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It is why so many of us grow up believing that just maybe, if we manage to make ourselves absolutely perfect, we might be able to escape the fate of being unloved, excluded, discarded. It is why we suck up headlines about celebrities’ weight changes and sit, riveted, in front of The Biggest Loser and My 600 Pound Life. This is how we learn, like the woman I mentioned in the opening of this book, to use the phrase “I feel so fat” in place of saying “I am afraid,” “I’m feeling insecure,” “I worry that I’m unattractive,” or “I feel unworthy of love and it hurts.” Fat, as the title of the old Susie Orbach book succinctly put it, is a feminist issue. Making a fetish out of fat, in all the various ways that happens, is a patriarchy problem. Whether fetishized in food, in the bedroom, or as the essence of all that is unlovable and disastrous, the fetish has everything to do with power, with status, with racism and sexism and classism. Not for nothing was I warned, as my research shows so many other white fat women friends have been as well, that if we stayed fat, only Black or Arab men would find us attractive. “They like that sort of thing,” my mother insisted, making it once again clear that a desire for fat was suspicious, foreign, abnormal. FETISH 97 I have come to believe that our well-trained disgust at the idea of a sexual fat fetish is just a distraction. Goggling at the freaks and weirdos, singling the fat and the fat-desiring out as spectacle and as a cautionary tale, keeps us from noticing our real, and very much shared, fat fetish. This fetish rests, as so many others do, in status and authority. When fat connotes sophistication, good taste, wealth, and especially control, it becomes precious, an indulgence to envy to precisely the same degree that it is rare. Think of the perfect hourglass figure, the impressive Kardashian buttocks that are (a) a correct skin color for a racist society’s enjoyment and (b) disciplined out of any unruly jiggling. Imagine the heirloom breed ham or olive oil from centuriesold trees painstakingly husbanded and harvested from one’s family farm. The less attainable the fat, the more uncommon and specific its attributes, the more desirable it becomes. Common, imperfect fat is disaster. When it is too easy to come by, when it shows up and sticks around whether we want it or not, when it seems to have a mind of its own and refuses to follow the wholly imaginary rules we want it to obey, it is hateful, shameful, an embarrassment. The Kobe beef burger and duck-fat frites made in a kitchen ruled by a celebrity chef is a little too obvious a gimmick, a little too easy to come by, to escape the taint. The fat woman, in particular, 98 FAT is also too obvious, and too obviously a bad woman, an undisciplined and selfish creature, to be accepted. Merely to fail to punish her is offensive. Desire? How could anyone desire a disaster? And yet most of our bodies, at some point or another, make it clear that there is only so much that we can control. Self-discipline is all well and good, but bodies are only so amenable to force. To loathe one’s self, to view one’s body as a betrayal and a disaster, to struggle endlessly to hit a notional and moving target for one’s appearance just because it is so publicly and noisily fetishized seems to me like preemptive selfpunishment, as if others can’t hurt us if we can hurt ourselves badly enough first. Alas. Like coconut oil, self-loathing is unlikely to do what we want to believe it will, and it doesn’t even have the redeeming virtue of being a decent substitute for butter in a chocolatechip cookie. 5 FIGURE I am not sure how I kept myself from crying until after the door was closed. It was 1999, and I was deep in the process of interviewing people as part of the research for my book Big Big Love. It was to be the first book on the market that dealt with fat people and sexuality. Because it was novel and I had no idea if there would ever be another book on the subject (I’m pleased to say that there have been—and that I wrote a second edition of my own book) it seemed imperative that I make it reflect as many experiences as I could manage. To that end I had put out calls for interviews, and in due course my home office loveseat cradled big butts of all persuasions and backgrounds and sizes, hour after hour, for weeks. As all of us who have conducted sexuality research discover rather quickly, it much more resembles a semi-forgotten minefield than it does a stack of back issues of Penthouse Forum. One becomes as accustomed to hearing stories of appalling trauma 100 FAT as one does to hearing tales of joyous romps and multiple orgasms. I had been holding up okay, for the most part, maintaining that critical bit of emotional distance between myself and my informants. But then one afternoon an