You Have the Right to Remain Fat

My life wouldn't be easier if I were thin. My life would be easier if this culture wasn't obsessed with oppressing me because I'm fat. The solution to a problem like bigotry is not to do everything in our power to accommodate the bigotry. It is to get rid of the bigotry.

We are taught that thin is synonymous with beauty, power, and love. But, in fact, it is not. Beauty is not something women earn; it is something people are. Power is not achieved through the dogged pursuit of homogeneity; it is something that is innate within us and that is strengthened by nonconformity. Love is not something people earn through obedience; it is each person’s birthright. We cannot starve our way into being loved, into being free.

you can’t find self-love by walking a path paved by self-hatred.

Dieting is a practice of fatphobia. Dieting is the result of unresolved fatphobia. We become terrified of what it would mean for us to be fat because we understand fundamentally how poorly fat people are treated. We transpose that bigotry onto the fat itself, rather than placing the blame where it belongs: on the culture that created and promotes injustice and fat hatred. We thereby, perhaps unintentionally, end up blaming fat people for the bigotry they are experiencing. Even though fatphobia is culturally pervasive and treated as if it’s a totally normal part of everyday life, it’s important to recognize that it is a form of bigotry that really harms people and that must be eradicated.

What we must realize is that it’s not thinness that is being eroticized. What is being eroticized is the submission thinness represents in our culture. Thinness is a secondary characteristic. The true commodity is the willingness of women to acquiesce to cultural control. Controlling women’s body size is about controlling women’s lives. This claim to control is based on fantasies of masculine superiority bolstered by the culture. This control does not just apply to thinness.

We are taught that men are the key to happiness and fulfillment. We fear that without heterosexual marriage and childbearing we cannot become people who matter or “real” adults. It is this nexus of desire and fear that is the breeding ground for self-destructive behavior like dieting. Rather than being taught that you deserve love simply because you are a person, you are taught that love is something people must earn through particular socially sanctioned methods. For many women, that method is weight control.

So maybe you don’t consciously feel inferior, but what if I asked you some follow-up questions, like: “Today are you wearing something that is physically uncomfortable because you believe it makes you look better? “Today did you refuse to eat something you wanted to eat because you were worried what it might do to the way you look? “Today did you refuse to do something you wanted to do because you were worried about how it would make you look to another person? “Today did you deny an impulse to say no or yes to something that mattered to you because you were worried that someone wouldn’t like you if you did it?

The diet industry was using language like “easy” and “simple” to manipulate dieters everywhere into believing that if their programs didn’t work it was because we were using them incorrectly.

I gradually learned that I was less than others because I was a fat brown girl. The lessons I learned about the inferiority of my fat body were brutal; the lessons I received about my racial and gender inferiority were subtle by comparison.

Unlike many parts of the world where fate is considered to be something that lies beyond the reach of average humans, in the US fate is considered to be something that is resoundingly within the realm of every single person’s control. Failure is an individual problem, not a collective, cultural, or political problem. The idea is that if you don’t have something, it is because you didn’t want it badly enough, or you didn’t try hard enough. Though the allure of this idea is undeniable, there isn’t much room for serious considerations of justice or historical unfairness in this narrative. But it is this fantasy—the American Dream—that is the siren song for so many.

My life wouldn’t be easier if I were thin. My life would be easier if this culture wasn’t obsessed with oppressing me because I’m fat. The solution to a problem like bigotry is not to do everything in our power to accommodate the bigotry. It is to get rid of the bigotry.

There is compelling evidence that racism kills people. There is compelling evidence that living with the stress of poverty leads to a number of mental health challenges. There is compelling evidence that weight-based discrimination leads to heightened levels of stress and anxiety that suppress the function of major organs. And, there is evidence that fatphobia leads to shortened life expectancy.3 But racism, poverty, and weight-based bigotry are all social problems. It is through victim-blaming narratives that we cast these social issues as individual ones that can be solved through bootstrapping and consumerism.

From the amount of space that male undergraduates take up to the manspreading I witness during my commute, my fat body is frequently attacked on the grounds that I am not beautiful enough to exist because apparently that is my job as a woman. I think about the condescending comments I get from men online who tell me that they honestly think I’d be so beautiful if I lost weight—as if that were the goal of my life or my politics.

And any movement that does not center collective liberation is not one in which I can invest.

You cannot earn freedom through conformity. You cannot buy your way in And we can only claim it when we recognize it is already ours.

Any future that doesn't center the eradication of oppression and collective freedom is not a future worth imagining.

I think about the thousand ways that the women in my family were silently (and sometimes outright) expected to give up their lives, their dreams, and their desires, so that they could become the glorified babysitters for the men in their lives who wanted a legacy but none of the responsibility of child-rearing.

Se nos enseña que la delgadez es sinónimo de belleza, poder y amor. Pero, de hecho, no lo es. La belleza no es algo que las mujeres se ganen: es algo que la gente es. El poder no se obtiene a través de la obstinada persecución de la homogeneidad; es algo innato, está en nuestro interior y el inconformismo le da fuerzas. El amor no es algo que la gente se gane obedeciendo; es un derecho de nacimiento de cada persona.

I realize now that all those times I had said, “I want to be thin,” I actually meant: I want to be loved. I want to be happy. I want to be seen. I want to be free. We are taught that thin is synonymous with beauty, power, and love. But, in fact, it is not. Beauty is not something women earn; it is something people are. Power is not achieved through the dogged pursuit of homogeneity; it is something that is innate within us and that is strengthened by nonconformity. Love is not something people earn through obedience; it is each person’s birthright. We cannot starve our way into being loved, into being free. You Have the Right to Remain Fat (pp. 42-43)

My body used to belong to me. When I was a little girl, my favorite part of the day was when we got home from errands or preschool. I would push the front door open with both small hands and run—through the living room filled with plastic-wrapped furniture, past the washer dryer that made funny sounds that I liked, past my bedroom filled with a growing collection of Winnie the Pooh toys—into the bathroom.

They are accepting unacceptable relationships and sexual experiences because they feel like they don’t deserve any better.

Rather than being taught that you deserve love simply because you are a person, you are taught that love is something people must earn through particular socially sanctioned methods. For many women, that method is weight control.

I saw my body as the only commodity I had to trade for love.

my fat body is frequently attacked on the grounds that I am not beautiful enough to exist because apparently that is my job as a woman.

It’s important to be clear that this performance of white femininity and white gentility is just that—a performance. As starched and polished and pearl-bedecked as that performance is, at its core is the notion of submission and the idea that through submission we can maintain privilege.

Performing femininity extra-special hard feels like a particular expectation of me because I am a fat woman and my bigness always makes others call my gender into question.