by Lindy West
As the flight progressed, first class got less exciting. At some point, once the initial thrill of being adjacent to a four-figure boat sale had worn off, I realized: These special drinks weren’t remotely special. This roast beef sandwich, though presented with a cloth napkin, was in no way luxurious. (Also, “sandwich” is a rather generous term for a microwaved wad of airborne gray beef.) My first-class chair wasn’t a plush throne stuffed with Richard Branson’s hair, as air travel’s mythology would have you believe—it was simply an average-sized chair with a human amount of leg room (as opposed to coach seats, which are novelty-sized file drawers with a elfin amount of leg room). It wasn’t unbearable. The highest praise I can give it is that it was adequate. It had succeeded at being a chair instead of a flying social experiment about the limits of human endurance. The rich aren’t paying for luxury—they’re paying for basic humanity.
For me, the primary advantage of flying first class was that it precluded the dread. I didn’t know about the dread until the fall of 2013—the first time I got on a plane and discovered that I didn’t quite fit in the seat. I’ve always been fat, but I was the fat person that still mostly fit. While I couldn’t fit into regular-lady clothes (more bejeweled tunics covered with skulls, cherries, and antique postage stamps, please!), and I had to be careful with butt safety (I once Godzilla’d an entire lunch setting while trying to sidle through a Parisian cafe), I was still the kind of fat person who could move through the straight-sized world without causing too many ripples. Until I couldn’t.
It had been an incredibly busy year for me professionally—I’d probably flown twenty times in the preceding eight months, and there’s nothing like a steady diet of stress and Chili’s Too to keep the waistline trim—and one day I sat down and it just didn’t work. I was on a flight home from Texas, and the flight out there had been fine. Suddenly, on the return flight, I had to cram myself in. I mean, I know I ate that brisket, but I was only gone for two days! I’m no butt scientist (just two credits away, though!), but how fast could a person’s butt possibly grow?
If you’ve never tried cramming your hips into an angular metal box that’s an inch or two narrower than your flesh (under the watchful eye of resentful tourists), then sitting motionless in there for five hours while you fold your arms and shoulders up like a dying orchid in order to be as unobtrusive as possible, run, don’t walk. It’s like squeezing your bones in a vise. The pain makes your teeth ache. I once spent a tearful eight-hour flight from Oslo to Seattle convinced I could feel my femurs splintering like candy canes. It hurts.
Much worse than any physical pain is the anxiety—the dread—of walking up the aisle and not knowing what type of plane you’re on. Every model has different seat widths and belt lengths, which also vary from airline to airline. Am I going to fit this time? Will I have to ask for a seat-belt extender? Is this a 17-incher or an 18-incher? Is the person next to me going to hate me? Does everyone on this plane hate me? I paid money for this?
I have, in my life, been a considerably thinner person and had a fat person sit next to me on a plane. I have also, more recently, been the fat person that makes other travelers’ faces fall. Being the fat person is worse.
Here’s how I board a plane. I do not book a ticket unless I can be assured a window seat—I will happily sit in the very back row, or change my flight to the buttcrack of dawn—because the window well affords me an extra couple of inches in which to compress my body to give my neighbor as much space as possible. It’s awkward and embarrassing to haul and cram myself in and out of the seat, so I also prefer the window because I’m not blocking anyone’s bathroom access. I’ve learned from experience that emergency exit rows and bulkhead rows are often narrower, so those are out. My preflight anxiety begins the day before, when I remember that I have a trip coming up. I arrive at least two hours early, even for domestic flights, to preclude any risk of having to run, because the only thing worse than being fat on a plane is being fat, red, sweaty, and huffing on a plane. I go to the bathroom multiple times before boarding because, again, I avoid getting out of my seat at all cost, even on international flights. (The path from fat-shaming to deep vein thrombosis is short and slick.) I linger by the gate so I can board as early as possible and be the first one in my row; that way I don’t have to make anyone wait in the aisle while I get my body folded up and squared away. As I pass the flight attendants at the front of the plane I ask, discreetly, if I can have a seat-belt extender, to minimize the embarrassment of having to ring the call button once I’m seated and let my seatmates know they’re next to the too-big kind of fat person. Finally, I press myself up against the wall like a limpet and try to go to sleep, avoiding any position in which I might snore and remind everyone about my fat, lumpy windpipe.
