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CHAPTER 1
I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't know I was fat. It is an understanding that has pressed down on me with more gravity than anything else ever could. Our culture is steeped in ideologies of aspiration and one of the most inescapable is the pressure to meet narrow standards of beauty and health, standards that are arbitrary and often damaging.
But wait! you object, don't you know there's an obesity epidemic? It's impossible not to know. All over the media, fatness is heralded as a major health crisis, a mounting threat to the American way of life. Hell, it's the end of human civilization. Even our children are fat! It is unthinkable. In a contemporary reworking of ancient combat in which the crowd cheers for the lions, fat people are tormented by screaming fitness trainers on national television and people tune in by the millions to watch with unrestrained delight as offensive bodies are elevated from fat sin to starving, dehydrated sainthood. Like modern-day gladiators, these combatants battle fiercely not with an external enemy, but with themselves. This is no longer just an "obesity epidemic" as defined by those who'd seek to pathologize and condemn our bodies. It is a fat rampage. And some fat people are responding in kind. Fat people are finding their voices, standing up, speaking out, and taking back their bodies.
This book is a transmission from that battlefield. It is a product of ten years of discussions, arguments, and revelations taking place in and around body acceptance and social justice movements. It is an analysis of intersectional identities and the complex realities of survival as a self-accepting person in a world that loathes self-acceptance. It is my story. It is also the story of many others who have fought for recognition and respect, and the right to live in their own bodies according to their own desires. It is memoir, conversation, cultural critique, and self-acceptance instruction manual.
According to the dubious measurements of the body mass index (BMI) scale, I am morbidly obese. To put it more succinctly, I am death fat. I am superduper really-for-real mad fat. I am the kind of fat where doctors are friendly until they get me on a scale, and then after that they get very quiet. Oh, I imagine them thinking, I didn't realize you were that fat. I am the kind of fat that occasionally outsizes plus-size shops. I am the kind of fat that people reference when they say, "Well, some people are just big, but people who are REALLY fat are just not normal or healthy, and those people SHOULD lose some weight." When they say this sort of thing, they are talking about me.
Furthermore, I adore cooking and refuse to keep anything less than real butter in my house. I eat very little meat but not for moral or ideological reasons; I just dislike preparing it. My diet consists primarily of fresh vegetables and whole grains, and I have a serious weakness for good cheese. I keep a jar of bacon fat in my refrigerator and I occasionally use it to cook big leafy greens, because big leafy greens do best with a bit of bacon fat. I exercise; I have a gym membership and I use it. I take the stairs at work five or six times a day, but only because I am too impatient to wait for the elevator. By the tests and non-BMI numbers doctors use to measure such things, I am healthy.
I have a partner who unconditionally supports my self-acceptance, while struggling with his own. I have a decidedly not-fat family that is mostly supportive of my choices and realities except for the very occasional lapse into the "but I'm just worried about your health" rhetoric.
I have been fat in varying degrees my whole life. Though I've lost and regained many a pound, I've never lost enough weight to feel a glimmer of what it might be like to be thin. I've never lost enough weight to come close to being not fat. Never enough to shop in not-fat stores. Never enough that I wouldn't occasionally hear "fat bitch" hollered at me from a moving car when walking alone, on a city street, or in a parking lot. Never enough that a doctor's ever said I was of a normal weight. Never enough that I didn't, even for a second, feel like I wasn't fat anymore.
Now some folks will read this and think, oh, how sad. But there's no sadness here. I am, plainly, morbidly obese. Death fat. I say this without judgment and without disdain. I say it not with an eager ring of reclamation, nor with self-loathing and fear. It just is. I live fully in this real and complicated world.
This is a book about many things, but it is mostly about refusing to be sorry.
There exists a social justice movement focused on criticizing our conventional wisdom about bodies and fat, and on changing our culture to create space where a diversity of bodies is respected and normalized. Different folks call this ideology by different names — fat activism, fat acceptance, fat liberation, fat advocacy. The common ground we all stand upon is the desire for fat bodies — and all bodies, no matter their circumstances — to be seen as worthy of dignity and respect. Fat politics is a movement of criticism and questions, not authority and groupthink. Its purpose ought to be noisy inquiry into what our culture tells us about bodies. Its purpose is not to replace one set of monolithic rules with another. We want fatness to be disentangled from its association with moral decrepitude, and for fat bodies to be understood as valid — not temporary, not disposable, and not loathsome.
Your body is not a tragedy.
