by Lindy West
It was the same bunk you were hearing everywhere around that time—imperious declarations about fat people’s delusions and gluttony, soaked in plausible deniability about “health.” Dan’s main sticking point seemed to be fat people (like me) who insisted we weren’t imminently dying—he fiercely and persistently defended his “refusal to take the self-esteem-boosting/public-health-shredding position that you can be obese and healthy.”
In one 2004 column, the root of a whole pantload of his fatphobia accusations, Dan got grumpy about women, “particularly obese people,” wearing low-rise jeans, and dismissed the impact that stigmatizing language has on young women:
“It’s an article of faith that we can’t talk about how much crap we’re eating—or how awful we look in low-rise jeans—without inducing eating disorders in millions of silly and suggestible young women… Our obsession with anorexia… not only covers up America’s true eating disorder (we eat too much and we’re too fat!), but it also hamstrings efforts to combat obesity, a condition that kills almost as many people every year as smoking does. Eating disorders, by way of comparison, lead to only a handful of deaths every year. If you’re truly concerned about the health and well-being of young women… worry more about the skyrocketing rates of obesity-related diseases in young people—like type 2 diabetes—and less about the imaginary link between anorexia and my low opinion of low-rise jeans.”
Okay, man. We get it. You are not into those pants.
More than anything, though, this passage from his 2005 book The Commitment sums up the overall tone of his stance, at the time, on fatties:
Two days later, in a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I came to a couple of realizations: First, anyone who denies the existence of the obesity epidemic in the United States hasn’t been to a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (The owners of water parks in the U.S. must be saving a fortune on water and chlorine bills; floating in the deep end of the wave pool with D.J., Terry observed that there was an awful lot of water being displaced. If the South Dakotans floating around us all got out of the pool at the same time, the water level would most likely have dropped six feet.)
We are horrible to look at, we are in the way, we are a joke.
I could probably have dealt with that—after all, it really was coming from all sides—but in an unanticipated side effect, a few perspicacious trolls made the connection between my fat body and Dan’s fatphobia. (Comments sections on any post about fatness were their own kind of horror—having my workplace host sentiments such as “I wouldn’t fuck with these people. They might sit on you and crush you to death. If they can catch you, of course. Best bet: run uphill, you’ll induce a heart attack, and the pursuer might even roll back downhill, taking out the other members of the fat mob” didn’t exactly make me feel supported.)
I started to get comments here and there, asking how it felt to know that my boss hated me because of my body. I knew Dan didn’t hate me—we had always gotten along, he made me a writer, and sometimes I even earned the vocal kind of praise!—but if that was true, why didn’t he give this thing a rest? Why didn’t he see that when he wrote about fat people, he was writing about me, Lindy West, his colleague and friend? Why should I, as an employee, have to swallow that kind of treatment at my job—in the same newspaper I was sweating blood into for $36k a year? What’s more, what about our fat readers? I knew there were people reading the blog, clocking the fact that I wasn’t sticking up for them—as though I was tacitly okay with what Dan was arguing. It implied complicity and self-hatred. Did I want to be the kind of person who didn’t fight?
Crop tops, short shorts, no kissing on the mouth, the whirrrrrrrrrrrrr of the garage door, Beth’s flowers, my perfect bloodwork, the trolls, a year in a basement talking about fucking Sasquatch (“I don’t know why they don’t just find out what it eats and then go to where that is!”), all of it, a lifetime of it, finally foamed up and spilled over. Something lurched awake inside of me. They talk to you this way until you “come out” as fat. They talk to you this way until you make them stop.
I emailed Dan, privately, in November of 2009. In my memory, I asked him to please, please consider his words more carefully before writing about fat people—to remember that we are human beings with complex lives, not disease vectors or animals. I begged him to extend some compassion to the fat people on his staff, and to imagine what it might feel like to read your boss parroting the same cruel words and snide insinuations that have been used to hurt you and hold you back your whole life. I was timid, pleading.
