by Lindy West
Around that time, just when I needed it, Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project came to me like a gift. The photographs are in black and white, and they feature a group of fat, naked women laughing, smiling, embracing, gazing fearlessly into the camera. In one, they sway indolently like the Three Graces; in another they re-create Herb Ritts’s iconic pile of supermodels. It was the first time I’d ever seen fat women presented without scorn.
I clicked, I skimmed, I shrugged, I clicked away.
I clicked back.
I was ragingly uncomfortable. Don’t they know those things are supposed to stay hidden? I haven’t been having basement sex with the lights off all these years so you could go show what our belly buttons look like!
At the same time, I felt something start to unclench deep inside me. What if my body didn’t have to be a secret? What if I was wrong all along—what if this was all a magic trick, and I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true? Why, instead, had I left that decision in the hands of strangers who hated me? Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet. What if you could opt out of the game altogether? I paused and considered. When the nutrition teacher emailed, I didn’t sign up for the next session of Almond Gulag.
I couldn’t stop looking. It was literally the first time in my life that I’d seen bodies like mine honored instead of lampooned, presented with dignity instead of scorn, displayed as objects of beauty instead of as punch lines. It was such a simple maneuver, but so profound. Nimoy said, of his models, “I asked them to be proud.” For the first time it struck me that it was possible to be proud of my body, not just in spite of it. Not only that, but my bigness is powerful.
I hate being fat. I hate the way people look at me, or don’t. I hate being a joke; I hate the disorienting limbo between too visible and invisible; I hate the way that complete strangers waste my life out of supposed concern for my death. I hate knowing that if I did die of a condition that correlates with weight, a certain subset of people would feel their prejudices validated, and some would outright celebrate.
I also love being fat. The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows—literal and metaphorical—meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me. My bones feel like iron—heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it’s more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.
Maybe you are thin. You hiked that trail and you are fit and beautiful and wanted and I am so proud of you, I am so in awe of your wiry brightness; and I’m miles behind you, my breathing ragged. But you didn’t carry this up the mountain. You only carried yourself. How hard would you breathe if you had to carry me? You couldn’t. But I can.
I was hooked. Late at night, I started furtively clicking through fat-positive tags on Tumblr like a Mormon teen looking at Internet porn. Studies have shown that visual exposure to certain body types actually changes people’s perception of those bodies—in other words, looking at pictures of fat people makes you like fat people more. (Eternal reminder: Representation matters.)
I discovered a photo blog called “Hey, Fat Chick” (now, crushingly, defunct) run by an effervescent Australian angel named Frances Lockie, and pored over it nightly like a jeweler or a surgeon or a codebreaker. It was pure, unburdened joy, and so simple: Just fat women—some bigger than me, some smaller—wearing outfits and doing things and smiling. Having lives. That’s it. They were like medicine. One by one they loosened my knots.
First, I stopped reacting with knee-jerk embarrassment at the brazenness of their bodies, the way I’d been trained. I stopped feeling obscene, exposed, like someone had ripped the veil off my worst secrets.
Next, they became ordinary. Mundane. Neutral. Their thick thighs and sagging bellies were just bodies, like any other. Their lives were just lives, like any other. Like mine.
Then, one day, they were beautiful. I wanted to look and be like them—I wanted to spill out of a crop top; plant a flag in a mountain of lingerie; alienate small, bitter men who dared to presume that women exist for their consumption; lay bare the cowardice in recoiling at something as literally fundamental as a woman’s real body. I wasn’t unnatural after all; the cultural attitude that taught me so was the real abomination. My body, I realized, was an opportunity. It was political. It moved the world just by existing. What a gift.
The Red Tent
In August of 2010, the Stranger got an e-mail from an organization called “Vashon Red Tent,” advertising that “A Red Tent Temple Sisterhood Is Coming to Vashon.” Vashon is an island, accessible by ferry from Seattle, mainly populated by NIMBY-ish hippies, NIMBY-ish yuppies, boutique farmers, and wizards riding recumbent bicycles. A full quarter of the children in Vashon schools are unvaccinated. The “Red Tent Temple Movement,” the press release read, “envisions a gathering honoring our stories and promoting healing in every town across the country where women of all ages meet regularly to support one another and monthly menstrual cycles.”
The only thing I knew about Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent, which inspired the movement, was that one time my college roommate read it and then announced to the rest of us that she wanted to go “bleed into the forest.” It didn’t feel like a good sign. This event, clearly, was my worst nightmare. The paper, clearly, RSVPed for me immediately.
I dragged my friend Jenny along with me, and we barely made the ferry. On the bench next to us there was a woman with long frizzy hair and high-waisted jeans. She was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of cats in sunglasses playing saxophones, and above the picture it said, “JAZZ CATS.” “There are a lot of different ways to be a woman,” I wrote in my notebook. Jenny and I were running late for menses tent, but we stopped by the grocery store anyway to buy some boxed wine and anxiety jelly beans. We sat in the parking lot and wolfed beans and got as tipsy as we could in the time allotted.
