by Dan Savage
The moderator then invited the jewelry designer to share her side of the story. She was shocked that her sister would even consider WLS. She loved her sister unconditionally, of course, and had watched her lose weight, but her feelings about the surgery were unchanged. She didn’t want to lose weight, and she thought her sister looked better when she was bigger. The moderator thanked the nurse for her bravery, but not the jewelry designer. Since everyone at “Help! My Friend Is Getting WLS!” was presumed to be opposed to weight loss surgery it was only the nurse who was being brave.
The moderator opened up the discussion for questions or comments, reminding us once again not to engage in personal attacks. The nurse looked around the room, and I could see her bracing for the condemnations that seemed certain to come. She sat up straight in her chair, squared her shoulders, and rolled her lips between her teeth. The moderator implored us to speak only to our own feelings and, once again, not to engage in personal attacks.
A big man with a red, sweaty face raised his hand—the only other man in the room besides me—and the moderator called on him. The man was perched on the edge of his chair, and was so agitated as he began to speak that he visibly shook. He was having the surgery, he announced. He had diabetes, joint problems, trouble walking, sleep apnea, he couldn’t fit in an airline seat anymore, and could no longer tolerate the daily abuse—the slights, the stares, and the jokes he had to put up with at work. Whenever a tool went missing at the plant where he worked, someone would ask him if he had eaten it.
His ultimate reason for having the surgery, though, was the knowledge that he would soon be disabled by his weight. He couldn’t stop himself from eating, and he would rather take his risks on the surgery than wind up housebound or in a wheelchair. He told everyone in the room who objected to WLS to open their eyes: the halls of the hotel were full of NAAFA members who were so fat they had to use canes to walk, and there were others who had given up on walking entirely, getting around in wheelchairs and motorized carts. People he knew from years ago, “people who might have been fat and fit once upon a time,” were now fat and dying.
The moderator looked horrified, and after she managed to wrest the floor back from the fat man, she explained that people don’t get fat because they eat too much. She told us about a recent weight-gain study that proved that some people are genetically programmed to store more fat than others. They put a large group of people, fat and thin, on identical, high-calorie diets. While some people gained as little as ten pounds during the months-long study, others gained thirty or more pounds. This proved, she said, that some people were genetically predisposed to gain weight. Fat people, she corrected the red-faced man, don’t get fat because they eat too much. They get fat because their bodies are programmed to be heavy.
The moderator didn’t address what seemed like the obvious lesson of the study: People who gain more weight eating the same amounts of food as other people should probably bear that in mind when they belly up to the buffet and eat less. Of course, it’s not fair that one person can eat a pint of ice cream every day and remain thin while another person will get hugely obese. But as my fellow conservatives like to point out, America is about equal access, not equal outcomes. Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there’s no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal. And, hey, if there’s no shame in being fat—if fat is fit, fun, and sexy—why does it matter so much to NAAFA why someone gets fat? Overeating? Genetic predisposition? Who cares? If fat is good for you, if it’s fun and sexy, should it matter how someone gets big? It seemed to me like a rather curious, blame-shifting argument for a fat activist to make. The skinny people blame the fat people for overeating; the fat people blame their genes for overstoring. But if you don’t believe there’s any shame in being fat—or if you don’t believe there should be—why spend time assigning blame? Why not just have another pint of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream?
The moderator passed the floor to a very tall woman who weighed at least five hundred pounds. The woman objected to the red-faced man calling fat people who could only get around in wheelchairs or motorized carts as “disabled.” They were, she sniffed, “differently mobile.” Instead of getting the surgery, fat people should demand bigger airline seats, better treatments for weight-related health conditions, and fat-tolerant workplaces. The next woman to speak, a woman with a huge belly that hung down to her knees, held up her canes and tersely explained to the red-faced man that she never really enjoyed walking all that much, so not being able to get around on her own was no great loss. She lived to read, she said, and she couldn’t care less if she could walk. The red-faced man snorted; the moderator silenced him with a look. The nurse who had undergone WLS was in the clear, as the red-faced man was drawing all the fire.