Or, at least, that’s how I remember it.
While writing this chapter, I looked up the original exchange, and it turns out that my memory sucks. Here’s the actual e-mail that I sent to my actual boss:
To: Dan Savage
Subject: “Hello! Could you lay off the fat people shit?”
Just curious: Who are these hordes of fat people chasing you around insisting that eating pot pies all day is awesome and good for your health? Because, um, I don’t believe you. That sounds like a straw man, and I know “some of your best friends are fat” or whatever, but you sound like a bigot. Also, your (super fucking obvious and regressive) point has been made—everyone in the world already thinks fat people are lazy and gross! WE GET IT. YOU ARE NOT BREAKING NEW GROUND HERE.
And just so you know, on top of the trolls who call me a fat cunty virgin every day of my life, now I also get trolls asking me, “How does it feel to know your boss thinks you’re a disgusting cow?” Being fat is its own punishment. I don’t give a shit if you think I lie on the couch all day under the Dorito funnel—I’d just rather not be abused on the Internet from inside my own workplace. Just a thought.
Love,
Lindy
Ohhhhh, past self. You are completely nanners. (I mean, let’s be honest. I was really popular. I knew they wouldn’t fire me.)
Dan’s reply was nine words long. He asked, simply, if I’d ever detected any animus from him personally.
“Nope, not at all,” I wrote. “Not my point at all, either.”
He said he heard me, but I was accusing him of being a bigot—a serious charge against someone exhibiting, by my admission, no animus.
It was a dodge. He was deliberately missing the point.
SO THEN I REALLY WENT FOR IT:
Sorry I hurt your feelings?
My points again: Being fat is its own punishment. Every day. Fat people know they’re fat and that the rest of the world thinks they’re disgusting. Have you experienced pop culture recently? You are crusading for a stereotype that is already the majority opinion. Why bother? Why is that interesting? There is no army of fat acceptance warriors poised to overthrow the earth and force-feed you gravy. Don’t worry—all the stereotypes about fat people are solidly intact.
I’m being sincere here. I don’t really think you’re a bigot—I just think you’re acting like one. This is a really painful thing that I wake up with every morning and go to sleep with every night, AND I’M NOT EVEN THAT FAT.
Dan never wrote back. We never talked about it in the office.
He couldn’t really be mad, could he? The whole ethos of the Stranger—an ethos that Dan built—was editorial freedom, thoughtful provocation, and fearless transparency. Dan taught me to be bold and uncompromising, to confront bullshit head-on, to cultivate a powerful voice and use it to effect meaningful change. I learned it from watching you, Dan. I learned it from watching you.
For the next year, he went back to posting semi-regularly about the horrors of the obesity epidemic with no discernible interruption, and I went back to ignoring him. Then, a whole lot happened in the same week. I dumped no-kissing-on-the-mouth guy. I kissed (on the mouth!) the man who, four years later, would become my husband. Then, Dan wrote a Slog post entitled, “Ban Fat Marriage,” using the supposed health risks of fatness as leverage to skewer some GOP dodo’s argument that gay marriage should be illegal because gay people supposedly die younger:
“
Even if it were true—even if gay people had lower life expectancies (which we do not)—and if that ‘fact’ all by itself was a justification for banning same-sex marriage, why stop with gay people? Iowa should ban fat marriage. There are, according to the state of Iowa, more than 1.4 million obese people living in Iowa. That’s nearly 30% of the state’s population, and those numbers just keep rising. The social costs of Iowa’s obesity epidemic are pretty staggering—and those costs include premature death and lower average life expectancies for Iowans.”
I get the point. I understand that, in context, Dan presents “ban fat marriage” as an instructive absurdity. This post is still dehumanizing. It still oversimplifies the connections between size and health, and, unfortunately, some anti-fat bigots actually have suggested that fat people shouldn’t be allowed to have families (because of “the children”). Mainly, though, if you have a track record of treating my struggle with persistent disrespect and dismissal, then my struggle is not yours to use as a flippant thought experiment.
