Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It

by Brittany Gibbons

  This quest solidified me as the Internet’s token fat girl, and I appeared on news shows and podcasts and was quoted in magazines, all because I was the authority on being fat. Something that years ago would have humiliated me, I now wore like a badgeof honor. What’s the worst that could happen? I’m called fat? My self-esteem was made bulletproof, and as a result, I’d become fearless.

  SHE WORE A BIKINI ON THE INTERNET

  Pushing the limits of the Internet is a necessary evil. In a space that welcomes robot porn and WikiLeaks, it’s imperative to come off each accomplished project with a resounding “Now what?”

  She talked about her sex life on the Internet, now what?

  She revealed her weight on the Internet, now what?

  She stood in her shapewear on the Internet, now what?

  She wore a bathing suit on the Internet, now what?

  In 2013, that now what became a bikini. It had been, easily, twenty-five years since I’d worn a bikini, but being caught up in the excitement of feeling sexy and strong and the Internet’s siren calls of now what, it seemed like the next natural step.

  This was no easy mountain to climb. It had cliffs and caverns and stretch marks and gallbladder surgery scars and love handles and saggy parts and a belly button that was so totally lower than I remember it being before. Oh, and a stupid amount of cellulite. But it turns out, putting on a bikini was so much harder than just, well, putting on a bikini. In fact, I had been so focused on the actual act, I never even considered the difficulty in finding one that fit. There is so much to consider, especially with a curvy body. I needed a bottom that came up high enough to hide my pouch, and a top big and supportive enough to handle my 38Hs. That made for slim pickings. Also, I’m not, like, sixteen years old, so there’s that.

  After taking to the Internet, because heaven forbid we plus-size gals try anything on in a store, I ordered an absolutely obscene amount of bikinis, took a few shots of tequila, lowered the air-conditioning in my bedroom to about 50 degrees (the temperature where my skin felt the firmest and I wasn’t working up a sweat shimmying in and out of Lycra), and after forty-two or so emotional breakdowns on my bedroom floor and a case of alcohol poisoning, ended up with two that made me feel positively gorgeous.

  Andy took the photos on a freezing February morning. Yes, Andy takes all of the fashion-related photographs on my website. If you would have witnessed this happening a few years ago, you would have seen me poring over his camera, explaining to him the importance of angles and downshots and lighting until eventually breaking out in tears and telling him to just forget it. Now Andy has become a curvy body expert, a title he carries with pride, as he anticipates my self-criticism and patiently takes the required eight hundred shots until I feel like my legs are less “globby,” and my hair feels less “ugh” and “blah.”

  I put the bikini photos online, anticipating not only the cheers and support, but also the petty gossip and body bashing. I received both, and considered it a success. The story ran on both my blog and the Huffington Post, and a few days later as we drove down to Florida to visit Andy’s parents who had relocated there, I started to receive calls from the early morning network shows and afternoon talk shows wanting to interview me about daring to wear a two-piece bathing suit on the Internet.

  Good Morning America sent a camera crew and producers to the house we were renting, and as the three cameramen set up lighting and adjusted shots, Jude walked up to the producer sitting beside me on the couch.

  “Why’s my mommy famous?” he asked.

  “Because she wore a bathing suit.” He tilted his head at him matter-of-factly.

  “I do that all the time,” Jude answered.

  So did I. In fact, most people wear a bathing suit all the time, weather or season permitting. The difference was that most people weren’t also fat and on the front page of the Huffington Post because of it. Everyone was so incredibly kind, but being interviewed about why as a woman I struggled wearing a bathing suit, by a male producer surrounded by three cameramen, was awkward. They didn’t get it. Why is it difficult to be a curvy woman and wear a bathing suit? That’s a really good question: why is it, society?

  The segment was packaged and run alongside news that H&M had decided to use an attractive plus-size model for their swim line. And the tone of the story became less about how amazing it was that fat women were wearing bikinis and more focused on how dare they.

  Sometimes, the biggest stumbling block to the cause of body positivity is traditional news media. While the Internet had exploded into a utopia of self-love and body acceptance, television and print media were lagging behind, like your grandma who still uses words like coloreds at your family Christmas dinner. For traditional media, fat women are only newsworthy when we hate ourselves or our existence is a caricature or oddity.

  Plus-Size Woman Runs for Political Office

  Obese Doctor Cures Cancer

  Fatty Wears Bikini on the Internet

  The problem is that being 65 percent of the population, we aren’t anomalies anymore; we’re the majority. Here’s an example of a real email exchange with a popular network morning talk show.

  To: Brittany

  From: Popular Network Morning Show

  Hello Brittany- Next week is Body Image week here at Popular Network Morning Show, and we’d love to have you on, are you interested?

  From: Brittany

  To: Popular Network Morning Show

  What a great theme, I’d love to participate; can you give me more details?

  To: Brittany

  From: Popular Network Morning Show

  Sure, we’re doing a segment featuring plus size women sizes 8-12 who aren’t happy with their bodies, and we’d like to have you come and talk about what parts of your body you aren’t happy about.

