I always wear headphones when I leave my house. I like music more than I like people. My anxiety sometimes means that a lot of noises – say from traffic and people and music from shops – stress me out to a certain extent. But more importantly, I get shouted at in the street. It does not happen every day. But it does happen. Enough that I feel safer with my headphones on.
I stay away from nightclubs. Again, I am not a fan of people or loud, fast music. It is not a big sacrifice that I have made, cutting out nightclubs. Even if I were not fat, I probably would have stayed away from them. But I had a period of trying to fit in when I went to them quite a bit. I was of the opinion – or hope – that if only I didn’t think about being fat, maybe people could not see that I was. Maybe all those people who said, ‘No, you’re not fat,’ were actually right. Maybe I could trick more people.
Allow me to introduce to you the normalisation of the abuse and violence against fat people in the form of ‘fun party games’. Two examples of these are ‘pull a pig’ (where a group of guys compete to ‘pull the ugliest-looking woman’ to win the game) and ‘fat girl rodeo’ (when a guy pulls a fat girl in a club, whispers this in her ear to let her know, and then holds on to her tight, like a ‘rodeo’, as she tries to get away). These may sound like urban legends or something I have made up to make my point, but I’m afraid it’s very possible to google both of these ‘games’ and see many examples. And I know plenty of people who have been victims of these ‘games’.
When I was twenty years old, I kissed a boy in a nightclub. A few seconds into the kiss, I heard the sound of a group of guys laughing. The guy kissing me started laughing too. I was so embarrassed that I kept kissing him because I thought that it would make it worse if he realised that I knew what was happening.
Only a couple of weeks later, I chatted to a dreadful guy in a bar. I was bored because my friend was dancing and this guy seemed more interesting than staring into a wall. It turned out that the wall would have been a bundle of joy compared to him. I only spoke to him for ten minutes when he suddenly started laughing and said, ‘I can’t believe you thought I was going to fuck you. Ew, gross,’ and then he left. The loud music in the bar made it impossible for him to hear what I shouted at him as he was walking away. I think that might be why people like him enjoy nightclubs. The loud music makes it impossible for them to ever be called ‘cunts’ to their faces.
I have rejected guys who gasped, ‘But you are fat!’ as if that was their get-in-for-free card. I have been chatted up at 2 a.m. by men who seemed close to crumbling under the pressure of needing to ‘pull’, and who had hoped that I would be grateful for their attention.
After a certain point, when men started flirting with me, I stopped trusting them. Even after they eventually wore me down, I would hold my breath and await the inevitable punchline to our night together. There are men I slept with years ago who I still sometimes expect to show up at my door with a sign that says, ‘Ha! Joke! You actually think I wanted to fuck you?’ and a part of me would be relieved to see them.
I once listened to a podcast in which a comedian joked about fat women in nightclubs. He said, ‘Fat women can definitely pull in nightclubs … Just after 3 a.m.,’ and the rest of the podcast group laughed. Only a year before I heard him say that sentence in my headphones as I was sitting on a bus, he had invited me to his flat at 7 p.m. one night. When he opened the door, he was sober and he had lit candles everywhere. After we had made love, he begged me to spend the night because he wanted to have breakfast with me in the morning.
A few years ago, a sailor stood in front of me in a comedy club after I had walked off stage. A sailor. In an authentic sailor’s outfit. With the hat and everything. I blinked a few times, trying to make sense of the scenario, when my friend, a fellow comedian, swooped in and introduced me to the sailor. It turns out the sailor was an officer in the Royal Navy, who worked in a nuclear submarine. He would be under water, in the nuclear submarine, for three months at a time and then on land for three months till he went back out. And the first thing he would always do, right when they reached land, was to go to this particular comedy club and watch comedy.
Now, I take pride in not finding uniforms sexy, especially when they belong to someone with governmental authority. I absolutely detest war and I think that the fetishisation of the army is disgusting … until a sailor in a little hat is standing in front of me with a wink in his eye and a smile on his face. And dimples. I remember dimples. I very well near saluted him. I was not even appalled at how quickly I lost all sense of my principles. I figured that once we were married, we could start working on his values, slowly introduce him to the idea of being anti-military, but you know, we’d keep the uniform.
He asked me my name and said he had enjoyed my set. I immediately interrupted him and said, ‘How big is the underwater-boat?’ and ‘How do you breathe underwater in the big underwater-boat?’ and ‘Have you ever seen a really big fish?’ because I am excellent at flirting.
He tipped his little sailor’s hat and said, ‘Maybe we should have a drink.’
I snorted loudly, ‘MAYBE?’ and then, ‘I mean, yeah, cool, that’d be … cool.’
And he said, ‘You know, I heard your jokes about people who like fat people and … I just think it’s so true. I’m away for three months at a time so my standards are also very low, so sometimes I also just settle for a fat girl.’
