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When my protests were ignored, I extricated myself through the time-honored expedients of a solid knee to the crotch and a stacked wooden heel stomp to the instep only to have my would-be date rapist snarl “You should be grateful anyone wants to fuck you, you fat whore!” at my back as I slammed my car door. A week and a half later I went out on another date, only because I had promised a friend I would let her fix me up with someone she knew. To my surprise this resulted in my eating Turkish food that evening with an openly self-identifying fat fetishist. He was an older, well-off man, and he proposed a sort of sugar daddy situation where I would indulge his desires to gratify himself by rubbing his penis against and in between the folds of my fat body and he would . . . pay for things, I suppose. I never found out, because the idea of having my body objectified that way made me anxious and uncomfortable, so I turned him down. He seemed cheerful enough about the rejection, at least 90 FAT at first, but when he walked me to my car he asked me to reconsider. When I said no a second time, he told me I should be grateful that he asked, because fat girls like me “just don’t get that many chances to have someone worship their bodies.” I rode the subway home feeling weirdly that I had been scolded, and also worrying that maybe he was right. I was soaking in the tub later that night when I realized what had gone on. By that point in my life it had become abundantly clear that people were interested in me and obvious that my fat body was not necessarily a drawback to finding sexual partners. To some of them, in fact, it was a major part of the attraction. At the same time, when I refused people sexual access to my fat body, they immediately insulted it. They did not insult me. They insulted my fat, doing their best to undermine and manipulate me with the stigma of the same fat they’d been begging for moments before. This, I concluded, was some fucked-up doublethink bullshit. Yet it had taken an attempted date rape and a condescending sugar daddy wannabe for me to even notice it was happening. This was because I had been indoctrinated with the appropriate compartmentalization of fat since childhood and inoculated with the feelings my culture demanded that I learn how to feel about myself. I learned it from every “it’s a shame you’re so chubby, you’ve got such FETISH 91 a pretty face” and every maternal sigh of “I suppose eventually someone will probably date you for your personality.” I internalized it from ads, from television, from watching my mother on her seemingly eternal diet, from the stack of Playboy magazines in the bathroom in my divorced dad’s rented duplex. Occasionally I was simply told, straight to my face, by someone who wanted to see me wince. In those moments, part of me knew that it was just gratuitous cruelty talking. But gratuitous cruelty only put into words the messages I had been receiving from everywhere else. It is not impossible for cruelty to wear the mask of accuracy. After all, it had not escaped my notice that fat made women miserable—or rather, what women had been taught to believe about fat made them miserable, and not infrequently made them make themselves even more miserable as an attempt to escape from fat. Inadvertently I learned which bathroom in my high school was the one favored for after-lunch bouts of bulimic vomiting, and knew which of the most popular and pretty skinny girls made their way in and out of that bathroom amid the noise of near-continual toilet flushes that announced as much as they masked. A friend’s mother, an elegant and willowy former fashion model, spent months hospitalized due to anorexia. My own mother, she of the Liz Tayloresque curves, snarled and raged against 92 FAT the same recidivist fifteen pounds she repeatedly lost and gained throughout my childhood and adolescence: there is not a single photo of her from that era where she does not look tense and pained, where she is not visibly holding in every abdominal muscle in the attempt, as she put it, to “look decent.” In my twenties I found myself the frequent confidante of other women’s fat anguish. Women, and not a few gay men of my acquaintance, would come to me for commiseration when they worried that they would get dumped, or not dated at all, because they were fat. Or at least “fat,” which is to say that they were afraid of being found undesirable and the shorthand “fat” was the only word they had with which to say so. Somehow it seemed safe to them to come to me, the undeniably fat person in their lives. Perhaps they wanted the comfort of comparison, to reassure themselves that at least they weren’t as fat as me. Many seemed to take comfort in my telling them that they were wonderful and lovely and smart and who cared what they weighed or whether they had a bit of a belly or whether their thighs were thick? I learned to carry tissues in my handbag, and keep some on my desk, because when fat angst was in the weather report there was often a rain of tears to go with it. As long as I empathized with their worries and flattered their beauty, they seemed to feel safe revealing their deep anguish about fat. FETISH 93 Eventually, however, I stopped being the Fat Friend. Not because I stopped being fat or for that matter friendly, but rather because the kind of support I was willing to give started to change. My friends wanted the safety of empathy, but what I found myself dispensing were reality checks. Why was it, I asked them, that these men they were interested in got to be so damn picky? Who made that rule? What kind of blue-ribbon-winning paragons were these male people, that they were entitled to summarily reject a person because her butt was not the precise size, shape, density, and degree of jiggliness that they found to be optimal? I turned the problem of fat angst around and asked pointed questions about what was really at stake. Having had more than a few people express sexual interest in me but be unwilling to consider me girlfriend material in any public way, I’d come to realize that whether someone finds you fuckable and whether someone thinks you’re sufficiently high-status to suit their self-image are two different things. My friends’ desirability was never really what was in question. I knew that. But it proved surprisingly difficult to get my friends to believe me that the problem they were facing had far more to do with male entitlement than about their bodies or their fatness or lack thereof. This was annoying, but not surprising. Fat-hating and body-loathing are purpose-built to derail and deflect, to leave individuals believing the worst about 94 FAT themselves rather than being able to detect the ways their lives have been poisoned by ideologies of status and power. Philosopher Kate Manne, in her award-winning 2018 monograph Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, declares that in essence, sexism is the theory and misogyny is the practice, the “long arm of the law” of sexism that punishes in the name of enforcement. This analysis, rather than getting bogged down in idiotic qualifiers about how individual misogynist actors might subjectively feel about women—a straw man if there ever was one—sheds light on what misogyny does. In so doing, Manne gives us a critical insight about women’s participation in their own repression: even dogs readily learn how not to do things that result in their getting swatted on the nose. Sexism declares that women are not people but rather things that men are owed: their energy, their attention, their bodies, their reproductive capacity, their labor, their affection are all things to which men are entitled. Sexism further insists that since women are things, they may be scrutinized at any time. Similarly, it asserts that women are obliged to be beautiful, appealing, desirable to men. Misogyny makes it clear what happens to women who do not comply. Those who do not follow the rules, or at the very least demonstrate that they are trying their hardest to follow the rules, pay the price. Rejection, FETISH 95 isolation, exclusion, poverty, insults, assaults. It’s all punishment for the offense of failing to do what women are supposed to do—namely, not be fat. What else to call the fact that research has proven that as women become fatter, they are paid less, while this is not true for men? How, otherwise, to interpret numerous international studies that show that fatter women suffer a higher incidence of domestic violence, and that the violence they face tends to be more dangerous, even lethal? What else can we call it when a fat woman who is raped is told, as so many fat women are, that she should count herself lucky that anyone wanted to fuck her at all? We cannot be remotely surprised that a body that is feminine and desirable yet somehow devoid of fat has become a staple goal for women. It does not matter that the goal is unattainable. One just tries to survive, and, with luck, not come in for too much punishment. It is not an accident that women’s ability to be and remain thin has become the insignia of our capability and value. No wonder at all that we become our own police force, our own torturers and jailers and sometimes our own murderers, or that women turn on themselves, one another, and even on their own children when it comes to fat. In a culture where men hold (and have historically held) the lion’s share of power and wealth, the threat of men’s disapproval is the threat of impending disaster. This is why women 96 FAT can berate and starve ourselves, ferociously abuse and mistreat other people including our children, and yet believe in the bottoms of our hearts that we are doing it “for their own good.”