Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

When Yasmin Sokkar Harker, a member of the faculty at the Law School of the City University of New York, produced her widely cited annotated bibliography of the legal literature on fat discrimination in 2015, she found she needed to include a section on “Fat Discrimination as Sex Discrimination;” in its introduction, Sokkar Harker writes, “Fat women are considered unfeminine and bear additional stigmatization by family, employers, and health professionals.” The intensity and magnitude of the situation is deceptively minimized by the legal formality of the sentence. That word, unfeminine, is a critical one. As has been noted previously at some length, to be a fat woman in our Western culture is to do “woman” incorrectly. The proof is in the misogyny, in the studies FIGURE 111 that have shown that fat women are more likely to be convicted in criminal proceedings than thin women, more likely to be underpaid than both thinner women and almost all men, and that they face significant hiring and promotion biases in the workplace. To be a fat man is not necessarily to do “man” incorrectly, but to be one whose fat exists in a pattern associated with femininity is definitely to do “man” the wrong way. The infamous exclusionary phrase on every gay men’s personal ad since at least the late 1980s when I became aware of them in the back pages of urban arts-andculture weekly papers is “no fats, no femmes.” The two can exist independently of one another, but the fact that they are so consistently paired as being something many gay men find repellent is telling. Fat appears to have an astonishing power to interfere with sex, with maleness and femaleness and our expectations thereof. To be fat, and especially to “wear” that fat in unexpected or uncommon ways, is to do sex and gender fundamentally wrong. It is not one’s behavior, or one’s feelings, or one’s choices that are incorrect; one’s sex and gender wrongness is literally under one’s skin. Some years ago, hanging out with some of the members of my fat girl posse talking about sex, a friend archly noted that “What these thin women who look at us so funny don’t understand is that a lot of us have places of interest where thin women 112 FAT don’t even have places.” The laughter resolved into a conversation about those places, the body parts some fat people have for which there are no actual names. We debated what name would suit the tender-skinned swells at the tops of some of our upper, inner thighs, and whether back fat needed different names depending on where on the back it was. We determined that the fat pad on the top of the arch of the foot was the Mary Jane, after the style of shoe with a strap across the arch. My husband’s contribution was to christen the area on the downward curve of a fat behind, leading to the top of the thigh, as “the helipad.” It was the place where one came in for a landing, he observed. In the years since I have had variations on the same conversation with other friends, struggling to think up better, more evocative names for things like a hanging belly, which the medical profession likes to call an “apron.” Frequently we’ve wondered aloud about the particularly pungent words we have for a fat pubis, neither of which are medical and both of which—“gunt” (a portmanteau of “gut” and “cunt”) or “FUPA” (an anagram for “Fat Upper Pubic Area”)— are intentionally sexist and demeaning. There’s a similar streak of nastiness that gets applied to men with fat deposits on the pubis, something that in some cases makes the penis appear smaller, especially when it is soft. The stereotypes of the fat man with FIGURE 113 the little dick and the fat woman with the enormous pussy have everything to do with our expectations of what genitals are supposed to be. Men are supposed to have a presence, ideally a large and protruding one, between their legs, women are supposed to have an absence, nothing at all protruding from between their legs. Fat bodies, like some (though not all) intersex, transgender, and transsexual bodies, may tear this set of expectations up from the roots. It is deeply disturbing to many when they do. Surely women can never be allowed to have a fleshy presence between their legs, especially not one that is visible when they are clothed, and under no circumstances is it to be larger than the average penis. Surely men must always have groins that are as chiseled and sleek as a GI Joe doll’s, save for the mighty penis and scrotum whose size and hardness tell us everything we need to know. To do otherwise is to have done wrong, and to have done wrong is to deserve punishment. The subsequent mocking, ridicule, cruel “jokes,” and mean-spirited internet memes work by insisting that these bodies are wrong, that these people cannot even manage to wear their genitals correctly. All the wrongness that is projected onto fat bodies is projected onto the fat crotch in a concentrated form. As centuries of homophobia and transphobia have taught us, to declare a person’s sexual organs and sexual activity to 114 FAT be wrongly constituted and wrongly existing, is a way of excluding that person and people like them from full humanity. This is why I find it so noteworthy, when I look back on that interview twenty years ago, that my interviewee was not seeking to become less fat. To my interviewee, fat was not the problem: I remember fondly their beer-bellied swagger and the wink and smile with which, at one point in the interview, they patted their belly and said they appreciated having some weight to put behind their thrusts during sex. Their problem was not their queerness, not their sexual opportunities, and not their fat. Their problem was that there was not a world in which they could live as a woman in the fat body they had and not be reminded constantly that they were doing it wrong. Certainly, as a masculineof-center woman, they were likely to be reminded of that anyhow; butch women, may God bless them every one, are well aware that they are doing “woman” wrong in the culture’s eyes by discarding conventional femininity. But when my interviewee found themselves stuck in the crosshairs of a queer-hating, transphobic, fat-hating, womanhating society, the easiest thing to try to change, or perhaps the easiest thing to reconcile themselves to losing, was not the fat but the figure, the breasts that FIGURE 115 marked them out as something at which they were a failure as long as they were fat. The fat figure, I believe, can teach us a lot. Fat is hated most where it conforms least. The patriarchy requires a hierarchy of bodies and power in order to function. This hierarchy requires bodies that are dependably formed, shaped, and proportioned, in order that one might know at a glance where a particular body belongs on the ladder of status, power, and authority. But Nature, in Her infinite wisdom, produces a rich, wild diversity of human bodies. Bodies are not answerable to our egos or our desires or even our cultural expectations, only to the instructions of DNA and biochemistry and environment and epigenetics, that mysterious translation of shared experience into biological tendency. In so doing they whisper some difficult truths about what exists without and beyond these power structures on which so many of us depend for our own status and power. In its spontaneity and catholicity, appearing where and when it does and not when and where we want it to, fat defies our belief that we somehow deserve what power we have because we are intrinsically somehow made of better, purer, more tractable stuff. That sex, gender, race, and class are deeply entwined in our compartmentalization of human fat is not a coincidence. These are the rubrics through which 116 FAT we rationalize power and exert control—or try to, at any rate, including over an object, a substance that routinely, seemingly willfully, defies our attempts at mastery. Fat doesn’t give a sweet and fancy goddamn what we want. For the most part we abide it only because we have no choice. We might ask, then, what we believe fat is, given that our bodies must contain it or die. How do we understand something so ubiquitous yet intransigent, so resistant to our will? Is it simply a metaphor for humanity, in that we all contain the seeds of our own demise if not our own undoing? Or is there something more sinister that occupies the bunting of our double chins and love handles? Perhaps the answer is that fat is sublime, in the original nineteenth-century Romantic philosophical sense of the word. The sublime, in this context, is an experience of the natural world as being something larger than one’s self, something one cannot control, a thing that is simultaneously marvelous and dangerous and whose superhuman nature simultaneously humbles and exalts. Fat is within us, yet also beyond us. It is spontaneous and wild, and we fear its uncontrollability. It absorbs our attempts to bend it to our will without the slightest hint of struggle, and we can rant and rail at it just as we might at the ocean or the entire universe and produce only what Shakespeare might call “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That is the moment of sublimity: the awe as well as the terror of facing nature in all its independence from our humanity. Let us say, then, that this object, fat, is sublime. And since it is, then so are we, for from the moment we are born until after we die we carry this sublimity within us.