  To: Popular Network Morning Show

  From: Brittany

  Well, for starters I am actually a size 16, I’m not sure that I’d quantify a size 8 as plus size? Also, I’m really happy in my body. Wouldn’t that be a much more positive message to share during Body Image Week?

  To: Brittany

  From: Popular Network Morning Show

  Sounds great, we’ll call you within the hour to set something up!

  I’m still waiting for that call, and I have a feeling it won’t be coming. We can’t depend on the news to give us the talking points and narratives about how we’re supposed to be feeling about our bodies. We need the women who are putting themselves out there in the bathing suits with the loud voices saying look at me, this is what normal looks like, and it’s beautiful.

  I am grateful every day that being one of those women gets to be my job. I’ve stopped cringing when someone at my kids’ school asks me what I do for a living. I no longer write “Stay at Home Mom” on the blank line of emergency medical forms when they ask for my occupation because it’s just easier than saying I take my clothes off in public. Now I write words like “advocate,” “author,” or “social media personality.” Some people hit twenty and know exactly what they want to do with their lives; for me, it took another decade. Ten more years of being ashamed and unimportant and dragging along the self-esteem rock bottom in order to give me the strength, knowledge, and desperate drive to change everything.

  15

  THE TED TALK

  IN 2011 I received an email from the organizers of TEDx, which is an offshoot of the popular TED Conference, TED standing for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The event features eighteen-minute talks from a variety of sources, most of them being people who invent the Internet, cure diseases, or at some point were president. For a certified TED nerd, an invitation to speak is about as close to heaven as it gets, but at the same time, absolutely terrifying.

  While they informed me I had been nominated to speak, the bigger question was, about what? What could I possibly say that was on par with the Brené Browns and Bill Gateses of the world? I responded to the email with an idea I’d had about how my life h
ad changed after standing in Times Square in my bathing suit. It was superficial and lighthearted, and I fully expected an email response informing me all remaining spots had been filled and thanking me for my time.

  Instead they said yes.

  The event was held at Bowling Green State University, a college I did not attend, but had been drunk at many times. I showed up to the rehearsal dinner underdressed and late. Not because I wasn’t punctual; I’d just spent too much time throwing up in the bushes next to where I parked my car. Skyler Rogers, the amazing man organizing the event, walked me through the process. I had eighteen minutes to speak, I was allowed no notes, and I was sandwiched between two guys who created animated robots for Disney and a guy who ended genocide or something. I’m honestly not sure what that second guy did; I was too busy hearing my own heartbeat in my ears to listen to that.

  How do you compete with two dudes who make actual robots and somebody who probably ends the murder of innocent people? By talking about how I like myself in a bathing suit? That was my grand contribution to society? I felt physically ill, again. On the car ride home after the rehearsal, I asked Andy if it would be okay to back out.

  “I’ll tell them we have an emergency or I have food poisoning,” I decided from the passenger seat of our car.

  “You can’t back out,” Andy replied.

  “Is it horrible to pray for sepsis?” I asked.

  “You will be amazing.”

  “Or this could be the most humiliating experience of my life.”

  “That’s unlikely. Nothing could beat you slipping into the grave hole at my grandma’s funeral.”

  “They should mark those better,” I sighed.

  I can’t remember when I fell asleep that night, but I awoke at 5:45 A.M. the next day with a strange peace washing over me. I had accepted my fate. The announcements had gone out, the programs had been printed, and the tickets had been purchased. Even if I sucked, even if I walked off the stage and left people thinking, Why did they pick her to speak, again? Even if no one clapped or laughed and everyone shifted uncomfortably in their seats and checked their watches eight hundred times, this was happening.

  I was in the second group of speakers, and as they pulled us to get miked before lunch, I made a life decision.

  “I need you to tape this mike to my face,” I told the young man attaching the Britney Spears headset to my ear.

  “Huh?” he asked, staring at me confused.

  “I need you to tape this mike to my face, because I don’t want it to come off if I take my clothes off, okay?” I whispered.

  “I-um,” he stammered, unsure how to respond until he finally embraced the fact that I was probably crazy and he was on board with that. “Let me find some tape.”

  We worked in tandem and secretly backstage securing the headset to my cheek, hiding the tape with my hair. I might not have invented robots, but I could stand up there with my clothes off in the name of every woman who had ever hated her body. I stood on the side of the stage waiting for my intro, shifting uncomfortably in the bathing suit I’d hidden under my clothes. When Skyler beamed at me from across the stage and pointed at me to walk out, everything went bright white and silent.

  I turned thirty and I became a swimsuit model.

  The auditorium was a sold-out crowd of over six hundred people, mostly men in suits and college students who were looking at me with smirks on their faces.

  I spent my first years of college as a bulimic. And the last decade or so coming to terms with how I really look. I’ve learned to like my body. It’s just other people that seemed to have a problem with it.

  Much like the way people scoff when you tell them you are fat and a swimsuit model, they have an equally hard time swallowing that you can be overweight and have an eating disorder. When you think about bulimia, you picture a bone-thin girl hovering over a toilet.