My sister is into this sort of thing. She loves ritual. She’s forever collecting shells for her Venus altar, or tying a piece of ribbon to a twig in a secret grove, or scooping magic waters up into very small vials to make potions. Being around my sister feels magical. When we traveled through Europe together (following the path of Mary Magdalene, doyeeeee), we didn’t miss a stone circle or a magic well—tromping over stiles and up tors and always leaving little offerings for the fairies. Once, in Cornwall, we looked down into an aquamarine cove and she said, “Do you see the mermaids? They’re sitting on that rock.” I said no, and she looked at me with pity. On the way to the Vashon Red Tent Temple, I texted my sister for advice. “I’m on my way to a new moon celebration at a menses temple,” I said. “Liar,” she said. “It’s true! Any tips?” “Stay open to a new flow and wave good-bye to the blood of old that nurtured you well.” I knew she’d know what to do.
I almost didn’t go in. It was too intimate and foreign, and I am clinical like my mom. I like magic as escapism—I barely tolerate fantasy books set in our universe (the first time I cracked a Harry Potter novel I was like, “Yo, is this a documentary?”)—pretending that the supernatural is real just drives home how much it’s not. But we did, we walked in, removed our shoes, and joined the circle of women seated on pillows beneath the homemade canopy of red scarves. It wasn’t really a “tent” so much as a pillow fort inside a community center, but it did the job.
The women were talking about chocolate, which was such an adorable cliché that I fell in love with them instantly. “There is definitely a goddess of chocolate.” “I read somewhere that the molecular makeup of chocolate is so unique that it was probably brought here from another planet.” One woman passed a Hershey’s bar around the circle. “This chocolate is even better now that it’s passed throug
h the hands of so many goddesses,” said the woman next to me, appreciatively.
There was chanting.
Isla, the leader of the circle, said that right now there is an astrological configuration—the Cardinal Cross—that has not occurred since Jesus was alive, and that she and the other local angel healers are very busy “holding that energy.” She explained that the media tells us that things are terrible and violent, but that this is actually one of the most peaceful times in history. We should not focus on the negative. Later, I asked my sister what an “angel healer” is, and she said, “Well, you know, angels are just the same thing as aliens. They’re probably the ones who brought the chocolate.” I asked about the Cardinal Cross, and she told me, “If you’re going to have a baby, have it like tomorrow. It’ll be a superbaby. Dude, remind me to send you a picture of the cosmos right now. It’s fucking out of control.”
We went around the circle and stated our “intentions” for the coming moon cycle. Most of the women had intentions that I didn’t understand, that involved “manifesting” and “balance” and “rhythm.” One woman said that her intention was to “end rape.” I said I intended to organize my apartment, and felt mundane. The women totally approved. Total approval is the point of menses tent. The press release had promised “a place where young women can ask questions and find mentors in absolute acceptance,” and menses tent delivered.
“You look different today,” said one woman to another. “Oh, I know,” she replied. “It’s because I did the twenty-four-strand DNA activation yesterday. I feel like a completely new person.” The women around me tittered with excitement. I asked what that meant. She explained that in addition to our two physical DNA strands, we have twenty-two spiritual DNA strands, which can be “activated” by a specially trained lady with a crystal wand. The process took ten hours. “There’s also a golden gate that you can walk through,” she said, “but that’s more for larger groups.” Then another woman explained that DNA activation has something to do with the Mayan calendar. I still didn’t understand. My sister didn’t know anything about DNA activation, but she did tell me a story about the time she went to see a shaman and the shaman had a spirit jaguar eat a ghost off her back. That sounded cooler than the DNA thing.
Jenny and I thanked our hostesses and hobbled out to the car, thighs asleep and buzzing with pain after hours of sitting cross-legged on pillows. We ate some more jelly beans and talked about our feelings.
It’s true that I don’t believe in most of this stuff—and I suspect that believing is the secret ingredient that makes this stuff work. But it does work for the gracious ladies on the pillows under the red tent, and it was surprisingly nurturing to sit cross-legged in their world for a few hours. And even though I would never phrase it like this, I agree that women don’t always get a chance to “fill our own vessels.” My dad worked all day. My mom worked all day, then came home and made dinner. Women do a lot. Women are neat.
Back at the office, I knew my job was to make fun of menses tent, but I just didn’t want to. They were so nice and so earnest. What was the point of hurting them? Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life—that’s a lonely way to live.
I used to try to be cool. I said things that I didn’t believe about other people, and celebrities, and myself; I wrote mean jokes for cheap, “edgy” laughs; I neglected good friendships for shallow ones; I insisted I wasn’t a feminist; I nodded along with casual misogyny in hopes that shitty dudes would like me.
I thought I was immune to its woo-woo power, but if it hadn’t been for menses tent, how long would it have taken me to understand that I get to choose what kind of person to be? Open or closed? Generous or cruel? Spirit jaguar or clinging ghost? A lazy writer (it’s easy to hate things) or a versatile one? I don’t believe in an afterlife. We live and then we stop living. We exist and then we stop existing. That means I only get one chance to do a good job. I want to do a good job.