It’s amazing how quickly you can go from being anti-military to pro-men-in-uniform and all the way back to anti-military again. There was a huge discrepancy between his facial expression and what he had said. He seemed to still be flirting, still be smiling, still be complimenting me. Yet what he had said was fundamentally dehumanising.
‘So, what do you want to drink?’ he said. There must have been a long pause, because he seemed confused as to why I was not talking. I figure I must have just been blinking.
‘I’m … good,’ I said and slowly started walking backwards. He looked wounded for a second. Then I couldn’t see his face anymore. War sucks.
The Big Fat Friend trope is commonly used in modern culture. Like how Fat Monica was Rachel’s Big Fat Friend in Friends. The woman at the party who is unfuckable, therefore annoying. ‘Funny’ songs have been written about the Big Fat Friend and performed to sell-out theatres, whole movies have been based on the idea, and it is one of the main ‘ways to pick up a woman’ in some of the books for potential pick-up artists.fn1 I do not have a count of how many times I have been faced with a completely indifferent man trying to half-heartedly keep me entertained while his friend is chatting up my thin friend. The idea being that I am jealous of the attention that my thin friend is getting and therefore will do anything to ruin her night. So men will have to dismantle me before they can successfully get with the thin friend who is fortunate enough to be worthy of their attention. This is all awfully heteronormative and boring.fn2 However, so is the world we exist in, so I want to address this.
Men’s opinions of me are irrelevant. Men’s opinions of you are irrelevant too. Yet we are constantly being fed this idea that it matters. Men particularly are told that they should voice their opinions loudly. That we yearn for their approval. And to be fair, a lot of us do – fairly often. Because that is what we have been taught as well. Hello, Patriarchy, my good old friend.
This is how this Big Fat Friend trope can legitimately be harmful. The fact that it is even a thing means that, suddenly, a whole society agrees that you – just by existing in a nightclub or a bar – are annoyingly in the way.
Before continuing with this chapter, I had to ask my friend, ‘Do you think everyone gets jealous?’ even though I know the answer. She assured me that, Yes, yes everyone has experienced feeling jealous at one point or another. That is also my assumption but jealousy, for me, is such a shameful feeling that I wanted to be sure before I made this next sweeping statement. Because this is something that is so inherently true for me and I wish it wasn’t.
Being the Big Fat Friend of your worthy and generally-considered-beautiful friend against your will over and over again is an excellent way of becoming jealous of them. I do not think that this is spoken about much because our thin friends of course do not want us to be the Big Fat Friends. They never asked for us to be put in this situation. Nevertheless, here we are. And you are being forced into a strange competition with your friend where the prize is the worthless attention of a man, a prize which you have been conditioned to believe is not utterly useless.
Friendships between women are empowering. And important. And I treasure every single friend I have. And I appreciate that jealousy is a ridiculously irrational feeling. That being said, let me tell you about my friend Michelle.
Michelle is thin. Michelle lives up to the conventional beauty standards. She is, in fact, quite extraordinarily beautiful. I once put up a photo of her eye (I repeat: of just her eye) on Instagram and I got messages from men asking me who my friend was and if she was single. Michelle works out and Michelle eats raw, clean, vegetably food. She is one of those people.
Michelle once said to me, ‘What do you do when you have too many matches on Tinder?’
Michelle has had two – two – men show up outside of her window with guitars trying to woo her. You know, stuff that is only romantic if you are inside of an American teen movie about a guy who is essentially a stalker. One New Year’s Eve, she got three phone calls from men declaring their love for her. And we are not talking drunken sloppy phone calls either. These were grown, sober men who had been planning these declarations for weeks. The love for her was overflowing inside of them and they had to, simply had to, tell her now. Only she was busy – just on the phone with that other guy, juggling three pounding hearts and penises in her perfectly small hands.
I had to stop going to my local pizza place after I had gone there with Michelle, because they would not stop asking me about her. Why on earth my friend was single. Where she was. If I could bring her. If I could give her a message? If she wanted free pizza. (That one hurt the most.)
Michelle was at a party once. She realised she had forgotten her lipstick. She hailed a cab. Told the cab to wait for her by her flat. It did. She went up, got her lipstick and got back in the same cab, which then took her back to the party. When she was about to pay, the man behind the wheel said, ‘Oh. I’m not a cab,’ and she stepped out, without paying and went back to the party. The man drove off, continuing with his life.
Let me rephrase that for you. Michelle stepped onto the pavement and raised her hand and, as if summoned, a man stopped his car – a man, probably on his way somewhere important – a man with shit to do, a life to lead – just to help her out. Drove her all the way home, waited for her in his car – only to drive her back to the party when she returned. She left his car unscathed and with all of her money – and he drove off. I sometimes struggle to get an actual cab.
There came a point where I noticed that whenever I got male attention, I would tell Michelle. I would send her screenshots of flirty messages and talk about it at great length. Regardless of how interested I was in the person I was receiving the texts from. Admitting this makes me feel empty. The way male attention becomes a currency in our friendships. The way I attempted to convince her of my worth, something that she had never questioned.