This is important. This is something you should know before we go any further. Speak it aloud if it helps. Write it down. Tell someone, "My body is not a tragedy." Whatever else it might be, it is not tragic. Tragedy may yet befall it, or may have already done so, but your body is not the things that happen to it, the things that are forced upon it, or even its failures to perform to certain standards. Your body simply is. The tragedy is the effort required to build a loving relationship — or at least one of tacit acceptance — with your body. In a more perfect world, this connection would take place organically, but any such connection built in our early years is rapidly undone as we learn to criticize and dissociate from our bodies. Then we must spend our remaining years trying to rebuild that relationship.
This world is filled with bodies — in droves, shoulder to shoulder, leaning into and against the crush of daily life — and all of them are different. We're taught that our differences are a weakness, our downfall, and that striving for sameness is the path to happiness and success. No. Humanity is diverse, wonderfully so, and the everlasting battle of fighting our bodies, of fighting ourselves, damages us.
Every day we wake up in our bodies, and we begin to tell our stories. This book collects some of them.
Once upon a time there was a Misguided Young Woman who entered a very large and active fat-positive online space that I was co-moderating. In this space, Misguided was a habitual troublemaker, continuously flouting two of the community's most basic rules: one, don't talk about dieting; and two, don't say mean or critical things about your body or anyone else's body. The team of moderators gave her numerous second chances, far more than she deserved. We did so because the forum had proven its ability to be truly transformative — often the people who are most resistant to the rules at first, later come to appreciate how these guidelines operate to make the space as awesome as it is.
Unfortunately, Misguided could not control herself, and eventually, with heavy hearts, my co-moderators and I decided to ban her permanently, to the relief and cheers of thousands of other community members.
About a year later, I was reading a comment thread elsewhere online when I ran across an exchange between Misguided, whom I had nearly forgotten about, and a few other people. As it happened, Misguided was telling the story of being banned from our online community. She seemed to be under the impression that she was banned for daring to question the right of fat people to eat cake.
"These people eat, like, a whole cake in one sitting. That's not right!" wrote Misguided.
Of course, this was silly. The other commenters interacting with Misguided were mostly dismissive, saying, "What business is it of mine what someone eats? I don't really care."
Exasperated, Misguided responded, with her characteristic hyperbole, "SO YOU THINK IT'S TOTALLYOKAY FOR FAT PEOPLE TO EAT TWO WHOLE CAKES EVERY DAY?"
There was something about the absurdity of this question that captured my imagination. Thus the concept of "two whole cakes" was born. Originally, it was an injoke between me and my friends, and then it became a popular shout-out in fat communities online. Shortly thereafter #twowholecakes first appeared as a hashtag on Twitter, and suddenly I started seeing it everywhere, bandied back and forth between people I didn't know on various online forums, even getting a mention during an "obesity epidemic" debate on Nightline.
So what does it mean?
The phrase "two whole cakes" is appealing because it is ridiculous. It evokes the kind of insatiable appetite and gratuitous pleasure seeking that our culture so erroneously assigns to fat people. It suggests a total loss of self-control, the danger that — as Marianne Kirby has put it — fat people will "eat the whole world."
It is also very funny. It's useful to zero in on negative stereotypes and show how preposterous they are. That's my kind of activism: to create ideas that spread like airborne viruses, that multitudes can grab onto and carry around like a secret or an answer to a question that few ever dare to ask.
To me, two whole cakes represents the absurd hyperbole associated with weight and body size. It acknowledges that there are folks out there who sincerely believe that all fatasses everywhere do things like sit down and eat two whole cakes on a regular basis, whence their fatness is maintained or improved upon. The over-the-topness of not one, but two whole cakes highlights the ridiculousness of beating myself up for making personal choices that do no real damage other than to offend conventional wisdom. Did you eat something yesterday that you're judging yourself harshly for? Stop. Did you say or think something critical about someone else's eating habits or their body? Think about why you did that and how you feel when someone does it to you. Did someone say something damaging to you that's lingering in the back of your mind? Acknowledge why it hurt, and move on.
Two whole cakes is about giving up and letting go of all the self-hating garbage we carry around inside our heads, and finding acceptance and contentment as we are now. Even if we've eaten two whole cakes.
I gave a talk about two whole cakes in 2010, and afterward an acquaintance emailed me to ask, "But what if someone actually wanted to eat two whole cakes? Publicly? What happens when the cartoonish caricature is made real?" It is not my place to judge others for making autonomous decisions about what they do with their bodies. Nor is it yours. Because ultimately, you or I could eat two whole cakes and probably the worst thing that would come of it is that we'd feel terribly sick afterward. But our lives wouldn't end. We wouldn't be bad people. We wouldn't have anything to apologize for. It is no one's business but our own.
