I wish I could tell you that this is going to be easy. It is probably not. If you are like most people, you have, in your life, tried to lose weight. Quite possibly, unsuccessfully, seeing as that is the very nature of dieting. We now know how near-impossible it can be to lose weight – and shedding the weight of society’s expectations and body-image standards is difficult too. The difference is the following: You could lose the weight and still end up miserable. You would just be miserable and thin. Or you can lose the weight of societal pressure and that might just be the only chance you have of truly finding joy within yourself. Of being truly happy.
I am sorry that this is a chapter. And that it is the longest one in the book. You were not born hating your body; this would not have happened without the interference by an entire industry that thrives off people’s insecurities about their bodies. In theory, this chapter should not be directed at you and it should not be called ‘How to love your body’. It should be directed at them and it should be called ‘How to Stop Making Other People Hate Their Bodies’, because this is a huge and comprehensive problem that affects everyone and the responsibility and blame lies with them and not you. The focus should never be on you and all the things you could or should do to become happier. The focus should rest on those who made you feel this way in the first place. So let us all collectively send a proper stink-eye to those who created this internalised hatred as we delve into your safari towards self-love.fn1
When I started this peregrination towards self-love, no one warned me how difficult it was going to be. How literally everything was going to change. You essentially need a complete rewiring. This is going to be hard. This is the Mount Everest of challenges you might face. In a lot of ways, ironically, this chapter starts the exact same way a lot of diet books start.fn2 With asking you to please see this through, to be strong. The difference between learning to adore your fat and trying to lose it is this: learning to love yourself – or unlearning to hate yourself – will essentially make you feel good. It will feel good in your core. You will gain autonomy, confidence and your own humanity. You will look at yourself and see someone who is attractive and worthy of love.fn3 So – same results as what all the diet books promise you, except you can eat whatever you want. And not in the diet-book way, where ‘everything you want’ has a fun caveat when you actually open the book. Turns out, you can eat everything you want as (sing-song tone) long as it’s kale. It is never kale. No one ever wants kale. I mean ‘you can eat whatever you want’. You can eat pizza for breakfast, sweets after 6 p.m., drink wine with friends and you never, ever have to count a calorie or weigh yourself again.
All of that ends now. You are now free. Imagine looking at a menu, deciding what looks the most delicious and ordering it – without feeling guilt or shame. Without apologising with your words or your eyes to the waiter and the people around the table. Imagine having dessert, not a single part of you thinking about calories or weight. You will come home, happy and content after a huge, delicious meal – you will look at your stomach in the mirror and you will smile. You will think ‘I am one hot piece of ass!’fn4 and you will mean it. You are free. You no longer have to be thin. You no longer have to apologise for who you are and how you look. You are fat and happy.
If that is a place you want to go, I need you to know that it won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Keep that in mind.
This guide starts with me telling you that you need to doubt everything that you think is true. It will be like when you start a diet by taking all the good-tasting food in your house and throwing it in the dumpster and pour soap all over it, so you cannot later go back and eat cake out of the bin.fn5 Except, instead of food in a bin with soap all over it, it is society’s fucked-up beauty standards in a bin with soap all over it.
Once you know about fatphobia, you start to notice it in even the smallest fragments of your social life. From your friends saying, ‘You look amazing, have you lost weight?’ which suggests that thin simply looks better than fat, or from all of the headlines on the covers of magazines urging people to try their new diets. It might be the lack of fat characters in movies and TV, or the way ‘fat’ is constantly used as a derogatory term.
Fat being a negative thing seems to be largely considered a truth. I am here to tell you that it is not. One of the most difficult things to do is to question what other people deem just common knowledge. I am pretty sure that the first time someone pointed out that the Earth, perhaps, was round instead of flat, everyone around the table looked at each other, rolled their eyes and said, ‘Steve is drunk again.’fn6
If you start believing that fat is not a bad thing, your life will get simultaneously better and worse. Let us start with how it will get worse.
I keep imagining the weekly brunch I participated in with some women from my work, a good seven years ago now. We liked to Sex and the City it upfn7 on a Saturday late morning, drinking cocktails and gossiping. It was the highlight of my week. It felt good. It felt like I was living up to the expectations of how I should act as a woman. Women Do Brunch. Women Gossip. I felt like I was a real woman. They were also the only friends I had. Among the commonly discussed topics at the Saturday brunch were boys, fashion and weight loss. We discussed how we were all too fat, too big, too much. Which diets we were trying out, which diets we were failing this week and which diets we would try the next. Plans for the future were discussed – the future, in which we were all thinner. I did not discover Fat Liberation till years later, when the friendships had all faded.fn8 I often think about how I would have felt, if I had discovered it during that time. Realising that our discussions about weight were toxic and damaging would have meant that I would have had to take a step back and not engage with them. I would have had to confront my friends. I would have had to explain to them why I would no longer participate in weight-loss chat and that I would rather not have to listen to it. I’m pretty sure this would have ruined brunch. It took me years to acquire the vocabulary to have these discussions so I am pretty sure I would never even have been able to explain to my friends why I suddenly needed to distance myself from the Saturday brunches. And I think of this so often. How you might be in the same situation.