That’s the amount of forethought, anxiety, and emotional energy that goes into every single flight. Fat people are not having fun on planes. There is no need to make it worse.
Just a month or two after the first time I didn’t fit, on a crack-of-dawn flight from New York City to Seattle, I had my first ever, um, disagreement with a seatmate. Despite my online irascibility, I’m pathologically polite in person, so face-to-face hostility is foreign to me. I’d almost missed the plane—I was that person staggering on board just before the doors closed—and I’m sure this dude thought he was going to have the three-seat row all to himself. He was about my age, maybe midthirties, an average kind of Jon Gosselin–looking guy. Probably works in an office; hangs out at, like, an Irish pub because he’s too old for clubs but still wants to hit on chicks; has always wanted to learn to surf but will never get around to it. I don’t know, just a guy. I flashed him an apologetic smile and pointed to the middle seat. “Hey, sorry, I’m over there.” He didn’t respond or make eye contact, just glared blankly at my hips. Then, as I went to put my bag in the overhead bin, I heard him mutter something sour.
“[Something something], say excuse me.”
I froze. Was someone being a dick to me? In person? At seven a.m.? In an enclosed space? For no reason? When I have a hangover? And we’re about to be stuck next to each other for the next five hours? I’m used to men treating me like garbage virtually, or from fast-moving cars, but this close-quarters face-to-face shit-talking was a jarring novelty.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he muttered, still refusing to look at me.
“No,” I said. If I’m going to make a living telling women to stick up for themselves, I need to do it too. “You said something. What did you say?”
“Nothing,” he repeated.
“No,” I repeated. “What did you say? Tell me.”
“I said,” he snapped, “that if you want someone to move, it helps to say ‘excuse me’ and then get out of the way. You told me to move and then you just—” He gestured with a large circular motion at my body.
“I’m putting my bag in the overhead bin,” I said, anxiety thundering in my ears. “You know, because that’s how planes work?”
“Yeah,” he said, dripping with disdain. “Okay.”
He stood up so I could slide into the middle seat, keeping his gaze fixed on the far bank of windows, avoiding my eye contact. I sat, trying not to touch him. My head felt like a hot-air balloon. I hadn’t said “excuse me” yet because I was still in the process of putting my bag in the overhead bin. The “excuse me” part of the transaction comes when you ask the other person to get up. I hadn’t leaned over him or touched him or dropped anything on him. No éclairs had tumbled out of my cleavage and into his hair. Was a preemptive “sorry” really not enough? Had I violated some custom I was unaware of? Had I fallen through a tesseract and into a dimension where “sorry” means “No offense, but you have a Jon Gosselinesque face and a Kate Gosselinesque personality”? If not, I could not fathom where I’d gone wrong.
The last few passengers boarded and they closed the doors. No one came to claim our window seat, so I slid over, saying, “Looks like there’s no one in the middle s
eat, so you won’t actually have to sit next to me. Since I apparently bother you so much.”
“Sounds great to me,” he droned, eyes front.
As soon as he fell asleep (with his mouth open like a nerd), I passive-aggressively jarred his foot with my backpack and then said, “Oh, excuse me,” because I am an adult (and he loves to hear “excuse me”!). We ignored each other for the rest of the flight.
It felt alien to be confronted so vocally and so publicly (and for such an arbitrary reason), but it also felt familiar. People say the same kind of thing to me with their eyes on nearly every flight—this guy just chose to say it with his mouth.
This is the subtext of my life: “You’re bigger than I’d like you to be.” “I dread being near you.” “Your body itself is a breach of etiquette.” “You are clearly a fucking fool who thinks that cheesecake is a vegetable.” “I know that you will fart on me.”