The floor then passed to an apple-shaped woman sitting next to me. She paused and took a deep breath after the moderator called on her. She had just undergone WLS, she said, and pleaded with her fellow fat women to respect her decision. All her friends were eating friends, she said, and she wound up with diabetes and such bad back pain that she couldn’t sleep at night. She made up her mind to have the surgery when she had to send away for a special implement to wipe herself after defecating.
“It was a stick,” she said. “A stick. I had to wipe myself with a stick.”
A young woman with a blond bob spoke next. She had also undergone WLS, and said it was something she had to do for herself and her kids.
Three women sitting together began to speak all at once. They challenged the idea that being fat meant they or anyone else in the room was unhealthy. One woman (apple-shaped) said that she rides her bike everywhere she goes, hikes, and swims three times a week. Another woman (pear-shaped) said that it was only a myth that being fat was bad for you; fat people needed to eat right and move, but they didn’t need to lose weight to be healthy. The third (gourd-shaped?) insisted that her eating wasn’t out of control and insisted she didn’t have any “eating friends,” only friends she eats with. All three of the “fat and fit” women looked to be in their mid-twenties, and none appeared to weigh more than 250 pounds. They did look fit—especially compared with the woman with the canes who didn’t care if she lost her ability to walk.
All of this was too much for the red-faced fat man, who began speaking without waiting for the moderator to call on him. He wagged a finger at the three fat-and-fit women. While they may not be experiencing any weight-related health problems now, they would sooner or later. They were like smokers who insist that smoking can’t be all bad for you because they haven’t come down with lung cancer yet. The three fat-and-fit women began to argue with the fat man, which prompted the moderator to wrap up “Help! My Friend Is Getting WLS!” before a brawl broke out. This wasn’t what I came to San Francisco for! I wanted to spend the weekend with happy, content gluttons, a hotel filled with happy, content, fat people enjoying guilt-free meals. Instead I found myself trapped in a hotel full of fat people tearing each other apart.
I kept my word and escorted Teresa and Shawn to the formal dance on Saturday night. The walls had been opened up to create the largest version of the Westin’s collapsible ballroom, and soon after we arrived the ballroom was full of fat women wearing the kinds of outfits fat women are rarely seen in—flashy sequined numbers, sleeveless gowns, and little black dresses held up by little black straps. There was a lot of exposed flesh and a lot of time and trouble had been taken with hair and makeup. Most fat women try to get through the day without being noticed; most don’t want to attract any more attention to their already hyper-scrutinized bodies. But the Westin’s ballroom was filled to bursting with big women in outfits that screamed “Look at me!”
There were very few men in the room when we arrived—there were actually fewer men in the ballroom at dinner than there had been at breakfast. But we passed a dozen or more men lurking in the hallways outside the ballroom on our way in.
“The FAs are out in force,” Teresa said as
we made our way to the ballroom. While a lot of FAs enjoy watching women eat, Teresa explained, most of the FAs who attend NAAFA dinner dances typically skip the dinner and buy a dance-only ticket.
Teresa and Shawn ate very little, just like they had at breakfast. Their small stomachs require them to eat five or six little meals over the course of the day, instead of three large meals. If they eat too much at once, they’ll throw the food up. When dinner was over, the doors to the ballroom were flung open and FAs seeped in like a gas, spreading across the ballroom while me and the BBWs were finishing our desserts. Most of the FAs were older, some were dressed rather fussily, and every last one was at least as skinny as I was.
“The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance believes that a preference for a fat partner is as valid as any other preference based on physical characteristics, such as a particular height, eye color, or hair color,” reads NAAFA’s official position paper on fat admirers. “Individuals who are attracted to a fat partner should be able to pursue, date, and make a commitment to a person of their size preference without fear of societal ridicule. Further, NAAFA believes that in a society where at least 55 percent of the population is considered fat, a preference for a fat partner is normal and should be encouraged rather than discouraged.”
