Baby, I think you’re beautiful. I would never have sent you these if I thought it would upset you. I supposed I believed him, but I was still so confused about these photos and what Owen saw in them. It couldn’t be the same as what he saw in me…could it? There was only one thing to do: I needed to consult my sisterhood.
“Boo Boo…no. There’s something wrong.”
“I know,” I said. “I know it’s weird as fuck, but like, I think he just likes big women.”
“But has he said that, though?” Donna asked, looking at me quizzically the next day in my bedroom.
“Well, no, he’s said he likes all kinds of women. But why else would he like the bbw sites? Normal men don’t like women like us.”
“Well, exactly,” she reasoned. “That’s why something has to be wrong with him.”
Replaying this conversation with my best friend makes me want to howl from equal parts laughter and sadness. Knowing everything I know now, it makes me sad to think we both simply could not wrap our heads around a conventionally attractive, intelligent, “normal” guy liking big women, exclusively or not. And the humor of it all isn’t lost on me, either. It’s so obvious: not only did Owen pursue me, a big woman, sexually, but he went so far as to send me pictures of other big women that aroused him, sexually. It would seem quite clear that he liked big women, sexually, but here were two college-educated women breaking a sweat trying to decipher what it all meant.
Sometimes the best explanation is the simplest one. Here was a normal guy, attracted to fat women. Shocking, I know.
A few days later Ashley and I ordered a pizza, and when I answered the door, I recognized the guy delivering it but I didn’t let on. I always found it mortifying to run into people from my past because the person who gets fat after high school is a running joke in every social circle. But the guy recognized me, too.
“Didn’t we go to high school together?” he asked.
“Um, maybe,” I bluffed. “What’s your name?”
“Buddy.”
“Oh! Buddy! Of course! How are you?” I hadn’t seen Buddy since I was eighteen, but he was a friend of my high school boyfriend, Shawn, and worked on some of the same shows as I did at the Carolina Theatre. Later that night, while chatting with Owen, I told him about it. Turns out he knew Buddy and told me a story of a time recently when they’d competed for the same girl, when Owen lived in Greensboro.
“I bet he wants to sleep with you,” Owen teased.
“Ew, he does not.” I shot him down, but I saw a twinge of jealousy emerge in Owen. So when Buddy and I became Facebook friends, when he invited me to his birthday dinner, and when he asked me to give his mom a birthday shout-out on the radio, I made sure to mention these events to Owen to gauge his reaction, as a litmus test of his feelings for me. The verdict: Owen was at least a little jelly.
I was eager for Owen to visit again, but I had the sinking feeling that he and I weren’t going to amount to much. In the weeks that followed, conversation became sparse, sometimes absent for days at a time, and often turned sexual when we did talk. I’d been so shy and reserved on our first date, so timid and afraid of messing anything up, that I often felt like he didn’t actually know me at all. But he was coming back to Greensboro at the end of December, and we made plans to go out again.
When he got into town, earlier than expected, he asked if he could just come over. I told him no, that I still had to shower and I wasn’t comfortable. The truth? I didn’t want any excuse for him to try any funny business and be stuck naked with him in the daylight. I was trying to impress him, not run him off, after all. He wanted to go to the movies, and my more pressing concern was that he drove a smaller car and I wasn’t sure I would be able to fit comfortably in it. He persisted, but I finally convinced him to go in my 4Runner. As we walked into the movie theatre, I marveled at how this beautiful man was walking next to me in public on a Friday night, when people were sure to assume we were on a date! We saw Django Unchained, which was not only a great movie, but also quite long, which allowed me lots of time to revel in the moment.
When we got back to my place, I realized I was okay with him touching me, as long as he couldn’t see the curves he was running his hands over. At one point he smacked my butt, and instead of feeling humiliated, I let myself enjoy it.
The next day was New Year’s Eve, and in the morning we woke up, naked, and lounged in bed for hours. We had sex. We talked about photography. He dissected my fancy camera, showing me what each feature was used for. We had more sex. But eventually, when he announced that it was time for him to hit the road, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him for a long time, if not for good. As much as I wished I could date Owen, I could sense that he didn’t feel anything for me, and I couldn’t blame him. In an effort to be likable, I’d muted my entire personality. And because I wasn’t being me, I couldn’t see him, either. Everything about Owen was great on paper, and the sex was 8/10, but I knew that was that.
I wished I could believe that the kind of man I wanted could be attracted to me. I knew I wouldn’t accept myself until I was either thin or could somehow come to terms with being fat. And I wasn’t ready. As he gathered his things and talked about going to a New Year’s Eve party, I made a resolution: the next time I met an Owen, I wanted to be ready.
I began to throw myself into work. Our show was now called Jared and Katie in the Morning, and it was a success. Without our old host, Bob, we had made a concerted effort to use our newfound creative freedom in fun and innovative ways. We were now in control of our content, and we loved it. I started a YouTube channel for the show and got more active on social media.
In February, the “Harlem Shake” was sweeping the digital landscape, and we were scheduled to have Dustin Diamond, better known as Screech from Saved by the Bell, in the studio for an interview. Afterward, we convinced him to participate in our own “Harlem Shake” video and he obliged, even inviting us to his comedy show that evening in High Point.