Hello, I Am Fat
In 2009, I’d been at the Stranger about five years (four as a freelancer, one on staff), and was casually dating a dude who refused to kiss me on the mouth. He’s a good person; he was good to me in other ways. They all were, really—even Sasquatch garage door guy—but, you know, we were all raised in the same fucking septic tank. No one teaches young men how to take care of fat girls.
The Stranger is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I got to learn how to write and run a newspaper from geniuses (David Schmader, Charles Mudede, Eli Sanders) I’d been obsessed with since I was a teen—we took chances, changed elections, ran our sections with nearly unfettered editorial freedom, and struck a balance between ethics and irreverence that I was always proud of. By the time I got on staff full-time, Dan Savage was already medium-famous and had orchestrated a more-power/less-responsibility promotion from editor in chief to editorial director, so he wasn’t in the office so much. Nonetheless, the culture of the place was all Dan, and even mostly in absentia he did the hell out of that job.
Dan would run a meeting every few weeks, always our most productive and most boisterous; be gone traveling for months and then show up at a candidate interview to grill local politicians with the acuity of a day-to-day city hall reporter; emerge from his office like a groundhog to drop an infuriatingly brilliant mandate about precisely how to tweak whatever delicate story was stumping us; and send insistent e-mails the morning after every office party to ensure surplus sheet cake was placed, uncovered, on his desk. (Dan has a thing about stale cake.) I was taught a mantra, my first week, to manage my expectations about Dan as an editor: “Silence is praise.” As long as you don’t know he exists, you’re killing it. I remember two editors improvising an extensive, Dan-themed Gilbert and Sullivan musical number over their cubicle walls: “I will laugh at you when you cry!” Dan, the great and terrible.
If his management approach is unique, Dan’s editorial sense—for clear-headed satire and gleeful, pointed disobedience, for where to aim and from what angle to drop the hammer—is unparalleled in my decade of writing experience. Dan knows how to land a point better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. That preternatural ability is what has made him famous (he is a magnificent pundit), and it’s also what gets him into trouble.
Like all of us, Dan fucks up. Like all of us, he is sometimes slow to find the right side of an issue. And when he has an opinion on something, he expresses it in vivid, uncompromising prose to a rapt audience of millions—over and over and over again, because he is as prolific as he is stubborn. He also, like all of us, can be intractable and defensive when criticized, and because he is very funny and very smart, he can also be very snide, and when such a person does actually happen to be wrong, but mistakes totally warranted criticism for petty sniping, and responds not with openness but with sneering acidity to a critic who is just trying to advocate for their own humanity, it can be a very bad look.
This is the great curse of popularity and the great luxury of obscurity: People only care about your mistakes when they can hear you. Only failures can afford to be cavalier and careless.
Unfortunately for my personal emotional cankers, in the mid-to-late aughts Dan was on something of an “obesity epidemic” kick. He wasn’t alone. At the same time that I was tentatively opening to the idea that my humanity was not hostage to my BMI, the rest of the nation had declared a “war on obesity.” They’d whipped up a host of reasons why it was right and good to hate fat people: our repulsive, unsexy bodies, of course (the classic!), but also our drain on the healthcare system, our hogging of plane armrests, our impact on “the children,” our pathetic inability and/or monstrous refusal to swap austerity for gluttony (like thin people, who, as you know, are moderate and virtuous in all ways). Oh, and our “health.” Because they care. They abuse us for our own good. (Do you know what is actually not a good way to help a group of people, it turns out? Advocating for their eradication.)
Dan was on that train, and I don’t blame him—it was a
very popular (and, I imagine, gratifying) ticket at the time, and, even more so than today, it was considered very roguish to “tell it like it is” about fat people (as though that wasn’t the status quo, as though we hadn’t gotten the message). I understand; I had only recently snapped out of some of the same thought patterns myself. I had to learn how to look at pictures of fat people, and I am one.
The problem is, fat people are an extremely suboptimal bogeyman, the roots of America’s “obesity epidemic” lying largely in systemic poverty and agribusiness, not in those exploited thereby; the problems with America’s fucked-up healthcare system stemming entirely from America’s preposterous healthcare system, not from the people attempting to survive within it (and use a service they pay tremendous amounts of money for); new research finding that it’s a sedentary lifestyle, not size, that correlates with increased health risks; and fat people turning out to be people whose lives are impossibly complex snarls of external and internal forces and who do not, in fact, owe you shit. As Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby wrote in their book Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere, health is not a moral imperative.
However, it is easier to mock and deride individual fat people than to fix food deserts, school lunches, corn subsidies, inadequate or nonexistent public transportation, unsafe sidewalks and parks, healthcare, mental healthcare, the minimum wage, and your own insecurities. So, “personal responsibility” was de rigueur, and my boss was on board.
