The Fat Chick Diaries

Sometimes I just don’t get fat haters. Not the hating part– I understand the world is full of biggots and people who just need to feel superior by knocking other people down. I get that part. It’s that I just don’t get what it is they think we ought to do about ourselves. Let me explain.

In 2005, I gave up my car. I figured it would save me enough money to get through grad school without loans, it would force me to exercise more, and it would just feel really good to thumb my nose at Bush’s blood-for-oil foreign policy. All three things proved to be true. Because of a particular flaw in the public transportation situation where I was working at the time, I could get directly TO work by bus, but to get home I had to walk two miles from the office to the nearest functioning bus stop. So I was walking two miles a day, five days a week.

This is what the skinny people want, right? Aren’t we all supposed to be out there exercising all the fat off?

Apparently not. On a frequent and regular basis, carloads of young, skinny assholes would roll their windows down and shout abuse at me as I walked from my office to the bus stop. So…. let me understand. You don’t want people to be fat, but when you see a fat person out exercising, you will discourage them from doing so by shouting abuse at them? I just don’t get the logic. Unless… oh wait, I think I get it now– they want us to shut ourselves up in our homes and jog in place where nobody has to see us, until we have burned off enough fat to be acceptable to them. Then, and only then, can we be seen again in public. Got it.

I am still carfree, and I still take public transportation, and I am still fat. (Oddly enough, all of that walking did no lead to the loss of a single pound.) So in the past few years, I have developed an interest in the attitudes of people about fat people taking public transportation. One of these days I will finish my epic post on fat people who ride the subway and the people who love to hate them. But for now, let it suffice to say that a simple web search shows there are a lot of people who just hate, hate, HATE it that there are fat people on subways and buses. They don’t want us to sit next to them. They don’t want us to stand near them. In short, they don’t want us there at all.

So once again, I must ask–what is it that they DO want us to do? Run through the tunnel behind the subway train until we have burned enough calories to be acceptable as fellow passengers? Quit our jobs and stay home, locked in our houses and apartments starving ourselves until we are deemed thin enough to be seen out in public again? What?

So now comes the latest “I just don’t get the logic” occurrence. I am a long-time subscriber to Newsweek, but I’m almost always at least a week or two behind. So this week I’m working on an issue from the beginning of May, and I came across this quote on the Perspectives page, which you can find on their website here.

“We’re on the Titanic and, rather than forcing our children into the lifeboat, we’re telling them to join the band.” –MeMe Roth, president of National Action Against Obesity, on new clothing lines aimed at plus-size teenage girls from retailers Target and Forever 21

Once again, I just don’t get it. Roth objects to CLOTHING? Or is it just that she objects to attractive, fashionable clothing for fat girls? Is that it? She doesn’t want them stuck at home with no clothes to wear– she just doesn’t think they should be allowed to dress fashionably, because that might cause them to… what? Feel good about themselves? Not feel disgusting? Have good self-esteem? Heaven forfend! We can’t have fat chicks feeling good about themselves– that would undermine Roth’s plan to make them hate themselves so much that they will do whatever it takes– healthy or not– to conform and become thin. No, fat girls should wear burlap bags with a big scarlet “F” stenciled on the front.

So it really is just all about hate after all. Nice.

Daily pug count: Three, plus a brace of puggles in front of the laundromat.

I haven’t done a Daily Pug Count in a while, so here’s today’s figure as of 4:04 p.m.: Four pugs. One in Queens, three in Manhattan. I’m telling you, NYC is Pug City, y’all.

Anyway, back to business. I saw Megan McCain on the Rachel Maddow Show the other day, and Rachel mentioned Megan is on Twitter, so I went and checked her out. Having seen images of Megan throughout the campaign and having just watched her during her interview with Rachel, I was very surprised to see among her Twitter entries (I guess they’re called “tweets”) a statement defending her own curves and encouraging the rest of us to love ours, too. I thought… did somebody make fun of her for being fat? If so, how is that possible? She’s not rail thin like her mom, but she’s certainly slim. Have we really gone that far over the edge that we’re fat-bashing Megan McCain now?

As it turns out, the answer is yes: Megan McCain, who is a size 8, got fat-bashed by her own fellow Republican. Tara Parker Pope writes about it on Well today.

That just stuns me. I mean, really? To me, a woman who wears a size 12 shouldn’t be considered plus size, because in terms of her clothing needs, she has a heck of a lot more in common with a size 8 than a size 18. A size 10 looks thin to me. But a size EIGHT??? Come on, REALLY? We’re fat-bashing in the single digits now?

You’d think there are no more pressing issues facing this country right now. Yeesh.

Like many of my sister fat chick bloggers, I have blogged about Governor Paterson’s fat tax. You can see my previous posts here and here. My beef has been not so much with the idea as with the abusive and misleading name given to the tax, especially since the majority of the fat people I know already drink diet soda.