Nobody wants to sit next to a fat person on a plane. Don’t think we don’t know.
That’s why—to return to my first-class flight—my foray into “luxury” was so disheartening. It wasn’t a taste of the high life so much as an infuriating illumination of how dismal it is to fly any other way. I realized: Oh. Flying first class wasn’t intrinsically special, but it was the first time in recent memory that I’ve felt like a human being on a plane.
We put up with economy class because most of us have no choice—we need to get from here to there and we want cheaper and cheaper tickets. I can’t blame airlines for trying to stay in business by compressing as many travelers as possible into coach like a Pringles can lined with meat glue. It seems like a straightforward business decision, which is why it’s confusing, as a fat person, to hear so much about how I, personally, have ruined air travel. There are entire blogs devoted to hating fat people on planes—describing their supposed transgressions and physical particulars in grotesque, gleeful detail, posting clandestine photos, and crowing about the verbal abuse that posters claim to have heaped on their bigger neighbors. As though there were a time when 1) there were no fat people, and 2) everyone passionately loved flying.
As a counterpoint, I would like to lodge a gentle reminder that air travel has been terrible for a long time. It’s terrible because a plane is just a flying bus, trapped in an eternal rush hour, with recycled farts and vaporized child sputum instead of air, seats barely wider than the average human pelvis, and a bonus built-in class hierarchy. Barring a brief period in the ’50s and ’60s, when airplanes were reportedly flying, smoke-choked bacchanals staffed by Bond girls wearing baby onesies, air travel has been a study in discomfort giving way to ever more profitable methods of making people uncomfortable. That has nothing to do with fat people’s bodies.
I’m sure some fat people are fat by their own hand, without any underlying medical conditions, but a lot of other fat people are fat because they’re sick or disabled. Unless you’re checking every human being’s bloodwork before they pull up Kayak.com, you do not know which fat people are which. Which means, inevitably, if you think fat people are “the problem” (and not, say, airlines hoping to squeeze out extra revenue, or consumers who want cheap airline tickets without sacrificing amenities), you are penalizing a significant number of human beings emotionally and financially for a disease or disability that already complicates their lives. Ethically, that’s fucked up.
That dude next to me didn’t call me fat to my face. I don’t even know if that’s what was bothering him, although I recognized the way he looked at my body (my body, not my face, not once, not ever). I can’t be sure why that guy was mad at me, but I know why people are usually mad at me on planes. I know that he disliked me instantly, he invented a reason to be a jerk to me, and then he executed it. More importantly, I see other people staring those same daggers at other fat people’s bodies every day, in the sky and on the ground, and congratulating themselves for it, as though they’re doing a righteous public service.
Even less popular than being fat on a plane, I soon discovered, was talking about being fat on a plane with anything but groveling, poo-eating penitence.
Not long after it happened, I wrote about “say excuse me” guy in a little essay for Jezebel, about holiday air travel, not expecting anything beyond the usual “eat less/exercise more” anti-fat backlash. It was a vulnerable story, and a sympathetic one, I thought, about the low-grade hostility that fat people face every day (and about the debilitating self-doubt bred by micro-aggressions—does this person really hate me or am I being oversensitive?), and I told it plainly, as it happened. I assumed that people could connect with me, the person, and potentially break down some of the prejudice that makes fat people such popular pariahs. The actual response caught me off guard, though it shouldn’t have.
Without considering for a moment that I might have interpreted my own experiences accurately—that this very simple and famously common interaction, an airplane passenger feeling resentful about sitting next to a fat person, might be true—readers bent over backwards to construct elaborate alternate narratives in which I was the villain. I was the one being rude, by saying “sorry” instead of “excuse me.” (What rule is that?) I had smothered him with my gut when I reached up to stow my bag. (Ew, as if I like touching people.) I had delayed the flight with my entitled, irresponsible failure to show up on time. (I was there within the boarding window, I just wasn’t early, the way I like to be.) I was the last person on the plane (nope). I was still drunk, looking for a fight, ranting and raving and reeking of booze. (What do I look like—a freshman?)