interviewee said something that shocked me, and the knowledge hurt so badly I felt almost heartbroken. A butch dyke I had seen around town, one I’d always thought sexy but whom I’d never had occasion to get to know, had volunteered for an interview. Now they sat across from me detailing their plans to seek sex reassignment, up to and including the language they knew they had to use with a therapist in order to acquire “the letter” to take to a physician. “It’s not because I really want to be a man so much,” they confided, leaning in, “I love being a dyke. But I just can’t take being a fat woman in this world much longer. I can’t say that to a therapist of course. They’d never write my letter. And I know that all I have to do is just get rid of these tits and things’ll be better. I’ll still be fat. That’s fine. But I can’t be a fat woman. I can’t be a fat woman, not anymore.” I didn’t mind the thought of another butch becoming a trans man. I knew a small but growing number of guys who’d taken that path and I’d never been anything less than happy for them when they got to do the things that made them feel so much better in their skin. But this was different. My interviewee’s fat pain was clearly enormous and ran very deep. But my interviewee did not say they wanted to be thinner. They didn’t really even seem to want to be a man. The desperate desire my interviewee expressed was specific and pointed: to cease to be a fat woman. After the interview was over and we said our goodbyes, I sat on the couch still warm from my interviewee’s body, sobbing my way through the nearby box of tissues. Was it so unbearable, truly, to be what I was, to live in a fat female body? Did my interviewee experience the same horror being around other fat women as they did recognizing that they were seen as one themselves? Would it really be so much better to be a fat man than a fat woman? And why was it breasts that made the difference? Let me say for the record that I have no bad feelings for my interviewee. Whatever might have transpired for them, I hope and pray that they are out there somewhere delighted beyond measure by the body they occupy today. I owe them one: they made me think hard and long about the fat figure. As I have now been arguing for several dozen pages, all fat is created, but not all fat is created equal. Fat is classed and raced, sexed and gendered. Whether or not we have visible excess fat in our bodies, along with how much there is of it, has deep meanings for our culture—or at least we have made it have such meanings. This includes the shapes fat creates, the figures it produces. We cannot mold our own fat into the specific shapes we want or control where our bodies deposit it, yet our lives are molded by the forms that fat takes. Biology decides whether we deposit fat and where. In general, babies and toddlers wear their fat everywhere, much to the delight of aunties like me who like smooching chubby little arms and legs and cheeks and pretending to nosh on fat little toes. You have to nibble baby fat while you can, because baby fat eventually ebbs, and one is left with a body that is, for lack of a better word, kid shaped. When the hormone storms of puberty begin to arrive, though, it all changes again. The bodies of most people assigned female at birth begin to selectively accumulate fat in the hips, buttocks, thighs, and breasts. The bodies of people assigned male at birth generally don’t. Later in life, the bodies of people assigned male at birth are more likely to accumulate fat in the torso, particularly in the belly. This is the source of many of our unexamined expectations, and consequently also our unexamined responses. I use the phrase “assigned male/female at birth” for a reason here. For any number of reasons, the visual diagnosis of sex that a doctor makes when they look at a newborn’s genitalia may not be correct. There are many people whose sexual biology does not entirely conform, for an array of causes both spontaneous and intentional, to what biology expects “male” or “female” bodies to be. There are even more people whose gender does not line up with the cisgender expectations of our culture—that people assigned female at birth will be women and feminine, while people assigned male at birth will be masculine and male. And fat is in the middle of all of it. We tend on the whole to interpret fat as feminine. The much-vaunted “hourglass” figure I’ve mentioned previously is the classic example of feminine fat, just the right amounts in just the right places to swell just the right body parts to just the right proportions. But equally as feminine in terms of our associations is cellulite, the places where the skin over a fat deposit is dimpled or bumpy thanks to the strength of the connective tissue binding the skin to its underpinnings despite the fat cells that occupy the spaces in between.