If this is the first you ever read about fatness in this way, chances are, you are surrounded by fatphobia in your workplace and your family and social life. Because, let’s face it, we all are. In order to properly embrace Fat Liberation, suddenly your whole world view will need to change. Every little conversation can become a possible battlefield. If you want to completely rid your life of toxic fatphobia, you may need to have some difficult conversations with colleagues, friends and family.
I acknowledge that this is terrifying. There are friends I no longer see, family members I no longer speak to, movies I cannot watch, music I cannot listen to, because of fatphobia and my awareness of it.
Excluding fat-hate from your life is not a necessity. You can carry on the way you are now and still work on your feelings towards yourself. I am just telling you that it is difficult. And there is a chance that you might not want to carry on the way you live now. Cutting the fatphobia out of your life is one of the most helpful and healthy things you can do. It is toxic – and it is scary and difficult. Loving yourself wholly is difficult and scary. But once you get to the other side, the grass is actually greener. Not only is the grass greener, but it is positively trampled flat by a horde of fat people dancing happily on top of it. Naked, flaunting our big, floppy bellies about the place.
I want you to feel warned. If you embark on this pilgrimagefn9 towards self-love, you have to be prepared for things to change. There is something very sweet and comforting about societal conventions.
An acquaintance of mine raised a question at a dinner party a while ago. She has a son who was being bullied for being fat. She posed the question, ‘What do we do? Do we tell him that he is fine the way he is or do we help him lose weight?’ Initially this sounds as though it shouldn’t even be a question. To me, the answer should be so simple. When I unleashed all my suppressed fat anger onto the table and started defending this poor boy – napkins, butter rolls and cutlery flying freely across the table – I realised that the answer was not simple. Teaching the child that he is okay is the noble and right thing to do. But it will not align with the world view he is being subjected to every single day of his life. Children are logical creatures. How will you respond when he says, ‘But if I am all right, why do they make fun of me?’ and there is no way out of it unless you manage to somehow explain that the whole world is bullshit. Of course, it is important to teach your child that they have worth and that they are perfect just the way they are, but is it possible to explain capitalism, feminism and fatphobia to a child? Is it even possible to explain that things are fundamentally unfair?
I understand the people who would decide to just help the child lose weight. I understand that, even though I know first hand how damaging that is. The alternative is imagining a child rocking up to school, trying to become friends with a bunch of kids who are just trying to live up to society’s expectations of them. I have been there and I know that it is lonely. So what do you want your child to be? Full of self-love but lonely or self-hating but conforming?
This is why these conversations need to be had from the earliest age possible. I have heard horror stories about Other Parents and how it’s almost impossible to speak to them about their children. I know that I, childfree, can’t easily tell you to have a little fat-positive chat with all the parents in your children’s school or nursery because I don’t know any parents who wouldn’t throw something at me if I suggested that. Make sure body-shaming is forbidden in the playgrounds and classrooms. Ask the teachers to not use anti-fat language or teaching materials. Suggest to parents and teachers that the children are taught about fatphobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, Islamophobia, transphobia, queerphobia and ableism and that there is an ongoing conversation about how to make sure that the classroom is not a toxic space. Now, I know from first-hand experiences that teachers and parents (like all people ever) will not necessarily be super open to change themselvesfn10 – and all we can ever do is try – but what I am saying is: It seems like the temporary solution to the problem. Until, of course, the actual solution: a complete dismantling of the structurally oppressive system.
As an adult, it is easier not being lonely. The internet is a wonderful place where you can essentially find anyone you want to mingle with. Facebook groups full of glorious fat people arranging fat-positive nightclubs, fat clothes swaps, fat art shows, fat conferences. There are podcasts with and about fat people in them, fat summer camps, fat fashion shows. Fat blogs and vlogs and Instagram accounts. You do not have to be alone with your fatness.
And that is the positive side of this – learning to love yourself and accept your fatness might create some imbalance in your life and it will take some adjustment. But there is this glorious world full of fat people ready to welcome you into our world, where you are considered beautiful and worthy and deserving of the same rights. Where there is no wrong way to be. It is a wonderful little corner of the world and it does not seem as if a lot of people understand us or accept us. So you no longer have to be sad or lonely.
The road to here is long and difficult but I hope you are willing to go down it and begin your excursion towards self-love.