NAAFA’s position paper on FAs urges these men to come out of the closet and organize their own movement. The FAs at the dance, lurking in the corners, didn’t seem like “movement” types. When I approached an FA near the bar in the ballroom and asked him what he found attractive about fat women, he wasn’t able to look me in the eye. Maybe he could tell I wasn’t an FA, and he wasn’t comfortable discussing his preference with me. After an awkward hesitation, he said, “Not until you run your hands over someone supersized can you appreciate how wonderful all that flesh feels.” Then he slunk off.
The general consensus at our table was that most FAs are a little creepy; a lot of them are ashamed of their attraction to fat women, and they’re not very good at concealing their feelings of shame. They come to NAAFA events (indeed, NAAFA encourages them to come), seduce fat women in hotel rooms, and then run home to skinny wives and girlfriends. When one particularly notorious FA was spotted in the room, a brassy blonde in metallic silver hot pants and a matching bra ran from table to table, warning her fat sisters about this particular FA’s MO.
“He’ll say, ‘Oh, I love you, I want to marry you, I want you to meet my mother,’ ” she warns the women at my table, “and the moment you sleep with him, he’s gone.”
As we dished the FAs, I remembered something I read on NAAFA’s Web site before I came to San Francisco. “At different times throughout history, the fat figure was looked upon as the ideal, desirable figure,” according to NAAFA. “Today, the American cultural aesthetic of beauty ranges from the thin supermodel whose proportions are unrepresentative of the naturally occurring shape of the human female, to an emaciated, sunken-eyed look termed ‘heroin chic.’ ”
Beauty ideals are not and have never been democratic; if majority rule applied to beauty ideals, then fat would definitely be in. The reason certain traits become beauty ideals is precisely because of their rarity or the difficulty the average person has in achieving them. When food was scarce, heavy people were beautiful; when most people worked in the sun all day, white skin was sexy. Now that food is plentiful—even the poor are obese—thin is beautiful; now that most people have to work inside all day, tan skin is sexy. The thin that’s sexy isn’t just your run-of-the-mill thin, but a thin that says, “I can look on all the food spread before me every day and ignore it, not indulge. I can control myself. I can starve myself.” America’s current beauty ideal isn’t so much anti-fat as pro-youth and pro-self-denial, both increasingly rare traits in the United States as boomers age and their asses spread like Krispy Kreme franchises. Fat will be back in style when famines are.
But now it’s time to dance.
I’m all for sin, and I’m pro-gluttony, but I’m not deluded. A sober celibate who eats very little and drinks next to nothing will probably outlive me—he’ll outlive everybody who indulges in drugs, sex, food, and booze. (Unless he gets run over by a beer truck driven by an oversexed pothead, which would serve him right.) The value of a single life, however, isn’t only measured in time; quantity of life is important, of course (who wants to die young?), but quality of life also matters. The sober celibate may live to be a hundred, but what good is a hundred years of life if you’re miserable the entire time? Sober celibates aren’t necessarily miserable, of course, but personally, I would be a miserable sober celibate. I thank God and Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers that I’m free to enjoy my life and indulge myself and sin and pursue happiness in ways that carry some risks, even if the way I choose to live shaves a decade or two off my life.
All I ask of the world and my fellow citizens is to leave me alone; I don’t ask, à la NAAFA, that everyone pretend my sins are risk-free. I went to the NAAFA’s weekend celebration to spend time with big, fat, gluttonous, content Americans. What I found was an organization that couldn’t admit that the pleasures of gluttony were worth the health risks of obesity—and I found very little public gluttony. The women who were having the surgery and becoming “too thin” for the size-acceptance movement, couldn’t eat much at any one time; women who were content being fat didn’t eat much in public either, as that might contradict NAAFA’s fat-people-aren’t-fat-from-eating-too-much dogma. No one at any of the buffets I attended cut loose.
But it was time that I did.
Like the nurse and the other woman at the WLS seminar, I have a special eating friend. Tim is a straight guy and in good shape, but he has fat-hoarding genes and he has to watch what he eats. He rides his bike everywhere, eats salads for lunch, and tries to have plain grilled chicken breasts for dinner a couple of times a week. I follow pretty much the same routine. But our resolve goes to hell when we eat together. We’re like a man and woman who are desperately attracted to each other but, alas, married to other people. It’s not a good idea for Tim and me to spend much time together.
