“It’s my fault!” she sobs. “It’s my fault he got so big. I should have said something to him. I didn’t know it was possible for him to get so overweight.”
“Mrs. Emory…it’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault.”
She stares off into space a little, her eyes glittering with tears. “You two made a good couple. I thought you were going to get married and give me a few grandchildren.”
Her comment tugs at my heart strings. I feel a lump building in my throat. “Yeah, well…it was his decision. He’s the one who wanted to lose weight.”
“He got scared when he got diabetes,” she explains. “He called me and told me that he was going to lose weight. He said that you wouldn’t like it, but he had resolved to do it. When he makes up his mind to do something, he does it.”
I nod. “That’s true.”
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. If this disease motivates him to eat healthier and lose weight, I’d say that’s a good thing.”
My jaw drops open. “But Mrs. Emory…”
“He was always so miserable,” she continues. “Ever since he got so big, you know. He’s just not been the same person. I miss the old Denny.”
I can’t listen to this. This woman thinks she’s being caring but her rhetoric reveals her as a fatphobe. To make matters worse, her own son is the target of her fatphobia. I must change the subject before I lose my cool. “Where is he living now?”
She shrugs. “I’m not sure. With the new girlfriend, wherever she lives.”
“Do you know her name?”
“He told me once. I forgot.”
I nod. “Do you know if…she’s fat?” That’s the question that’s been burning inside of me. I must know the answer.
“Not sure,” she replies. “Never met the girl.”
“Uh huh,” I say. “Could I just ask you one really big favor?”
Mrs. Emory dabs her eyes with a napkin. “Ask.”
“Could you give me his phone number?”
“I suppose I could,” she replies. “He might not like it, but…”
“I won’t tell him where I got it,” I reply. “I promise. I’d even prefer if you didn’t tell him I was here.”
Mrs. Emory goes into the kitchen and returns with an old, tattered, brown address book. She flips to a certain page before reading the number aloud to me. I program it into my cell phone.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’d like to call him.” I grab Mrs. Emory in a hug and squeeze her. A moment later, I drop the embrace, embarrassed at my outward display of affection. “I should go now,” I say.
“You don’t have to leave so quickly,” she replies.
“I do,” I reply. I thank her again for the coffee and slip out the front door.
* * *
I accidentally discovered fat liberation while looking for yet another diet. It was 1995 and I was a twenty-one year old college dropout, fat and dateless. I was living my life vicariously through episodes of Friends and Seinfeld. Also, I was still mourning the demise of Kids in the Hall, which was basically Canada’s greatest export since John “BHM” Candy. Oh yeah, and I was just outgrowing Melrose Place.
Television obsessed me at the time. I was an escapist of the first order. When I switched on the tube I could forget about my dreary life and focus on someone else’s which happened to be way cooler than mine. Television was my drug.
I wanted to live their lives. I felt entitled to it. Surely, it was my right to live in Manhattan and wile away my hours drinking java at my own Central Perk. I would have settled for LA. And why not? I was young, hip, and single. Very single. I was supposed to have a fabulous dating life, a cool job, and a big city apartment. I was supposed to be Elaine or Monica or Rachel. But I wasn’t doing those things, and I knew it was because of my fat. There are no fat girls on Friends, or on Seinfeld for that matter. No fat girls on Melrose Place either. I felt cheated.
I had just moved out of my parents’ house after my aborted studies at UMass and an even shorter period when I dabbled in nursing at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC). So basically, I was a college dropout two times over. I dropped out of the STCC nursing program because of extreme anxieties about my body. I was the biggest girl in my nursing classes and constantly aware of it. When I say “biggest”, I mean fattest, of course. I just couldn’t have brought myself to use that word at the time. I hadn’t yet discovered fat liberation and I still needed soothing euphemisms to get me through the day.