Here is the thing. There is a good chance that it is too late for you to go back. You now know and understand what the alternative to accepting this new world view is. You can continue to believe that fat equals bad, unhealthy or unattractive, and you can continue to attempt to lose weight, knowing that the chances are that you will never be thinner than you are now. Being thin makes life easier, as you are no longer part of that oppressed group of people. But you are not guaranteed happiness, regardless of how privileged you are. Happiness is easier to achieve when you are not battling structural oppression on a daily basis, but when it comes down to it, the subjective hatred you feel about your body is just that – subjective. Meaning it is something you can change – without having to change your body.
You can just change your mind.
If you continue to believe that fat is inherently a bad thing, you will spend the rest of your life fearing it. Each meal can become a threat. A life full of limitations, restrictions and negativity. All in order to become or stay thin. Most people live like this – because we have been taught that thin means happy. Look at those beautiful and thin women in the diet ads, laughing at salads. Who would not want to be so happy that they find themselves erupting into laughter over lettuce?
So here is the trick. You can actually be just as happy as legume lady without having to limit your intake to stuff that is green and tasteless. You do not have to be thin to be happy.
You do not have to be thin to be happy.
You do not have to be thin to feel good about yourself.
You do not have to be thin to be loved and wanted.
You do not have to be thin to think you are sexy and beautiful.
You do not have to be thin to do yoga or to go swimming, to wear a bathing suit or a crop top, you do not have to be thin to follow your dreams.fn11
You do not have to be thin.
The gist of it: The very first step is learning, accepting and believing that being fat is not a bad thing. It seems like such a simple thing to state towards the end of the book, because by now I hope I have sufficiently made that point, but it is absolutely crucial. Society has successfully placed a voice within all of us that constantly tells us that fat is worth fearing. I can go into a random cafe and say to a group of people, ‘I feel fat,’ and they will say, ‘Don’t say that, you’re not fat,’ regardless of the fact that I am actually fat and that the word fat is technically just a descriptive word and not something I can feel. I cannot feel brunette. It is widely accepted that ‘fat’ equals ‘bad’.
And it is wrong. You need to believe that it is wrong. If we take it one step at a time.
The notion that fat is not beautiful: There are two sides to beauty. There is beauty in the socially acceptable sense. The beauty ideal. What has been deemed beautiful. It is this idea of beauty that is terribly damaging because it leads to people who do not fit into this category being discriminated against and oppressed. This definition of ‘beauty’ is very carefully constructed and forced upon us from a very early age. In this understanding, fat is not beautiful because fat is not acceptable. This idea that beauty is objective is the reason why I, throughout this book, have used Chris Pratt as an example of a Classic Hot Guy that we can just all agree is sexy. He is completely interchangeable with other white, cis Hollywood hunks like Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling or Channing Tatum. (In reality, if I really had to fantasise about marrying a cis man I found attractive, like John Goodman or Danny DeVito, the jokes would not work. You would be slightly confused and not certain if the people I mentioned were somehow the joke.)
The other side is the individual’s perception of beauty. The subjective interpretation. Naturally, a lot of us are prone to preferring society’s idea of beauty because we are so easily manipulated. But to a certain point. From then on, what happens inside of our brains is the very definition of subjective. There are loads of people who find fat people beautiful. I believed that beauty was one particular thing for most of my life. Until I rewired my brain. And what I saw in the mirror seemed to change, even though it remained the same. I suddenly found and saw the beauty in the body that I had hated. When you think of it, it is ridiculous to assume that we all find the same thing hot. It’s important to attempt to dismantle the beauty ideals that we are all forced to survive under, but it’s also important to dismantle those beliefs within yourself.
The notion that fat means lazy, greedy, unintelligent, evil, non-sexual, etc.: You can continue this list yourself – all the personality traits that you subconsciously combine with fatness. The fact that none of these are true should be so obvious that I feel bad even spending precious space in this book saying it. You know it is not true. I know it is not true. Even the most fat-loathing person in the world would do a double-take if you asked him to bet all his life savings on this being true. Despite this, we often swing these words around alongside ‘fat’, like it is a fact. ‘Oh, he is so fat and lazy,’ and it just sounds true. If I said, ‘You thin lazy bastard,’ it would seem weird. We should have reached a point by now where we know that how a person looks does not mean they are a certain type of person with specific traits.
The notion that fat is unhealthy: See Chapter 7. If you still disagree, meet me at the car park closest to your house at 4 p.m. on Friday and I will fight you.
Perhaps it is easier to look at it like this: being fat describes that your body is rounder and softer than people who are less round and less soft. That is it. Fat describes a body shape or the amount of fat you have on your body. It is a neutral thing. If you must add any emotional connotations or moral connotations to it, add positive ones. Most importantly: get rid of all the negative ones.