Michelle and I had to have a talk. We discussed the way we added so much value to whatever men said and did and how it affected our friendship. How interesting and valuable our conversations would be if we actually forgot about men for a second and started talking about work, ideas, art and ourselves. We started sharing dreams and secrets and we embarked on each of our own journeys towards bettering our lives and confidence – both aiming for a life in which our opinions of the men in our lives mattered more than their opinions of us.
It is hard breaking out of this pattern. We are expected to be ‘fuckable’. ‘Unfuckable’ women have no value. ‘Unfuckable’ doesn’t sell cars or gyms. And if you are fat, you are automatically ‘unfuckable’.
There is this notion that fat people are desexual. As I discussed briefly in the previous chapter, fat people are often portrayed as either sexually aggressive or without a sexuality. Fat people rarely get to be sexual or sexy. And so the assumption that we are desperate builds.
Fat people being seen as desexual is more than just a bit offensive. A friend of mine, who is fat, when talking about the time he was raped, is often told that he should just be grateful that someone wanted to fuck him. That sounds desperately similar to a time when I walked home at night and a man spat at me, ‘If you weren’t so fat, I’d rape you,’ which, apart from being awful, is also just not really a way to make me lose weight. Rape is hardly the carrot that’s going to make me join the gym.
Fat people are not desexual.fn3 Fat people fuck.
I am walking living proof that fat people have sex. I can tell you that it has happened. Quite a few times, even. I can provide you with a list of names and places. Actually, the list of names would probably get me into trouble, but I can get you the list of places:
Various flats in Copenhagen, a hotel in Copenhagen,fn4 a hotel in Leicester, a storage room in a pub in Swansea,fn5 a bush in Copenhagen, another bush in Copenhagen,fn6 in a car, two London flats, a flat in Edinburgh, a hotel in Edinburgh, a hotel in Berlin, a hotel in Italy, a hotel in London and an Airbnb in Utrecht. I have had sex with fat guys and thin guys. Guys with rock-hard muscles and tattoos, guys with floppy bellies hanging over their penises, guys in their twenties with impending beer bellies, guys with high standards and high self-esteem and guys with low standards and failing comedy careers. But … that’s it. I have had sex maybe a hundred timesfn7 since I gracefully lost my virginity in a storage room at the age of sixteen. This is including a three-year-long relationship. But I talk about these hundred times a lot. I am writing this in my book. I speak about my sexuality as openly as I can. And as much as I can. It was not until recently that I realised why.
A few years ago, I was at a party. A colleague of mine came over. He was one of those younger white comedians who seem quite nerdy and talk about how they cannot get laid. We talked a bit. He then leaned in (#LeanIn, take notes, ladies) and sighed, ‘I just don’t know how to talk to women.’
It took me till the next morning before it hit me. But – that was literally what you were doing, white, nerdy comedian-boy. I was there and you were talking.
It was not as much the sentence as much as his voice being unshaken, unbothered by my presence. Because he knew exactly how to talk to women. What he meant was ‘women he finds attractive’. Women who are options. Women who are fuckworthy.
As a fat woman, you do not exist.
People will say things like, ‘Why is everyone here in a relationship?’ and you will want to scream into their face: I am single. I am here. I exist.
But you don’t scream. Because they mean well. They never said it to hurt you, they never wanted you to feel bad. They just assumed that you were complicit in the idea that you were not a sexual or romantic option.
They just
assumed that
you were
complicit
in the idea
that you were
not a sexual
or romantic
option.
I slept with a man in 2010. I slept with the same man again in 2012. Afterwards, as he was getting dressed, he said, ‘How many other people have you slept with this week?’
Not in a judgemental way, not in a demeaning way. He was genuinely interested. We were sort-of friends, sort-of colleagues. Both comedians, so there was an implicit acceptance of our brokenness. The question didn’t offend me.
‘Uhm. I have not had sex with anyone since, well, you. Two years ago.’
He was stunned. His wrinkled forehead and raised eyebrow told me that he did not believe me. ‘You don’t have to say that, I don’t mind.’
It was true. It really was.
It took me a few years to realise that a lot of people in my personal life seemed to think I had a lot of sex, like the vulgar exception to the rule that fat people are not sexual beings. When confronted with this, they barely knew why they assumed so. They put it down to the candid way I talked about sex, my public flirtation with a large number of people and how I often discussed sexual topics on stage.fn8
And one day it all clicked. There is a loudness to my sexuality, because it is so purposefully ignored. If I express it loudly enough, perhaps it will finally be believed to exist. Like everything else about me. My femininity, my emotional complexity, my political viewpoints. It is all loud. In a boring attempt to shout it into existence so it will be heard by the conscience of society. When I look at a person I have had sex with, my eyes are screaming at them, ‘You are now evidence that the world is wrong about us.’
We feel, we exist, we fuck.