Jared and I attended, and Donna came along. When it was over, as we sat chatting, Dustin announced that he wanted breakfast, so we hit up a twenty-four-hour diner. Say what you want about him and his tabloid headlines, but I found him to be one of the nicest, most genuine guys I’d met in a long time, famous or not. You know how they say you can judge a person by how he treats the waitstaff at a restaurant? This same logic applies, but substitute a fat/not conventionally pretty/differently abled woman. One of the things that struck me hardest after gaining so much weight so quickly is that most men never seemed to want to talk or pay attention to me anymore. And I don’t mean overt sexual attention. I’m not offended when I don’t get catcalled or when guys don’t hang all over me at a drunken party. In other words: I don’t care if you don’t want to sleep with me. But I do care about all the other benign interactions that suddenly go missing. And I couldn’t remember the last time a guy seemed interested in talking to or getting to know me without an ulterior motive.
This realization made me sad and caused me to reevaluate every relationship I’d had with men in the past, especially the ones I hadn’t thought of as romantic or sexual. Were they only being nice in order to get something in return? Had every pleasantry been a bid to get out of the dreaded friend zone and into my pants? (Side note: the “friend zone” is not a real place, but more on that later. Prepare your maps.) Now that men typically didn’t want to have sex with me, they seemed to want nothing to do with me, period. It was as if I didn’t even exist.
But that wasn’t what I experienced with Dustin. He was kind, polite, and genuinely interested in conversation. And honestly, he seemed a little lonely. Obviously, his heyday as Screech had long since passed, but he was still famous, right? My ordinary-person mentality had difficulty understanding that being famous didn’t equate to happiness any more than losing weight had for me. (This is also something I would later gain a personal understanding of, when I became “famous” myself.) Come to think of it, the only other “nice guy” I’d met wh
o didn’t devote all his time to getting into my pants was Buddy, which is precisely why I wanted him in my life.
Our “Harlem Shake” video didn’t go viral, but we were having fun expanding our horizons. I was in charge of filming, editing, and posting videos for the station’s YouTube channel. I taught myself how to use iMovie and bought the cheapest decent video camera I could find at Best Buy. It was exhilarating to learn a new skill and to use my creativity, and more than that, it was fun being silly every day. We were always on the hunt for new ideas. Jared had seen some of the dance videos I’d posted on my own Facebook page before I joined the radio, and he suggested I do some more, but he told me to choose Top 40 hits like we played on our station. And we needed a catchy title. “What about ‘A Fat Girl Dancing’?” he proposed. My initial reaction was lukewarm.
“Look, it has everything,” he continued. “Think about what’s popular on YouTube: pop music, dance videos, fat people—but then when they see you can actually dance, it’d be a cool surprise.”
I could admit that it seemed like a good idea, but my gut reaction was to flinch at the word “fat.” Talking about my weight had become a staple of our morning program, and I played my size mostly for laughs, lamenting my dating life and experiences as a fat woman. I had never before been comfortable calling myself fat—not because I was in denial about it, but because I didn’t want to acknowledge it at all. Discussing it on our morning show took the edge off. It allowed me to be open about it and hear feedback from our listeners. For example, one morning I told a story of taking my shirt off in hot yoga, and how I received a couple wayward glances from much fitter women who were also in just their sports bras.
Jared posed the question, “Are you okay with a fat person taking their top off in a group exercise class?” The calls flooded in, and the majority of callers, male and female, echoed the same sentiment.
“If she’s exercising, who am I to judge?”
“Absolutely, she shouldn’t be ashamed!”
“Yes, working out is for fitness, not for appearance!”
Jared enjoyed playing devil’s advocate when it came to matters of my weight, often expressing the negative opinion I experienced in my daily life. As a heavy guy struggling with weight himself, he readily acknowledged the double standard when it came to men and women, but also made no effort to change his line of thinking. “Lucky for me!” he would say.
I’d been self-identifying as fat for a while and getting positive comments from listeners as well as social media messages thanking me for discussing my weight in a frank manner. So I decided that A Fat Girl Dancing would be fine. Actually, I thought, it was brilliant.
But far from purposefully promoting body-positivity (at this point, I’d never even heard of that term), I just thought it would make for a fun feature on our YouTube channel and got to work posting the first official Fat Girl Dancing video in February to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop.” I was a huge Macklemore fan, and Donna and I had used free tickets from the radio station to go see him in concert on a weeknight. To my horror, I could not fit in the coliseum chairs, so I encouraged Donna to stay put, while I walked to the top of the arena and asked the ushers if there was any chair, even a plain folding one, that I could set up. They told me that I couldn’t block the aisle and there was no other kind of chair in the building. This seemed incredibly odd to me, as we were in the coliseum of our capital city. And the man had told me there were no chairs without ever going to look or asking someone on a walkie-talkie to check. My common sense tells me that there HAD to be a chair in that building, but that he just wasn’t concerned with getting it for me. I wonder if he would have accommodated me differently if I’d had a broken leg or some other malady that was “not my fault.” So I had to stand there at the top of the arena for the entire concert, my feet aching with pain by the time it ended.