The two of us have gone to restaurants and ordered three appetizers and three entrées. If we’re out together and Tim doesn’t order an appetizer, I’ll order one for him. We can never pass up dessert when we eat together, something we’re capable of doing when we’re with other people. Once in a very expensive restaurant, we were having a hard time deciding which one of the five items on the dessert menu we would split. Tim got up to go to the bathroom, leaving me to choose. All five desserts were sitting on the table when Tim returned. Nothing remained of our desserts when we staggered out of the restaurant an hour later.
Our dining relationship is sick and self-destructive. We both refer to eating together as MAD, for “mutually assured destruction,” a reference to the Cold War stalemate that kept the peace for half a century. Basically, if I’m going to get fat, so is Tim, and vice versa. I suspect there’s some repressed erotic component to all this oral gratification. Tim’s girlfriend, a doctor, weighs about ninety pounds and would forget to eat if Tim didn’t remind her. Abbey takes no great pleasure in food and, unlike Tim and me, Abbey doesn’t see the thrill in eating her way through the dessert menu in an expensive restaurant. Abbey eats, but without passion. My boyfriend, on the other hand, loves food, and eats constantly. But Terry is a six-foot-tall, 150-pound swimmer—he’s basically 139 pounds of bone and muscle, 10 pounds of skin, and 1 pound of hair. Terry will never be fat, no matter how much he eats, so food has no dire consequences for him, no danger. For Terry, crème brûlée is not an act of glamorous, self-destructive transgression. It’s just dessert.
With me, Tim can share a sinful passion that his girlfriend will never understand; with Tim, I can tempt a fate (obesity) that Terry never has to worry about. Since eating together feels so much like we’re cheating on our partners, I had to say no when Terry tried to invite himself along on a date Tim and I made to eat at Claim Jumper, a West Coast restaur
ant chain famous for its huge portions. Tim and I planned to go MAD.
It was a chocolate cake that brought me to Claim Jumper.
A seven-layer chocolate cake taller than it is wide, the Motherlode confronted us as soon as we entered the Claim Jumper. The cake squatted in a glass pastry case facing the door, looking for all the world like an upside-down trash can covered in chocolate frosting and studded with walnuts. The frighteningly phallic cake looked enormous and threatening in the pastry case, dwarfing the enormous pieces of cheesecake, six-inch square brownies, and grapefruit-size muffins arranged around it. Since the display case holding all these superpastries faces the restaurant’s supersize doors, the Motherlode is the first thing every diner who enters a Claim Jumper sees.
Stunned by the sight of this chocolate cake—picture the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind covered in chocolate frosting—it took me a moment to notice the teenager peering over the top of the pastry case. The hostess had to ask us for the number of people in our party three times before I finally heard her. She took our names and told us the wait would be about forty-five minutes. Then she handed us a pager and a square piece of cardboard with DANCE HALL GIRLS printed on it. Apparently, when our table is ready, she would beep us; if we failed to respond, she intended to humiliate us by shouting, “Dance Hall Girls, party of two, Dance Hall Girls.”
There are twenty-nine Claim Jumper restaurants in California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington State. It doesn’t much matter which Claim Jumper we’re in, nor does it much matter what city or state we’re in. All Claim Jumpers have the same Old West theme, the same slowly rotating fans and Tiffany-style lamps, the same tin ceilings and wood posts, and the same moose and buffalo heads staring down from the same faux river-rock walls. And like so many restaurants in the United States, the Claim Jumper we visited served food to white folks prepared for us by brown folks. What makes Claim Jumper unique, though, is not the Old West theme, but the portions. Everything at Claim Jumper is huge, from single orders of onion rings that can feed eight people, to their thirty-two-ounce serving of prime rib, to that monstrous chocolate cake in the display case. Each Claim Jumper location seats five hundred people, and all together the twenty-nine Claim Jumper restaurants take in about $200 million per year.