So I started this post almost a year ago and never finished it. I started writing it in the first place because of a typically great post by Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville about thin "allies" who aren't: Fatsronauts 101: Permission, Continued.
In it, she says: I need people with privilege to be as angry about the fact they're asked to hate my body as I am.
With that sentence rattling around in my brain, I wrote the bulk of this post one sleepless night and then lost my confidence in it in the daylight. But wouldn’t you know, it was a series of tweets by Melissa yesterday that prompted me to finally finish it. You should go read all of them, but here are a few highlights to put this post in context:
While I love with so many hearts the return of warm weather, that also means the returns of people shouting at me from cars w/ open windows.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014
My fat female friends all experience this. This hasn't happened to me, but several friends have had food waved at them out car windows.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014
Now, imagine what it's like to be a fat person who has these experiences and have to listen to admonishments to "get outside and move."
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014
If you stay indoors to avoid constant harassment, you're a lazy fatty. If you go outdoors and move around, you're a gross visible fatty.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014
If you want to be an effective ally, you really need to be getting ANGRY about that constant dehumanization.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2014
What Melissa says about anger resonates so deeply with my experience as a person with thin privilege trying to be an ally to fat people. I do feel anger, unreservedly—and I don’t mean to be at all self-congratulatory in noting that, because it was a genuine revelation to me when I started to feel that way, a development of something I’d cultivated but for which I certainly can’t take all the credit.
I notice my anger because I think people find it confusing and off-putting. Obviously, I don’t receive the same open hostility that a fat person would when I talk with anger about fat hatred. But on the few occasions when I’ve spoken openly about some anti-fat messaging that’s upset me, like these horrible NYC subway ads, to friends and colleagues whom I don’t know to be fat-accepting, I’ve felt that people are, at best, bemused by my anger. There’s resistance to what I’m saying, a) because it goes against all the cultural messaging (with all the force of medical authority behind it) that fat=bad, obesity=a public health crisis, etc., etc., but also, b) because they’re thinking, “Why are you so upset about this? You’re not fat! What’s it got to do with you?”
And the answer, of course, is that standing by while people different from you are being oppressed is a really shitty way to behave, but also that the culture of fat-shaming and body policing has everything to do with me, with all of us, fat or thin. There’s no one in this culture, especially no woman, who is unaffected by body policing. And it doesn’t take a great deal of insight to see that fat-shaming and other types of body policing are part of the same toxic package. It just takes a willingness to see.
There’s a lot of self-interest in my anger about fat-shaming. I’m angry about it because social attempts to control marginalized bodies, and to marginalize people for their bodies—their shape, size, color, reproduction—is harmful, kyriarchical bullshit. Period. The end. Let the fat lady sing!
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Story time!
Around the same time as I read that Fatsronauts 101 post, I was talking to a dear friend about some medical issues she was dealing with. She’d had multiple doctor’s visits and tests, but no definitive diagnosis or fix had been offered. She mentioned one or two possible “next steps”, but dismissed them with a shrug: “They’re just going to tell me it’s because I’m fat.” From the way she said it, it was clear that she was speaking from experience.
I immediately recognized that resignation and impulse for self-protection. I struggled for years with insomnia—basically nonstop since at least adolescence—without ever seriously considering seeking medical help, because I’d internalized the messaging that said regulating my sleep patterns and dealing with anxiety was a matter of making the right “lifestyle choices” (sound familiar?). Even when things were really bad, I never asked for professional help for fear of being seen as drug-seeking, weak, lacking in willpower. Ironically, it was easier for me to seek counseling for depression, despite the stigma attached to mental illness, than to seek help with sleep. (I could go on a rant here about an academic culture that glorifies overworking, one in which students complain-brag about how few hours of sleep they routinely get by on, but that’s another post for another time.)
Of course, the end result of my story is that after a really bad week that made me desperate enough to make an impulse appointment at my school’s health center, and after I started crying at the sympathetic doctor when she started suggesting those exact same “lifestyle changes” that I’d tried (and blamed myself for failing) so many times, I got a referral to a psychiatrist and actual, serious medical help for insomnia and anxiety, and no one shamed me. Which is not the outcome that many fat people have when dealing with the medical establishment, obviously. The weariness in my friend’s voice, her resignation to not getting the medical care she deserved, struck me deep.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what to say except that really fucking sucks, and it makes me so angry for you.”
I remember that she thanked me for my anger.
