The-F-Word.org

When I went back to college five years ago after a several year hiatus, groups of frat-like guys scared me. If I absolutely had to pass them, I’d hold my breath, bracing myself for the onslaught of fat-related comments that I expected, but in actuality, rarely came.

You see, when you’re fat, your body is on public display, an open invitation for others to comment, criticize, scrutinize, objectify, and commodify with their own brand of fat hatred. I remember these instances vividly, mental, sepia-toned flashbacks triggered by the slightest sense of familiarity.

Driving across an overpass brings back memories of my 14-year-old self, walking her dog around the neighborhood, when a truck full of guys not much older than myself loomed. Slowing down, they yell crass sexual innuendos of what they want to do with my fat body. I’m trapped between them and a 20-foot drop over rushing traffic below. They drive on, still whooping and yelling. I exhale and head home on quivering legs. Moments later, they return. I dash into the woods to escape them. They drive off, laughing.

So, when I stumbled across Jean Braithwaite’s essay “Fat Pride” in The Sun Magazine, I could fully empathize. She recounts her experiences in college, as men – yes, adult men – “mooed” her in passing.

Out of curiosity, I googled Braithwaite, an assistant English professor at the University of Texas-Pan American, and found another article, the first chapter of her unpublished novel on being fat in America, “Fat: The Story of My Life with My Body.”

Reading her story was like reading my own; we could be sisters of another, just-as-critical mother. The essay is quite long, but if you have time, it’s a good, worthwhile read.

Braithwaite first describes her teenage experiences as a “fat anorexic,” followed by a later, more “successful” bout with anorexia. But even then her disordered behavior wasn’t cause for alarm, because in our culture, the ends justify the means, and if the end result is thinness, no measure is too drastic along the journey.

Got thin, but not cadaverously thin – after all, I’d started pretty fat. I fainted a few times, but not where anyone saw… Obsessive, my mother said. Plenty of complaints about my failure to cooperate with my family’s special-occasion meals. But no interventions, no shrinks, no hospitals.

So perhaps I was never a “real” anorexic. Then again perhaps the gap between anorexics and regular women is thin, vanishingly thin.

Emphasis mine, because I think this is so very astute and so, so very true.

During the 1980s while in her twenties, Braithwaite says she discovered fat pride, but by the time she was 30, gave up on the movement, for the same reason many in the current movement have probably wrestled with:

You cannot convince people. It’s a truth universally accepted that we sculpt our bodies by our behavior… When you are fat, you live with the knowledge of how you look to other people. I could not change other people’s eyes.

Later, Braithwaite said she made a minor adjustment in her diet – she insists she wasn’t dieting - and went from 300 pounds to a size 10. But this isn’t some annoying weight loss success story. Braithwaite wonders if her non-diet is merely a “relatively comfortable form of anorexia.” Health-wise, she says she feels no different now than when she was an active fat person.

She writes:

I don’t know whether I’m doing the right thing, or a right thing, or something dangerous. One thing I’m sure of is that if I was anorexic at 20 then I was anorexic as a fat teenager too, only less successfully. Another is that if anything is admirable about me now, I had just as much of it at 300 pounds, if not more….

If I deserve to be complimented now then I deserve it for my entire adult life, all the years I’ve been fat, an abstemious, vigorous fat person.

This essay just really resonated with me, as I’m sure others can relate. Braithwaite is clearly intelligent – she has a PhD – and her writing is suffused with wit, clarity and beautiful imagery. Yet, sadly, the sum of her life’s experiences seem to be encapsulated in a battle for self. It’s as Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes in her book Fasting Girls:

Sadly, the cult of diet and exercise is the closest thing our secular society offers women in terms of a coherent philosophy of self.

I often wonder what the world would be like if talented, educated and passionate people like Braithwaite (and myself) directed the force of their efforts from changing their bodies to changing the world.