Living on my own for the first time, I got a classic first apartment in Chicopee. What a dump. I don’t miss it at all. I got a job at the supermarket, which wasn’t so great because I was around food all the time. I was usually on a diet and constantly making mental notes to “eat that later”. Once I’d successfully slimmed down I could go off my diet and try that new strawberry cream cheese or giant-sized double chocolate muffin I saw skidding across my barcode scanner. I fantasized about food the way some people do about sex.
I was dieting in classic yo-yo fashion, suffering from an extreme case of dieter’s whiplash. I pushed myself through the same vicious cycle of gaining, starving, losing, binging, re-gaining, and hating myself.
Each time I regained the modest amount of weight I had lost, I blamed myself. I never considered the diet a failure; I considered myself a failure. Somehow I managed to convince myself that a long string of failed diets exposed my weakness as a person. My weakness in turn indicated that I was undeserving of dignity or respect, much less love. Only Ben and Jerry seemed to love me. And Duncan Hines. They were the men in my life and we had fantastic love affairs that left me feeling empty and full all at the same time.
So I watched more TV. I was treated to a myriad of commercials from the diet industry in between sitcoms starring human skeletons Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston.
As I mentioned before, I tried some of the corporate sponsors’ wacky diets. If I had had the money, I would have paid for drastic weight loss surgery in a hot minute. There was no price too high for me. I would have spent my last dollar on a weight loss gimmick if I had believed it was truly the diet to end all diets.
The silliest thing I ever bought to lose weight was diet sunglasses. Don’t laugh, they really exist. Basically, they were supposed to help you lose weight by making your food look unappetizing. The secret was nothing more than blue lenses. Human beings have a natural aversion to eating blue foods. According to the advertisement, they were all the rage in Japan. I tossed them in the trash after the first meal. What a waste of money.
I recall that it was December when I found fat liberation. The holidays were coming and I was planning on binging on egg nog and dried cod fish. That’s what Portuguese families eat for Christmas. I also planned to start a brand new diet after the first of the year. Classic dieter mentality.
I went to the library in search of another diet book and accidentally stumbled upon deliverance. There in the “health and well-being” section of the library, sandwiched between two quick-fix diet books, was the ultimate anti-diet book: Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings for Fat Women on Fat Liberation, edited by Lisa Schoenfelder and Barb Wieser. Obviously, the librarian had mistakenly believed that Shadow on a Tightrope was just another book for miserable fat chicks who want to get skinny. It was nothing of the sort.
That book changed my life. It is the seminal work in the field of fat feminism and fat oppression. It consists of essays and poems by fat women on the daily drudgery of being fat in a society that rejects and torments women for not keeping a “perfect” figure. Published in 1983, it represents the bundled works of fat liberation’s early, definitive years.
I cried. I broke down and unleashed a torrent of tears, almost twenty-two years in the making. It was as if someone had written a book about my life.
Through this book I learned about a movement that goes by many names—fat liberation, fat acceptance, fat pride, fat power, the anti-diet movement, fat civil rights, and size acceptance. At various times, I migh
t use most of these terms interchangeably, despite the fact that shades of meaning exist to differentiate them from each other. However, I don’t use “size acceptance” because we aren’t discriminated against on the basis of our size. I avoid the term “fat pride” because I’m not proud to be fat; I simply accept it as a fact of life. If I had to choose just one term, I would have to say that I prefer fat liberation.
Finally, I had a philosophy to adopt as my own. Fat liberation rejects dieting. Fat liberation accepts human beings in their natural array of body diversity. Fat liberation fights injustices rather than conforming to them. Fat liberation seeks to nurture good body image rather than cultivating self-hatred. Fat liberation challenges assumptions and spins the dominant “obesity” paradigm on its head.