The “Thrift Shop” dance video garnered an array of both positive and negative comments from our listeners.
I hope she’s on the bottom floor!
I give that performance an 8…on the Richter scale!
Reading those comments made my face burn, but I didn’t feel like a joke. Of course, I had absolutely no idea that these videos would eventually spark my career.
This burgeoning creativity, increased responsibility, and a recent pay raise ($8.50 an hour!) were all that was keeping me going. My personal life was in shambles. Even with the raise, I had depleted my savings from Korea, and making under $15K a year was just not enough for me to pay rent, bills, gas, groceries, and still be able to afford a coffee and a weekly dinner or night out with my friends. I’d had no luck with online dating, and the bigger I got, the more insane the guys’ messages became.
Sure, there were the staples—the offensive “pretty face” messages; the annoying “hi” and nothing more messages; and the “your fat” ones, which insulted my penchant for correct grammar more than anything else. I’d gotten nasty messages before, but they were becoming more intense in content and frequency. For example, after leaving a message unanswered for a few days, I woke up to a second try (this is verbatim!):
Guess u full of shit then. You should really make it known on your profile so people don’t waste their time. LMAO. SMH. You should really look at yourself and realize your DEFINITELY not a prize, just sum lard ass cum bucket and will always be. The one on someone shoulder but never a main squeeze. Have fun on here. I hope some redneck slits your throat.
Messages like this shocked me and weighted down my already sinking spirit. Not because I was personally offended by clearly crazy people on the Internet, but because these were the same people living in the real world. They were someone’s father, brother, ex-boyfriend. I reported and blocked such accounts, but they hurt my heart. I ached for myself and for other women in the world who experience what I’ve experienced. Facing financial and emotional distress, the last thing I needed was online abuse. I’d begun isolating myself socially. A year and a half since I’d stopped training with Will, I had gained back all the weight (I was 330 pounds at this point), and I felt out of place in bars and restaurants.
When we instituted a “Drunk Trivia” segment on the program, I enthusiastically volunteered to give up a Friday night and corralled Donna and the intern and headed to the bar where Buddy bartended, although he wasn’t working that night. As I used my phone to record drunk strangers answering questions—“Who’s the vice president?” or “What’s the order of the colors of the rainbow?”—I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a guy was chatting up Donna. Because Donna is a strikingly beautiful, friendly Asian woman, it is unheard of for her to not get hit on. I can’t count how many times a sloppy drunk has lurched over to her to tell her she looks like a geisha and to say “Konichiwa.” This behavior really pisses Donna off. It pisses me off, too.
This particular guy she was talking to seemed nice enough, though, and I caught snippets of their conversation. Donna was telling him she wanted to go to graduate school for psychology. He seemed interested. When I was done with my group, I thought he’d be a good choice to interview next, as he was already immersed in conversation with my friend (i.e., he’d probably be willing). But when I got a better look at him, I felt a shot of adrenaline course through my body. I knew his face from an OkCupid interaction a year and a half earlier. Basically, the dude messaged me and I didn’t answer, so he was shitty to me about my weight. Then a year later he was shitty to me again about my weight because he forgot that he’d done it to me before.
I figured I had two options: I could pull Donna away from him and then avoid him for the rest of the night. Or, I could approach him and give him a piece of my mind. My heart raced at option two, but I was at my wit’s end with assholes, so without further debate, I walked straight over.
“Hey! Do you want to do some drunk trivia?” I asked him.
“Sure!” he replied, with Donna still by his side.
“Great. What’s your name?”
“Luke.” I fuck
ing knew it.
“Well, Luke, I’m Whitney and actually I know who you are.”
His face was blank, but his body language indicated he was nervous.
“You don’t remember me? From a couple months ago, on OkCupid—you told me I was too fat?” He remembered. Donna’s mouth nearly hit the concrete floor as she put together what was happening.
“Yeah, so I’m an asshole…” He trailed off.
“Yes,” I agreed. “You are an asshole, and I thought you should look at me face-to-face instead of spewing your bullshit on the Internet.”
Because I wasn’t playing nice and accepting his apology (not that you could really even call it that), Luke got visibly agitated.
“I can’t help that you’re fucking 300 pounds.”
In my head I was thinking, Okay, actually thirty pounds over that, but awesome.
His voice was rising and the dozens of people out on the patio began to take notice.
I can’t remember what I said back, but then Luke got closer to me and I could feel my adrenaline pumping.
“You’re just a fat fucking bitch!” he shouted, inches away from my face. Audible commotion from the patiogoers followed, but no one stepped up or stepped in. Luckily, with that off his chest, Luke turned and went inside. Minutes later I was still shaking.
“Come on, Boo Boo, let’s go,” Donna said, grabbing my arm.
A year earlier I probably would have been out the door on my way to the car by then, crying about being mistreated. Then again, a year ago, my embarrassment over being fat in the first place would have prevented me from calling attention to it in public, especially if that meant confronting a man. I was totally fed up with being mistreated for being fat. I was coming to terms with being a fat woman, and it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. In that moment I knew for sure that I wasn’t the person I was a year ago.
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