  What you don’t picture is a chubby college freshman on her knees in the bathroom while everyone else is asleep, dragging her bloodied knuckles through the sweaty hair that stuck to her face, throwing up the last bit of food she’d binged on in her dorm room because she was always so hungry, but never wanted to face the consequences of the food she was eating.

  I needed to change the way women saw their bodies. Magazines, ads, online, any of the five different Kardashian shows on E! . . . none of those women looked like me. I couldn’t relate to their message and I couldn’t relate to their lives.

  We pay money every day to be reassured we aren’t meeting the current standard of beauty. We not only are told that we’re not good enough: we willingly pay for the experience.

  Because talking about change isn’t as effective as being the change. So, that’s what I had to do. I had to be the change I wanted to see. I had to redefine normal and beauty in this country.

  And with that, I slipped off my shoes and unzipped my pants, leaving the crowd shifting in their seats, unsure if something poignant was about to happen, or I had the stage presence of Al Bundy.

  I stood, with five of my friends, in the middle of Times Square in New York City, on Good Morning America, between Emeril Lagasse and a cart selling hot nuts . . . in my bathing suit.

  I looked at Skyler gripping his clipboard off the stage to the left. I stepped out of my jeans and pulled my shirt over my head.

  I stood there to show people, I am what women in this country look like. There is nothing shameful or ugly about me. I can be confident and desirable at this size. I’m someone’s mother, hell I’m three someones’ mother, and I’ve earned every curve on my body. And I’ll be damned if they aren’t sexy.

  My thighs rubbed as I crossed the stage. The bright lights that blinded me to the audience below afforded me a sense of safety and cockiness. I wasn’t concerned about sucking in or showing my good side. I was just telling my story to a silent room of spotlights.

  Was it worth it, standing there, every flaw exposed on national television? I don’t know; how many of you have ever hated your bodies? How many of you untag yourself from Facebook photos, have been asked when you are due when you aren’t even expecting, or gotten passed over by a guy for your thinner friend?

  I’ve been all those people. None of them is less humiliating than the others.

  I did this for you and for my daughter. And your daughter, and your mother and your friends. If you can get up in the morning and hate your body less than you did the day before, then it was worth every second next to that Hot Nut Cart.

  I don’t know how long I spoke. (It was eight minutes)

  I can’t remember anyone’s face. (Except Skyler’s when I started taking my clothes off. He was horrified.)

  I don’t remember the music I walked onto the stage to, but I’d like to think it was “Murder Was the Case” by Snoop. (It was “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive.)

  I ended my talk with a thank-you and instinctively grabbed my clothes from the floor and ran offstage into the bathroom.

  The feeling was indescribable. It was more electric than climaxing or jumping into a pool of cold water. When I reemerged from the restroom and made my way out to the auditorium at intermission, I found a line of women waiting to speak to me, some of them crying, and men in line just to shake my hand. When I finally found my seat next to Andy, his eyes were shiny and he smiled. He told me I’d received a standing ovation, and next to giving him children, it’s the proudest he’d ever looked at me.

  It’s been three years, and I still haven’t been able to watch the video of my TED talk. In my head, it went perfectly, and I’d hate to ruin it by picking myself apart or focusing on anything other than the feeling I’d left the stage with that day: pure, unadulterated joy. That talk changed my life. It was the first time I’d addressed a crowd live, and despite being incredibly scared, I survived. Nothing would be as scary as that, which meant I could do anything.

  I encourage you to watch the talk online; there’s way more stripping that way. And I’d like to add that this s
peech has since been featured on the Huffington Post and Upworthy and by Meghan McCain, who called me her personal hero. And I’m only writing that right now because my dad is reading this, and it makes the Obama vein on his forehead stick out.

  16

  SEX WITH FAT GIRLS

  May 22, 2012

  To: Andy

  From: Brittany

  Hey, could you list 5 things you love about my body?

  To: Brittany

  From: Andy

  Butt hair face lips cleavage.

  To: Andy

  From: Brittany

  Whoa, slow down there Casanova, I’m about to end up pregnant, don’t get so descriptive.

  To: Brittany

  From: Andy

  Well, to be honest, I haven’t seen you totally naked in years.

  Well, shit. The fact is that even before kids, I was horrible at intimacy. The sex part was pretty basic, you put it in the hole, but the actual connection was where I struggled. The connection that kept me in the moment and enjoying the experience instead of focusing on what my body was doing and how it looked doing it. Plus, I come from a family of nonhuggers and I spend a good portion of my day hyperaware of my body, so yeah, recipe for Temple Grandin hug machine. My husband is gorgeous and very sexy, but the issues I was having with being naked and having sex were all me. Because I wasn’t able to shut off my insecurities about my body and weight, sex had become a really anxiety-inducing experience that went one of two ways.

  1 I avoided it because it was hot and stressful hiding naked under two comforters and a snowsuit in the dark, and instead would run a diversion play. I have cramps. I have to work. I promised Gigi she could sleep in our bed. That’s right; I used a four-year-old as a cockblock.