I threw up a quick Slog post:
Re: Ban Fat Marriage
Hey, Dan—so now that you’re equating the stigmatization of fat people with the stigmatization of gay people, does that mean you’re going to stop stigmatizing fat people on this blog?
Nothing. I waited a few days. Nothing.
I looked back over our old e-mail exchange—remembering how scary it had been to send, how roundly he’d dismissed me, and how quickly he’d gone back to posting fatphobic rhetoric. Passively attempting to earn my humanity by being smart, nice, friendly, and good at my job had gotten me nowhere; my private confrontation with Dan had gotten me nowhere; literally telling him “this harms me” had gotten me nowhere; taking a quick, vague swipe at him on the blog had gotten me nowhere. So I did what—honestly—I thought Dan would do: On Feb 11, 2011, I wrote a scorched-earth essay and, vibrating with adrenaline, posted it publicly at the tail end of a sunny Friday afternoon.
The post was called, “Hello, I Am Fat.” It included a full-body photo of me, taken that day by Kelly O, our staff photographer, with the caption: “28 years old, female, 5′9″, 263 lbs.” Remember that, at this point in my life, I had never self-identified as “fat” except in that single e-mail exchange with Dan, and in private conversations with trusted friends. Even then, I spoke the word only with shame, not power. Never in public. Never defiantly. Something had snapped in me the week of this post. This was a big deal, a spasm of self-determination rendered in real time. This was the moment.
It read as follows (now with a few annotations and cuts for brevity):
This is my body (over there—see it?). I have lived in this body my whole life. I have wanted to change this body my whole life. I have never wanted anything as much as I have wanted a new body. I am aware every day that other people find my body disgusting. I always thought that some day—when I finally stop failing—I will become smaller, and when I become smaller literally everything will get better (I’ve heard It Gets Better)! My life can begin! I will get the clothes that I want, the job that I want, the love that I want. It will be great! Think how great it will be to buy some pants or whatever at J.Crew. Oh, man. Pants. Instead, my body stays the same.
There is not a fat person on earth who hasn’t lived this way. Clearly this is a TERRIBLE WAY TO EXIST. Also, strangely enough, it did not cause me to become thin. So I do not believe any of it anymore, because fuck it very much.
This is my body. It is MINE. I am not ashamed of it in any way. In fact, I love everything about it. Men find it attractive. Clothes look awesome on it. My brain rides around in it all day and comes up with funny jokes. Also, I don’t have to justify its awesomeness/attractiveness/healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is MINE. Not yours.*
I’m not going to spend a bunch of time blogging about fat acceptance here, because other writers have already done it much more eloquently, thoroughly, and radically than I ever could. But I do feel obligated to try to explain what this all means.
I get that you think you’re actually helping people and society by contributing to the fucking Alp of shame that crushes every fat person every day of their lives—the same shame that makes it a radical act for me to post a picture of my body and tell you how much it weighs. But you’re not helping. Shame doesn’t work. Diets don’t work.* Shame is a tool of oppression, not change.
Fat people already are ashamed. It’s taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front, thx. I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and “choices.” Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat forever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they’re trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it’s because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don’t even have yet? You know what’s shameful? A complete lack of empathy.
And if you really claim to still be confused—“Nu uh! I never said anything u guyz srsly!”—there can be no misunderstanding shit like this:
“I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact—being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly—characterized as ‘hate speech.’”
Ha!
