Fat Politics

by Laurie Ann Lepoff

From Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser (Spinsters/ Aunt Lute, 1983).

This paper was written for Lesbians; and if non-Lesbian people read it, I have a concern that it not be taken as a put-down of the Lesbian community. I wrote it with the belief and trust that it will be heard, for if I had never come out, I doubt that I would have grown to a place in myself where I could have made such a statement.

In my first two years of high school I was smart and I was petite. I kept a safe distance from my peers by being a "brain." No one knew quite what to make of me, but they left me alone. Their response was one of respect and even fear. When I got fat, the difference was unbelievable. It was as if everything I had to say was invalidated by my fat. Nobody took me seriously anymore. I was ridiculed and scorned. Nobody is more aware than I of the privilege and power that comes with acceptable appearance, because the power I lost when I lost access to that appearance was enormous. And I was kept powerless by a system which is insidious. Everywhere I looked I saw media impressing upon me the power of being thin in the world- and the degradation of being fat. The message is internalized by everyone.

Even those closest to me, who loved me and thought they were doing so for my own good, tried to shame me into losing weight. It is as if fat women are under an obligation to be ashamed and disgusted with ourselves, to be constantly at war with food, to be always on a diet or promising to start one next week. We are made to feel that we don't have the right to nurture ourselves, we are embarrassed to be caught eating! Who does she think she is anyway, eating? She's fat. She should be eating cottage cheese and celery. It is not our right to eat? Who the hell are you to be even thinking that you know what I should be doing for my own body and mind's health, that self-deprivation is for my own good?

A friend once told me that her mother, who was fat, stopped going outside after a while and my friend never understood why. My friend was neither blind nor stupid, yet she really meant it - she never understood why. We are made to feel that we don't have the right to walk around on the streets, so repulsive are we. There have been times in my life when I refused to go outside for months except when absolutely necessary because I could not take the jeers and public ridicule that I endure today nearly every time I have the audacity to walk around in broad daylight.

A few years ago I spent three months going out every day to look for a job, and it was easily the most degrading and humiliating experience of my life: There is no prejudice quite so blatant as that which exists on the job market against fat women. I couldn't get a job as a dishwasher and no secret was made as to why. The only employers who hire people like me are those few who are smart enough to know that once they get me, I'll most likely be so grateful that I'll never complain, never quit, and never ask for a raise because we both know what my chances are for ever getting hired anywhere else.

There is little validation anywhere for our struggle. We are rarely encouraged to love ourselves (even by our "liberated" feminist sisters), to consider ourselves beautiful, to nurture ourselves. We are expected to hate ourselves, deprive ourselves, and consider ourselves ugly. We maintain a shred of dignity by convincing ourselves that we are working on getting thin and that eventually we will be OK (thin). We desperately need each other's support to feel strong, powerful, beautiful, and-most importantly -angry. Yet we are so accustomed to despising our own bodies that we despise the fat bodies of our sisters. We oppress each other outrageously. We get together and talk about diets. We don't take our pain seriously. We don't validate each other's experience in this bitter bigoted world. We skim over the agony of our lives under the assumption that everything that happens to us is really our own fault and we deserve it for being fat. We don't stand up against outrageous bigotry because we accept that it is somehow justified. I feel more solidarity with a fat suburban housewife than I do with my slender Lesbian sisters, although I can expect as much support from that housewife as I could from a closet dyke who believes herself to be sick and perverted. I don't need to hear from women who are not fat and who "just happen" to be in relationships with other women who are not fat that I need to learn to accept and think of myself as beautiful. My negative self-image does not exist in a political vacuum.

When I lost a lot of weight and was thin, I could talk to anyone about the terror of getting fat again because I knew that as an attractive woman I would be listened to. When I got fat again, I didn't dare speak to the oppression of actually being fat, because who would take me seriously? Fat people, particularly women, are not respected. It is assumed that our problem would be solved if we would just lose weight. When I was seeing a shrink who was (of course) not fat, I would talk circles around what was really bothering me before I would admit to a thin person that I felt oppressed around being fat, for fear she would say (or think), "Well, why don't you just go on a diet?"

When, in fact, I mustered up the courage to speak of my oppression to a friend, someone I love very very much, she responded just so: "But isn't there some choice?" she said. "Choice" is not the issue. The "problem" is not my being fat. The problem is how I am treated because of it. You don't solve racism by bleaching everyone's skin the same color (white, of course). Remove the offending characteristic and everything will be peachy. Make us all the same and we'll stop oppressing each other.

I responded to my friend's question with considerable antagonism. "Why don't you just go straight if you feel so fucking oppressed as a Lesbian?" I spat into the phone. "I'm sure you could pass if you really tried. All it would take is a little will power."

More than anything I wanted, I want, to be understood, but I resent like hell having to explain myself, as if to excuse myself for being fat. If I tell a sad enough story, maybe she'll understand and give me a little support. Just how bad do things have to be before I get to just go ahead and be fat? Why the fuck do I have to explain myself to you, you slender, privileged bitch? You live in this world, you have eyes, you see what abuse I have to take! How much pain must I suffer before you accept my oppression as valid? Who the hell are you to sit in judgment on me?

