On Being Unapologetically Fat June 21, 2010
Posted by Katie Oh in : Such As , trackbackI originally wrote this as an assignment for my Think Piece class. What I discovered was that it kind of became my personal mantra.
I am unapologetically fat. In this new age of weight-loss everywhere, of low-fat, low-carb, no-carb food, I refuse to stoop to the level everyone else seems to want me to. Fat is the last acceptable form of discrimination in American society. “Thin” has a connotation of beautiful, gorgeous, and successful, “fat” signals lazy, undisciplined, and ugly. Maybe some of the criticism of fat people comes from a “good place,” and maybe I’m unhealthy in my fatness. But why is that anyone else’s business? It isn’t. What’s more, I feel some of the greatest critics of fatness are insecure fat people themselves.
I was watching the Biggest Loser, the weight-loss reality show on NBC, as a contestant in her early 20s melodramatically sobbed. She’d been fat her whole life, never got asked on a date, never went to a prom, never had a boyfriend, and she “wanted her life back.”
I rolled my eyes. I was fat in high school, and I had no trouble. I got asked to the prom (though, as a high school anarchist, I chose not to go), I had boyfriends. I couldn’t help but think this crying girl on television was faking. What if she was just a boring person? What if, instead of accepting or trying to change her personality, she blamed her problems on being fat? I wanted to tell her that losing weight doesn’t rid you of all your problems—in fact, she would probably just find new ones.
I hate shows like the Biggest Loser because fat becomes the enemy—the thing about yourself you should hate. If a contestant loses 5 pounds one week instead of the 20 their partner loses, they’re shamed—which only reinforces the problem of the self-hating mindset. They never sit the contestants down for a pep talk about having confidence in themselves at any size. They just keep repeating that weight loss is the only road to self-acceptance, the only way to validate yourself.
I see the looks I get from people sometimes, evaluating my hips and belly, and I wonder if they know that I ran a 5k race at Thanksgiving. But would even that knowledge change their mind? I think people are afraid that if they become fat, they will lose their friends, and all respect from other people. That wouldn’t happen with the people they already know. As for the rest? It’s their loss. Run with me.
Comments»
Loved this!
” couldn’t help but think this crying girl on television was faking. What if she was just a boring person? What if, instead of accepting or trying to change her personality, she blamed her problems on being fat?”
good question.
I want to agree with you by sharing a paragraph from my research… Actually, I want to recommend an article and I kind of explain its relevance a little bit in this paragraph so I am just going to paste it here:
Sandra Lee Bartky’s appropriation of Foucault’s theory of biopower, in which she focuses on the artifice of femininity in the insidious production of docile bodies, is useful in analyzing these greeting cards. Among the many ways the female is encouraged to scrupulously mind her body and its movements in order to conform to patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability is through the management of body size and weight (Bartky, 145). While there may be no formal sanctions against or punishments for women who defy bodily acceptability, the lack of specific institutions for exacting discipline upon women for not meeting feminine expectations does not mean that there are not insidious ways in which women are indoctrinated in “proper” femininity and punished for non-compliance. The overweight “strippers” in figure 2 defy femininity in both their largeness and the apparent looseness of their sexuality that their captions ascribe to them. Bartky notes that: “Today, massiveness, power, or abundance in a woman’s body is met with disgust” (Bartky, 132). While the expectation of thinness may not always be associated with femininity, as the specific body types expected of women may differ throughout time and between cultures, the association of size with power may make it especially problematic for large female bodies to exist acceptably in the public sphere if patriarchal domination is to be maintained (Bartky, 32). Additionally, the perceived “looseness” of a woman’s physical movements or morals would be a violation of the standards of femininity, as “Woman’s space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined” (Bartky, 134). The women in figure 2 are therefore doubly in violation of traditional standards of femininity, and their construction as deviant and grotesque spectacles may serve as a warning for women who dare to exist in such an unrestricted manner.
“Foucault, Femininity, And The Modernization of Patriarchal Power” is the article I am all over in this paragraph. I think it’s relevant to your interest in self-policing of fat bodies! Obviously I’m applying her theory kind of strangely to a specific type of greeting card and her topic is much more potent than that… But it’s a good read on the insidious forms of control in our society, which VERY MUCH includes self-policing, that disproportionately affect female bodies.