I don't advocate eating two whole cakes on a regular basis, but the phrase, to me, captures something of the wild freedom and relief I felt when I was first discovering fat acceptance. It reminds me of the way those simple concepts — eating what I wanted, when I was hungry, without feeling guilty, and stopping when I was done; not hating myself or my body; building a critical resistance to the cultural messages around me — have created a revolution within me. I could eat two whole cakes if I wanted to! I don't want to, but I could, if I did. Two whole cakes is about laughing at the stereotypes and assumptions that hurt us and thereby lessening their power to do so. Pass it on. Tell your friends. Reinvent it for your own purposes. Two whole cakes is a force that can't be denied.
At some point in the unfolding of human history, it was decided that fat girls are not supposed to wear dresses. Or colors other than black. Or horizontal stripes. Or ruffles, or florals, or knee socks, or wide belts. No heels, no flats, no skinny jeans, no palazzo pants. Nothing too tight and nothing too big. Nothing too bright. Nothing too trendy.
There are a great many rules for fat-lady dressing. These rules — shared in deferential whispers, with religious fervor, and agreed upon as irrefutable truths — make the clothing available to fat people lacking in imagination and variety. These rules make dressing a fat body often a Brobdingnagian challenge, which occasionally involves the identification of one's body shape with a piece of produce (are you an apple? a pear? I am a butternut squash) and the constant battle of refusing to live in wrap dresses even though everyone knows wrap dresses are incredibly flattering.
"Flattering" and "unflattering" are so overused and underdefined that they've come to stand as code for opinions that might be offensive or hurtful if stated in clearer terms. One might argue that a "flattering" ensemble is one that suits an individual in a way that makes him or her feel comfortable, confident, and generally fabulous, and underscores and shares his or her existing, internal awesomeness with the outside world. It's possible that "flattering" evokes this idea, some of the time. But just as often it translates to "that makes you look thinner," or more proportional, or otherwise makes your body look in a way that it does not ordinarily look. Further, when we say something is unflattering, we're often trying to deliver bad news in a polite way, by deflecting blame from the body to the garment, in spite of the fact that most of us are going to secretly blame the body anyway. Women in particular are prone to directing their anger at themselves rather than at the pair of jeans that fails to fit both their hips and waist at the same time, as though the jeans' expectations must necessarily prevail over the actual dimensions of the body you've had for your entire life. If the jeans don't fit, it must be your fault. You should change to fit them, because the jeans are in charge here. If you refuse — silly, stubborn person that you are — then you are relegating yourself to fashion struggles in perpetuity.
Fashion is communication. If you cannot fit fashion, then you are left out of the conversation. Imagine you're at a dinner party with ten amazing people; they are having fascinating discussions on topics that interest you, but when you try to join in, no one listens. They talk over you. They don't even notice you're there. This is something of what it's like to be a fashionably minded fat woman.
In the interconnected worlds of fashion media and fashion design, fat women are typically presumed to be not merely incapable of style, but a direct assault on everything fashion stands for. Karl Lagerfeld, a member of fashion's old guard who currently heads up the timeless entity that is Chanel, has declared, with a characteristic lack of subtlety, "No one wants to look at fat women." High fashion and the arbiters of style have a built-in fat ceiling beyond which no body past a particular size (an eight? a ten? a — gasp — twelve?) may pass. Fat people lack any kind of comparable access to stylish and well-fitting clothes, not simply because those clothes are expensive — and they are — but because they don't exist. Certainly, there are a handful of committed plus-size designers who make quality apparel out there, but the plus options are a tiny fraction of what is available to non-plus people. And while some heinously overpriced knitwear for up-to-a-size-twenty-four fat folks can be found at a premium in the darkest, dustiest basement corner of the occasional high-end department store (or, failing that, on the store's website), the selection even among the $400 polyester jersey dresses is — to put it delicately — unimpressive. In recent years, Beth Ditto, the unapologetically fat and queer lead singer of the dance-punk band Gossip, has been unexpectedly embraced by the fashion world. Even Karl Lagerfeld had her band play at an event (though we can suppose he avoided looking directly at the stage the whole time). As a result, Ditto has come to serve as a rare icon of fat style; designers specially produce clothing for her, either for the stage, or for a feature in a magazine. But I think Ditto is only accepted as an iconoclast because she is seen as an aberration. Her inclusion in the conversation does not signal the coming around of high fashion to embrace fat women as a whole; in fact, I would argue that it further ensures that won't happen, since including fats aplenty would erase the novelty that Ditto's fatness currently supplies. I suppose this is just as well because if I try to put myself, accustomed to waging straight-up war in an attempt to cultivate a personal style out of the lemons mainstream plus-size clothing manufacturers offer me, in Ditto's position, in which I might suddenly have Chanel call and offer to make me a dress, I cannot imagine my response. Would years of rage spill out of me in a stream of vile profanity? Would I humbly blubber my thanks and send my measurements right over? I can't even imagine.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Two Whole Cakes"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Lesley Kinzel.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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