The Fat Question, part one

What is so bad about being fat anyway?

This was a question posed to me by a book I started reading at dinner (half a skinless chicken breast, half a small order of fries guiltily consumed as reward for having half a yogurt at breakfast, half a diet dr. pepper). For someone who has spent the majority of her life consumed with thoughts of food, weight and thinness, this ought to have been an easy question. After all, upon discovering Steven Levenkron's "Best Little Girl in the World" in the school library at age 10, I already knew enough about body image, and the resquisite hatred of one's body, to pick up tips and yearn to take Kessa's place. And it didn't stop there. Middle school found me experimenting with halves, with what could in polite company be termed "portion control", and by the first year of high school I could often be found walking slowly, soft-eyed, trailing my fingertips along the wall to retain balance after four days of not but diet coke and water. I have become an expert at a single-slice-of-lunchmeat-lunch, knowledgeable of the calories in a meal of tictacs, a natural at the skill of hunger, one of those people for whom deprivation is fun, and excess is the true punishment. So I should know.

It's important to be thin. It's the reason Curves and Jenny Craig exists, why you often see solitary women pushing carts of Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice dinners in the supermarket, why diet products exist. Thin is a symbol of the virtues of this society, spoken and unspoken. It symbolizes the modern woman's quest for power, control, strength. After all, you need strength to sip a Kelloggs protein water instead of a mocha frappucino, as in the commercial for Kellogg's water. Our foremothers fought for votes, education, property rights and independence. We carry it on a little further and fight for concave stomachs and razor-sharp hips. It makes sense, in our social understanding. Strong is good, so willpower must be good.

Thin also represents more oppressive virtues. Purity, for instance. Like the virgin foregoing sex, the modern woman displays her purity by foregoing a bite of chocolate cake, and virtuously stabbing her fork at lettuce leaves instead. Not chosen purity either, but forced, required, for if women were unpure in their eating...what? Thin means restraint. Passivity. A woman passively sitting by, idly watching those around her feed themselves, <i>enjoy themselves.</i> A starved woman has no energy to succeed in the workplace or finish her studies. She is no threat, then, to the men who have recently found themselves eclipsed by studious, ambitious women. All she wants is to lie down, perhaps leaf through a cooking magazine to consider the pictures of tempting foods. She won't tell on a boss who fondles her, or have the guts to make a political speech. Thin means weak, fragile, bones poking through pale skin, a body that could be blown away by a strong gust of wind. In other words, harmless. Thin represents women's weakness, proves women's subordination too. Is this why our society punishes the overweight, the obese, even the mildly chubby, "healthy" ones? To guilt them into restraint and subsequent extinction from the world of work, the "male sphere"?

Consider it. A fat woman. What are the arguments?

<u>She's unattractive:</u> Who determines this? You? Me? A fashion magazine spread, a Parisian designer, random people on the street. How do you know she's unattractive? Probably, only because you've had the images of thin as right and fat as wrong drilled into your mind since infancy, by people who have experienced this same drilling. Those we glorify as beautiful, as "right" are airbrushed, painted versions of women whose body type reflects less than 5% of the population. How can it be that the majority of women are ugly, and only 5% are beautiful? How do people fall in love? How does the species carry on?

Aside from this, the arguments are stripped bare. Fat women are unacceptable in our culture because they represent everything thin is not. In place of hard, strict control, they induldge. They take their share, perhaps more, in a world where women are still expected to scrape by on leftovers, to settle for second best. They don't deny their needs and wants the way a woman with a rumbling belly does when she purposely avoids eating. They help themselves. In turn, they may be strong, fueled, energetic Amazons capable of acheiving whatever they have in mind. It is only in extreme excess that a fat woman loses the ground she has gained from giving herself what she wants. Unlike her petite counterparts, she at least has a chance to fly.

It makes sense. The frightening thing is, even when one has the ability to comprehend this information, it makes relatively little impact. I <i>know</i> fat is not a crime, food is not a crime, allowance and self-respect are not crimes, but life is slow to catch up with what our minds have become aware of, even so.