After reading Shadow on a Tightrope, I delved into the canon of fat lib classics. I found an old copy of Llewellyn Louderback’s Fat Power (1970). Louderback was one of the founding members of NAAFA and Fat Power was to be NAAFA’s literary cornerstone, much like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was to feminism. I read William Bennett’s Dieter’s Dilemma, as well as Making Peace With Food: Freeing Yourself From the Diet/Weight Obsession by Susan Kano. I found a rare copy of Abraham Friedman’s Fat Can Be Beautiful: Stop Dieting, Start Living. I also subscribed to Marilyn Wann’s popular Fat!So? magazine.
Joining NAAFA was the next obvious step. Before long, I was attending their national convention in New Orleans. I later joined a group of half a dozen women (unaffiliated with NAAFA) for a public scale-smashing on the town common in Amherst. This act of destruction was, at its heart, a political statement about the inhumanity of perpetual starvation in the name of weight loss.
I wrote spectacularly plentiful letters to the editor. Keep in mind, this was a full five years before I had an email address. Every time I read an article in my local paper about losing weight (usually in the “health” section) I would write in to challenge the writer’s flawed assumptions. Each time I found another article about the terrifying “obesity epidemic” that was sweeping America, I used my pen to counteract the alarmist misinformation.
I found fulfillment in fat liberation the way churchy people find comfort in Christ. I suppose I was a little gung-ho about it, probably enough to perturb my friends and family. But I loved what I was doing. For the first time in my life, I felt strong. I felt empowered. I had a sense of purpose.
I couldn’t understand the reaction I got from most people when I told them that I’d found a something to believe in. Without fail, the mere mention of my dearly beloved cause was met with snickers. It was all a big joke. The idea that fat people would want to be treated as equals was such a wacky concept that it had to be a gag.
Civil rights for fat people? What the heck is that?
Uh…it’s exactly what it sounds like. It means fat people having the same right to public spaces as everyone else. It means fat people having access to health care. It means ending employment discrimination against fat people. It means combating anti-fat bullying in schools. What could be more serious than that?
Of course, I was not kidding around. When I met ignorant people, I set them straight. From time to time, some well-meaning but clueless person would say something like, “Oh, is this the new thing we have to be p.c. about?”
Surprisingly, I didn’t always find a hotbed of support among fat people. Some were receptive to the idea but others shrugged the movement off as just one more excuse to stay fat. As I quickly discovered, it’s difficult to undo the effects of sustained brainwashing. Fat people have come to believe that they deserve second class treatment and it takes a lot of effort to convince them that they aren’t obligated to put up with it. Some people, both fat and thin, believe that we fat liberationists have become so despondent with failed diets that we’ve constructed an elaborate rationalization to comfort ourselves in our fatness.
I kept working away, a warrior in the trenches of fat liberation. I took my lumps and gave them back. I never gave up, not even in the face of tremendous societal rebuke.
I never gave up…until now.
Chapter Nineteen:
Muumuus and Ruffles and Polyester, Oh My!
Patricia stepped out for a minute. Millie and I don’t care where she went, we’re just glad the boss made herself scarce.
Millie stands over my shoulder as I jump on the computer and click the little Firefox icon. Ever since Denny took his computer, my only internet access has been at work, when Patricia’s not looking. That presents a little bit of a problem; I often use the computer to do show prep. If I surf the net for while, I can almost always find a timely article about fatphobia, diet obsession, or fat empowerment. I’m not supposed to be doing show prep on company time but I don’t have much of an option.
We’re supposed to be making calls right now. Millie and I are both sick and tired of doing that. We’d like to take a short break from being cussed out, hung up on, threatened with violence, and told to stick objects up our asses.
I immediately navigate to 411.com. I click on “reverse phone”.
“I wonder what she looks like,” Millie comments.
Yup, that’s what we’re both dying to know. I told her about my confrontation with Denny at the bus garage, his new girlfriend, and my visit to his mother. I type Denny’s new phone number into the computer. One mouse click later, a name and address pop up on the screen.
“Alyssa Bennigan,” Millie reads over my shoulder. “She lives in Chicopee.”
“Bingo,” I say. “That must be Denny’s new girlfriend.”