I cried for an hour after that confrontation, feeling incredibly alienated and alone. I had jeopardized that feeling in our relationship, our basic shared struggle as Lesbians facing a straight world, by exposing another oppression which we don't share, and which is so great that by comparison I hardly feel my oppression as a Lesbian. And she seemed to respond with total lack of understanding. She didn't know what I was talking about. I thought, hell, if this is how it feels to expose myself to someone who loves me, how can I confront someone who doesn't even like me? I thought maybe I should sit on these angry feelings and accept the support I can get for what I can get it for. If I lose my Lesbian support, I'll have nothing.

But as it happened my friend really took in the words I spat at her in my rage, and now I have her support where I really need it. It is clear to me that I will never get the support I need unless I stand up for myself and demand to be taken seriously.

In the straight world, the excuse for oppressing fat women is simply that fat is considered ugly, and women are expected to be attractive for men. In the Lesbian culture, the excuse is health. You're fat because you don't take care of yourself--it's unhealthy. Besides which it doesn't fit the popular image of your healthy athletic dyke. What utter crap. People do all kinds of horrible things to their bodies for a variety of reasons and are not expected to be asexual because of it. Smokers screw up not only their own health but everyone else's who has to breathe the same air, and they are not degraded by their peers and each other for "letting themselves go" and ruining their health. Is it because they are less offensive or could it be that they are encouraged and promoted by the media and we are not? "Health" is used as an excuse to degrade us, just as the medical establishment would have it that everything that ails us from influenza to clap is due in its entirety to our "unhealthy" condition--our fat. I know a woman who has scars in her throat from sticking a toothbrush in it to force herself to throw up every day, along with eating two boxes of Ex-Lax in order to lose weight and I wonder how many of you would consider her actions healthier than mine? Is it really my health that worries you, or is it that somewhere in your mind you still think I'm obligated to be beautiful in some male-defined way?

Everyone who has been on the diet cycle is familiar with a range of food mind-fucks that go with the dieting expectation. We use food as a drug-to numb ourselves from the pain of our lives -and hate ourselves for it afterwards when the numbness wears off. We go on strict diets and when we slip up a little we stuff ourselves the rest of the day because that day is ruined anyway. We become immersed in hopeless despair--we can't stand to be consumed by the struggle with food every second of the day-- we give in-- we hate ourselves. We eat until we are so sick we can't move. We feel so much shame we refuse to leave our rooms or the house we live in. I have done all of these things for long periods in my life, and I am not unusual: all fat women know them, they are the result of our oppression.

When I lost sixty pounds, very fast, once in my life, I had to get my head into a mind-set of self-hatred, non-nurturance, complete self-denial to do it. When I tried to get out of that headset, I felt like I would have to spend every second of my life fighting the urge to eat. I felt I had no control. I tried to fill up my life with so much activity that I wouldn't have time to eat. I knew I could never relax. I felt like the effort would drive me crazy. The thought of getting fat again and everybody seeing it and losing respect for me, the thought of losing the power I had gained by acquiring a "normal" appearance, was so terrifying that I was in a state of panic. No one who knew me then had any idea how close I came to killing myself at that time. They all equated my new attractive shape with a state of physical and mental health. My mother still carries pictures around of me when I was on the verge of suicide, to show people how beautiful and healthy I once was.

My point, in case anyone has missed it, is that I am infinitely more healthy now than I have ever been. I rarely eat compulsively, numb myself with food, I never feel obligated to eat ten candy bars if I "blow it" by eating one. I made a decision never to diet again. I don't spend any of my precious energy on self-destructive battles with food. And for this decision, I lose the power to command respect in the straight world, to find employment, to engage in physical exercise in public without incurring public ridicule, and many other basic human rights.

Do I have to fucking beg to be respected in my own community, to get validation for my struggle to love and respect myself in the face of enormous pressure to feel ashamed instead? I think I deserve a pat on the back for just having survived my life. Fuck you all for your damned righteousness and your insensitivity and your screwed-up male values of acceptable standards of sexual attractiveness. You don't just "happen" to not be attracted to fat women (as lovers, that is-I'm sure such a thing would never prejudice you against your friends), like straight women just "happen" to prefer men to fulfill their sexual and emotional needs. Did you ever come out (as a Lesbian) to a straight friend and learn that the thought of making love with a woman is so repulsive to her that she thinks she would vomit on the spot? Where do you think she learned that response? A facilitator at a drop-in rap group once told me that the reality of the situation which I just had to deal with was that fat simply is not attractive. I didn't question it at the time, but now I ask, who says so? The media? The men? Could it be that you all just swallowed the package that's been crammed down our throats since infancy and you never thought to look beyond it to consider something else?

This article originally appeared in Plexus, May 1975, and in Issues in Radical Therapy, Summer 1975.