In the same breath that commenters were telling me I was overreacting, I was delusional, I was lying—a man couldn’t possibly have been hostile to me on an airplane—they were also chiming in with and commiserating over their own anecdotes about the horrors of flying near disgusting, smelly, presumptuous fat people. So which is it? Are fat people treated just fine on planes or is flying with fat people such a torment that it warrants a public crusade?
Part of writing is choosing which details to include and which to discard. Part of reading is deciding whether or not you can trust your narrator. The Internet made it very clear, very quickly, once my post went up, that trusting me was not on the table. I didn’t bother to mention, for instance, that the dude was sitting with his legs splayed wide in classic “MAN’S STEAMING BALLS COMING THROUGH” fashion, with his foot in the middle footwell (my footwell) where I’d stowed my backpack. (If I had, I would have been accused of feminist hysteria, the way women who call out subway “manspreading” have been.) I didn’t waste words on the fact that when they closed the cabin doors and it became clear that our window seat was going to be unoccupied, I moved my backpack to the window seat, where I’d already been sitting. So, yeah, I jostled the guy’s foot when I moved my bag, because the guy’s foot was blocking my bag. The guy didn’t even wake up. I thought it was tedious and unnecessary exposition (and, if you’re still awake at this point in this boring-ass paragraph, you’ll see that I was right). I assumed that Jezebel readers would trust that I am as I have always presented myself—a kind, pragmatic, nonviolent, reasonable human being—and read my story with a modicum of empathy, or at least the benefit of the doubt.
Within hours of my post cycling through the Internet sausage factory, I was barraged with bizarre fictions on Twitter: I had stumbled onto the plane drunk, delayed takeoff as I screamed at the guy to move, sat on him, viciously kicked him with my wide-calf boot, brutally beaten him with my backpack, continued to harass and mock him for the duration of the flight as he quivered in terror and pretended to sleep, then eagerly libeled him on the Internet. One particularly putrid community of misogynists threatened to “report me to the FBI” for “assault and battery in a federal airspace.” (LOL, go for it, sluggers.) They also coordinated a (temporarily successful) effort to Google bomb my name so that their “article”—“Fat Feminist Lindy West Goes Berserk Because She No Longer Fits in Airplane Seats”—came up on the first page of search results.
> Here’s an excerpt from that totally reasonable and not-at-all-bigoted-because-fatphobia-isn’t-a-real-thing reaction to my article ([sic] throughout):
Is this who we want having influence in our country? Society must realize there are consequences to fat feminist beliefs. They range from the concrete (not fitting on airplanes) to creating a class of perennial female victims-seekers who have no notion of personality responsibility. Instead of focusing on self-improvement, they seek to blame everyone else for their problems, even innocent men on airplanes who have their property damaged from the canckled legs of deranged women.
On a different site, a commenter wrote: “Man FUCK HER. I wouldn’t want to stoop to feminist levels and wish bodily harm—castration/acid burning her face, etc.—on her, but if I did, then I’d say I wish that Buffalo Bill taught her a lesson or two.”
And another: “My god, what a putrid and deluded fucking cunt. I’m so glad that her health decisions that are none of my business will see her in an early grave. I’m sure when she loses her legs from diabetes or has a heart attack at forty due to lard clogged arteries that will be the patriarchy’s fault too. Bitch.”
Very astute, boys. I was probably just imagining the whole thing. I’m certainly not an adult human being who’s been successfully reading social cues for thirty years. And we certainly don’t have any evidence of general animosity toward fat people, particularly fat people on planes.
Before the day I didn’t fit, this conversation was largely an abstraction for me. My stance was the same as it is now (if people pay for a service, it’s the seller’s obligation to accommodate those people and provide the service they paid for), but I didn’t understand what that panicky, uncertain walk down the aisle actually felt like. How inhumane it is.
