ll pass. That image is totally manufactured. Women don’t naturally look that way, and men aren’t naturally attracted to that image. It takes years of socialization.”

  Ron takes me by the hand. My heart skips a beat. It feels like the first time I met Denny on the cruise. “That’s one of the reasons I’m losing weight,” he says.

  “You want to look like Barbie too?”

  Ron laughs out loud. “No, no. Not like Ken either. But I’ve been divorced for three years now and I’ve barely tried to get back into the dating scene.”