1. “Rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly” is in no way a “tame statement of fact.” It is not a fact at all—it is an incredibly cruel, subjective opinion that reinforces destructive, paternalistic, oppressive beauty ideals.* I am not unsightly. No one deserves to be told that they’re unsightly. But this is what’s behind this entire thing—it’s not about “health,” it’s about “eeeewwwww.” You think fat people are icky. Eeeewww, a fat person might touch you on a plane. With their fat! Eeeeewww! Coincidentally, that’s the same feeling that drives anti-gay bigots, no matter what excuses they drum up about “family values” and, yes, “health.” It’s all “eeeewwwww.” And sorry, I reject your eeeeeewwww.
2. You are not concerned about my health. Because if you were concerned about my health, you would also be concerned about my mental health, which has spent the past twenty-eight years being slowly eroded by statements like the above. Also, you don’t know anything about my health. You do happen to be the boss of me, but you are not the doctor of me. You have no idea what I eat, how much I exercise, what my blood pressure is, or whether or not I’m going to get diabetes. Not that any of that matters, because it is entirely none of your business.
3. “But but but my insurance premiums!!!” Bullshit. You live in a society with other people. I don’t have kids, but I pay taxes that fund schools. The idea that we can somehow escape affecting each other is deeply conservative. Barbarous, even. Is that really what you’re going for? Good old-fashioned American individualism? Please.
4. But most importantly: I reject this entire framework. I don’t give a shit what causes anyone’s fatness. It’s irrelevant and it’s none of my business. I am not making excuses, because I have nothing to excuse. I reject the notion that thinness is the goal, that thin = better—that I am an unfinished thing and that my life can really start when I lose weight. That then I will be a real person and have finally succeeded as a woman. I am not going to waste another second of my life thinking about this. I don’t want to have another fucking conversation with another fucking woman about what she’s eating or not eating or regrets eating or pretends to not regret eating to mask the regret. OOPS I JUST YAWNED TO DEATH.
If you really want change to happen, if you really want to “help” fat people, you need to understand that shaming an already-shamed population is, well, shameful. Do you know what happened as soon as I rejected all this shit and fell in unconditional luuuuurve with my entire body? I started losing weight. Immediately. WELL LA DEE FUCKING DA.*
The post went up. I le
ft the office early and went across the street to get a head start on our Friday afternoon ritual, “Ham Grab,” so named because it consisted of getting drunk as fast as possible and then descending upon a meat and cheese platter like a plague of locusts with journalism degrees. As the comment section churned away—two hundred, three hundred, four hundred comments—I heard nothing from Dan all weekend; unbeknownst to me, he was off the grid in a cabin somewhere with no cell or Internet service. It would be a jarring welcome back to civilization. Oops.
The following Monday, Dan posted his response. It was three times longer than my piece—2,931 words, to be exact—accused me of “ad hominem attacks” and being blinded by my own emotional problems, and featured, as its centerpiece, this condescending bit of armchair psychology:
It sounds like you’re externalizing an internal conflict about being fat—you’re projecting your anger and self-loathing onto me, and seeing malice and bigotry where none exists, and perhaps that’s useful because that anger seems to be liberating and motivating. If having your own personal boogeyman on Slog helps you conquer your shame and love your body and this helps you break out of old, self-destructive patterns and habits (you can’t be losing weight now just because your attitude changed), then I’m happy to be your own personal boogeyman. But honestly, Lindy, you don’t need one. You’re stronger than that.
He said a lot of other things too, like “the bigotry in my posts exists only in Lindy’s imagination,” and “there are crazy fat people out there, Lindy… be careful who you crawl into bed [with] now that you’re a ‘brave’ hero to the FA movement,” and approvingly quoted a commenter who suggested that “apparently, Lindy isn’t very good with reading comprehension.”
It was exhausting—it just felt so static and pointless. We hadn’t moved an inch. The next day, there was a staff meeting about how I’d hurt Dan’s feelings, with no mention at all of the climate that had led me to write the post in the first place. I was livid. I thought about quitting, but the Stranger meant everything to me—it was the place where I found my voice, and the family that emboldened me to use it. At the time, I couldn’t imagine anything beyond that office, and besides, I loved working for Dan.