I’m pretty new to this whole blogging thing, and I’m still in the process of exploring the amazing blogs out there that deal with fat issues. So forgive me if I’m the last kid on the block to clue in to this amazing resource: Junkfood Science. The blogger, Sandra Szwarc, is a thoroughly credentialed nurse among other things, and she knows how to bring the data. one of her favorite sports is taking down idiots who use outdated, debunked studies or unsupported myths to promote bogus ideas about diet and nutrition, and therefore often about fatness and health. She’s a mythbuster extraordinaire, and I can’t stop reading her stuff.

Here’s her take on the obesity tax, which she calls a fat discrimination tax. When I wrote about the tax myself, I said I didn’t think it was the fat people who were drinking the sugared sodas. She actually brings the data: the research shows not only that it’s not fat people, but rather young adult males, who drink the majority of sugared sodas. She also busts the governor’s people for using the now thoroughly debunked claim that obesity causes more than 300,000 deaths a year.

If you haven’t already, go take a look. It’s definitely worth your time.

Just for the fun of it, I was messing around on Facebook, looking to see what types of groups were there with the word “fat” in their name. There are, of course, a ton of groups about how gross, disgusting, and worthy of scorn fat folks are. Fat folks, and especially fat chicks. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

But there were some interesting groups, too, and I joined a few. Browsing through the posts in this groups, I found a link to this amazing post from the blog Birthcycle. I’ve had this experience before, where someone bashes fat people right in front of me, as if I should understand that they don’t mean ME, and I shouldn’t be offended.

In other news, I got my retainers yesterday. My teeth have retreated a bit in the 25 or so years since I got my braces off, and it just bugs me. Maybe that’s vain, but it is what it is. I booked an appointment for a consultation with an orthodontist, where I discovered that Invisalign is wayyyy the heck out of my price range. The ortho claims he can restraighten my teeth with a series of retainers at about a third of the cost of Invisalign. He says he can do this in about a year if I wear them 24/7 except while eating or brushing. He did molds in late December, and I went to pick up the retainers yesterday. So by approximately January 12, 2010, I should have perfectly straight teeth again, and I should be able to keep them that way by only wearing the retainers at night.

For Christmas, my parents and I got tickets to go see South Pacific at the Lincoln Center Theater for the December 26 matinee. My mother absolutely loves this play and used to sing the songs around the house when I was a kid. Acquiescing to the choice of South Pacific was an amazing act of love on the part of my father, who apparently loves my mom, his bride of 43 years, at least slightly more than he hates South Pacific. Unfortunately, my parents developed a wicked case of stomach flu this past weekend, forcing them to cancel their plans to come north for Christmas. I offered their tickets to some friends, but they all had plans with their own families, and nobody was free the day after Christmas.

Returning the tickets for a refund was not an option. I thought about trying to sell them online somehow, but then a thought occurred to me.

I absolutely love going to the theater, but let’s just say theater seats in Manhattan were not designed with me in mind. If I want to go to the theater, the opera, and sometimes even the movies, I have to resign myself to the fact that no matter how hard I try to scrunch myself up and take up as little space as possible, it’ll be a tight squeeze, and the chances that somebody sitting near me will resent my presence– and make that resentment known to me in no uncertain terms– are pretty high.

Perhaps because of the price of the tickets, theater patrons often have no compunction whatsoever about loudly making the fat person sitting in near them feel like absolute shit. Once, the snooty guy sitting in the balcony row behind my boyfriend and me lamented out loud to his companion in that whiny, overly-entitled tone you hear so often in Manhattan, “Oh, that’s just GREAT! They’re like a couple of tombstones in front of us!” Another time, the woman sitting next to me, herself right on the cusp between normal and plus-size, turned to her companion, hitched her thumb in my direction, and said right out loud, “Do you SEE her? She makes ME feel SMALL!” I don’t know if she believed that all people who are fat are also deaf, or that fat people either don’t have feelings, or that the feelings of fat people simply do not matter, or what. I considered confronting her, but I figured my presence in her vicinity was punishment enough.

Most of the time when I’m at the theater, I spend the entire time trying to make myself as small as possible. I sit with my heels up off the floor and my knees as high as I can get them, so I can squish my legs together as much as possible. My arms are crossed in front of me, and I’m yanking on each elbow with the opposite hand, scrunching my shoulders and trying with all my might not to invade the space of the person on either side of me. By the end of the show, I’m often in a fair amount of pain because of all of this, but I figure I owe it to the people sitting on either side of me, whose tickets set them back a pretty penny just as mine did, not to make them uncomfortable because, beyond both their control and mine, the seats in the theater are just way too small.

Now, there exists a common thought among thin folks that space should be rationed, and fat people on airplanes, in subways, on buses, and in theaters are all perpetrating a great injustice on the rest of the population by taking up more than their fare share of space. You don’t have to search very hard to find examples of people whining about the time they had to….. gasp…. sit next to a FAT PERSON on an AIRPLANE! If you google the terms “subway” and “fat” together, you’ll find that there are legions of subway riders who apparently don’t think fat people should be allowed to sit down at all. Almost always, the people complaining about fat people taking up more than their fair share of space suggest that fat people be forced to pay for two seats. Which brings me back to South Pacific.