I navigate to Facebook and type her name in. Everyone has Facebook these days, even my mother. One Alyssa Bennigan pops up. She’s from Chicopee, Massachusetts. It’s her. I click on it. Like most people these days, she keeps hers available only to friends. Nonetheless, I see a picture of her. It’s grainy, as if the pixels were slightly warped during enlargement.
“A little fat,” I say.
“Yeah. A little,” says Millie. “Not like us, though.”
I shoot her a nasty glare. What the heck was that last comment supposed to mean? “Yeah,” I say. “Not that she’s skinny but…I wouldn’t call her fat either.”
“Maybe 190,” Millie comments. “Not really gorda.”
I want to hunt this Alyssa Bennigan down and do physical harm to her. Hot rage boils up inside of me. A dull pain in my jaw alerts me to the fact that I am grinding my teeth.
“Kind of a pretty face,” Millie comments.
“Whatever,” I say. “I wish we could access her page. Damn it.”
“Let me add her as a friend,” she replies, taking the mouse from me. “I’ll just ask her if she wants to be my Facebook friend. Then we’ll be able to see her page.”
“You would do that?”
“Sure,” she replies.
“Do you think that would work? I mean, she doesn’t even know you. Why would she be your friend on Facebook?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. People friend me all the time. People I don’t even know.”
I stand up from my chair and offer it to her. “Go ‘head,” I say. “She’ll never know.”
* * *
Fat liberation began with one man’s mission to find a blouse for his wife. In 1967, Bill Fabrey, scoured the city of Rochester in search of something stylish that would also fit his “plus-sized” bride. Though he searched high and low, exploring the dark corners of every department store in the city, he found only a single, solitary blouse in the right dimensions. Not one style of blouse, not one color of blouse, but one lonely, stinking blouse. He bought it for the woman he loved.
Mr. Fabrey was tired of the way society treated his wife. Her sense of self-worth had been gutted. She had been made to believe that her husband was the only man in the world who could ever find her beautiful. She had accepted a lifetime of brainwashing and begun to believe that she deserved every bit of the second class treatment she was getting.
Bill was also fed up with the anti-fat prejudi
ce he was bombarded with on a daily basis. Few people understood his personal preference for big, beautiful women. People sometimes commented that he must really be in love because he certainly hadn’t married his wife for her looks! That was supposed to be a compliment. The idea that a man could ever be physically attracted to a fat woman was basically unthinkable.
Actually, he did love her, and he also found her gorgeous at the same time. It wasn’t that he loved her despite her looks; he was in love with the whole package. He became very upset that other people took it upon themselves to tell him what he was supposed to find attractive.
Bill Fabrey went on to be co-found the National Association to Aid Fat Americans. NAAFA is the respectable, mainstream, bourgeois, civil right organization that serves as the establishment wing of fat liberation. NAAFA works within the existing political framework to persuade the public that fat people are not doormats. Mr. Fabrey served as the organization’s chair from its inception in 1969 until he passed the torch to Conrad Blickenstorfer in 1986. It was about that time that the organization changed its name to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.
I’m a card-carrying member of NAAFA, although I find it a bit milquetoast at times. I prefer the more radical branches of the movement, but that’s a topic for another day.
How fitting that the struggle for fat acceptance began with a blouse. For fat women, only food has the power to illicit more anxiety than clothing. The idea of shopping for a new wardrobe is enough to send us into cardiac arrest. At least food can also bring us joy; clothing is just a pain.
Clothing manufacturers don’t make very many garments in our sizes. That poses a little bit of a problem for us because we can’t venture outside of our houses in the buff. Besides the fact that it’s illegal, no one wants to see our “disgusting” bodies either. We have to cover ourselves with something, but what?
A few women who are handy with a needle and thread make their own clothing. I admire these women because they can choose all of the fabrics, patterns and colors they desire. Even so, I could never sew my own clothing. I’d screw it up, I’m sure.
We Are Fat and We Are Legion Page 15