Here I was, with three tickets to South Pacific and nobody to go with me. Suddenly it occurred to me: I might be stuck going by myself, but I had THREE SEATS to use! This could be the first time in my life–and probably the last time– I could go to the theater, spread out, and be truly comfortable! Nobody sitting near me would be able to complain about being forced to sit next to the fat chick. By dint of having two parents who were too ill to attend, I had essentially done what fat-haters keep telling us fat people we should be doing anyway: purchase extra space. I could go to the theater, truly enjoy myself, and be not only totally comfortable, but also totally guilt-free. Suddenly I was really loving this idea.

I went to the theater and sat in the middle of the three seats. I stuck my purse and my coat on the seat to my right. I heard a woman sitting behind me mention that she would have to hold her heavy coat on her lap during the show, and I offered to let her put it on the empty seat to my left, explaining that my parents weren’t able to attend. Another woman asked me if I had tried turning the tickets in to the box office to see if they could be resold, and I explained to her that I had decided to keep them both so I could be really comfortable at the theater for the first time in my adult life, to which she smiled and nodded. Two men with tickets to the seats directly to the left of mine came in just before the show started.

I love South Pacific, and being able to stretch my legs, use both armrests, not have to hold my purse and my coat on my lap, and just generally take up as much space as I wanted to was absolutely paradise. I was having a wonderful time.

That is, right up until intermission. That’s when I learned an important lesson: Even if you do what the skinny world wants you to do and pay for extra space for yourself, if they suddenly decide they WANT that space, the notion that you paid a premium for it and have a right to use it anyway you want goes right out the window. They will complain bitterly if you invade their space, but if they see that you have a little extra space, they don’t just want to invade it– they feel entitled to it.

As soon as the lights came up, the man sitting to the left of my seats turned to me and asked why there were empty seats near me. I explained that I had planned on seeing the play with my parents, but they were too ill to attend. He said his sister was sitting a few rows back and asked if he could invite her to sit in one of my empty seats.

I guess he just assume I’d say yes. Instead, however, I very politely said, “Actually, I’d really rather you didn’t. I paid a lot of money for these seats, and since I’m kind of a big person, this is probably the only time in my life I’m going to be truly comfortable at the theater.” I frankly thought this was a perfectly reasonable explanation, not that I owed him any explanation at all. But no. He saw empty seats, and felt he entitled to determine how they should be used, regardless of the fact that I had paid more than $130 apiece for them.

I stood my ground.

He rolled his eyes, gave me a dirty look, and said, “Uh, okayyyyyy…..” Then he and the other man he was with left for intermission.

Obviously, I was the subject of their conversation during the intermission, because when they came back, the second man said to me, in the nastiest, most sarcastic tone you could imagine, “So I guess you just get to have lots and lots of space, huh? Lucky girl.” The sister also had some choice comments for me, which I was able to hear clearly despite her being two rows back.

I thought about speaking up. I mean, come on. Lucky?!? Hardly. First of all, my parents were several hundred miles away puking their guts out when they should have been enjoying a nice Christmas with their family, including a trip to the theater with me. Second, I didn’t come by these tickets by luck. I shelled out more than $400 for them, and I had every right to luxuriate in all that extra space. Just because there were no butts in those seats didn’t mean they were up for grabs to other people. It’s not like the guy’s sister was standing in the hallway– she had her own seat, it just wasn’t right next to theirs, probably because they waited until the last minute to buy tickets. Not my fault, and certainly not my problem to solve.

Realizing that saying something wasn’t going to accomplish anything, I ignored them and tried to enjoy the rest of the show. But I could hear the sister’s voice two rows back during the entire second half, whining away, and it made truly enjoying the play nearly impossible. What a rude, overly-entitled family. I bet Christmas at their house is like living in Hell.

So what is the lesson here? Because I’m a fat chick, the world expects me to purchase extra space for myself, but if somebody later decides they want that space for themselves, I’m expected to give it up for free? Sorry skinny people, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Oh wait, I forgot– skinny people don’t eat cake.

So I’m sitting there distracted by these jerks, when suddenly the time arrives in the play when the suave French plantation owner, Emil, sings “This Nearly Was Mine,” easily among the most heartbreakingly beautiful songs in all of Broadway history. I couldn’t help but notice the irony in some of the lyrics, given the way in which the family of overly-entitled skinny people sitting around me begrudged me the right to enjoy the seats I bought:

Now, now I’m alone
Still dreaming of paradise
Still saying that paradise
Once nearly was mine

Another of the most famous songs from South Pacific, and one of the reasons it was so progressive when it first came out, is “You Have to be Carefully Taught,” about the origins of prejudice and bigotry. It’s really about racial prejudice, especially in the context of interracial marriage, which is the main theme of South Pacific. But I think it applies to the origin of fat-hatred, so I’m including it here:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be carefully taught

So did I do the right thing? I mean, they really can’t have it both ways, can they?