Owning the word ‘fat’ was the most important step of my pilgrimage towards self-love. ‘Fat’ was a weapon that had been used against me my entire life. Taking the word, using it about myself, stripping it of its negative connotations was like grabbing the gun out of someone’s hands and pointing it right back at them.
And essentially, it was fairly easy.
‘Fat’ is not a negative word. I repeat: ‘fat’ is not a negative word. ‘Fat’ has been made to mean something negative through society’s fatphobia. ‘Fat’ has been made to mean greedy, lazy, selfish, unintelligent, annoying, evil, unattractive, in the way and excessive. But actually going back to basics, to the actual origin and meaning of the word: it is not a negative thing. It is a descriptive word describing the size of your body.
The upset or hurt that you have been taught to connect with the word ‘fat’ has nothing to do with the actual word or – and this is very important – with any facts. Being fat is not intrinsically a negative thing, in the same way as being a redhead or tall or wearing a purple T-shirt says nothing about what your core values are or how objectively good-looking you are.
I understand that the word ‘fat’ can hurt. For many of us, it has been thrown at us from moving vehicles, from family members who were meant to love us, from people on the internet whose sole intention is to hurt us. If, every time I left the house, someone tossed a cinnamon bun in my face with fury, I might actively start to dislike cinnamon buns after a while as well. But if I somehow managed to figure out a way of catching the cinnamon buns so I could eat them later, all the tossing of them would stop hurting. Quite the contrary: it would mean that I would get to eat a lot of cinnamon buns.
So, if you can start accepting and using the word ‘fat’ as a neutral – and eventually a positive – thing, it will stop hurting. As with most things, it will take quite a lot of time. The more you use it, the more you say it, the better the cinnamon will melt on your tongue.
In the beginning, I used to add sentences to the phrase in my head. I would say ‘I am fat’ out loud and then add whatever I needed, but I would not always say it out loud.
I am fat – and so what?
I am fat – and that is a not a bad thing.
I am fat – I also have brown hair and I am kind.
I am fat – why would that make you feel uncomfortable?
I am fat – and I am allowed to be fat.
Because it will make people feel uncomfortable at first. Get ready to be met with a stream of, ‘Oh my god, you are not fat, how dare you say that about yourself?’and similar comments, but hang in there. You can choose to either ignore them or confront them. ‘Why do you say it as if it is a bad thing? I am fat. It is not a secret. This is how I look. Why would I not want to be fat? Do you think it is a bad thing to be fat?’fn12
The first step is removing the negative connotations – the next step is to replace them with positive ones.
I am fat – and I love it.
I am fat – and squishy, soft, round and beautiful.
I am fat – and I love my fat stomach.
I am fat – and glorious.
I am fat – and that is wonderful.
I can only recommend this solution if you love making people cringe and blush and change the topic quickly. Which is one of my favourite pastimes.
This goes for all the words that we perceive as something negative. Fleshy, big, fat, cellulite, heavy, large, chubby and floppy arms. It is not necessary for any of these words to be anything but neutrally descriptive. I look at my body and I state: my stomach is big and rotund, my thighs are fleshy, my upper arms are floppy and my butt is full of cellulite and I say all of this and feel happy. I say these words with the same tone that I would use if I told you I had won a million pounds. Proud and happy and exclusively with positive connotations. It has taken me so long to get here, but it is definitely a possibility.
Just keep saying it. The words, the word ‘fat’ and your daily affirmations:
I am the first person to refuse, stubbornly, to stand in front of a mirror and speak to myself out loud. I will happily talk to myself when I am walking down the street, faking a phone call in order to make sure no one speaks to me.fn13 But there is something ever so awkward about standing in front of your own reflection saying ‘I am beautiful.’ I believe that we are taught that we should never be too self-involved, too confident, too full of ourselves. We should keep our heads down and stay humble.
Fat people are more than anyone barred from feeling beautiful and from taking up space. And when you plonk your feet down in front of a full-size mirror, you are meant to focus on all of your flawsfn14 and on how you want them fixed. You are definitely not meant to praise yourself for being wonderful. So when the majority of the self-help books that I read over time asked me to do so, I refused to do it. It felt silly.
Until I did it, of course. Do not get me wrong, the first time you look at yourself and say ‘I am beautiful’, it will not seem natural. Not the fifth time either. I hate to tell you that it works. I wish it did not work. I wish it was a wishy-washy American daytime chat show temporary solution. It is that too – but it is also a way of actively fighting the voices in your head that tell you that you are not good enough.
We receive negative messages about bodies on a – dare I say – hourly basis. From the adverts on television, public transport, social media, all telling women to buy a certain product to become ‘better’, to have smoother skin, shinier hair, a smaller waistline, redder lips and you have to be able to laugh at salads and yoghurts.fn15 To the messages you get from friends and family, telling you that ‘you’ve lost weight – you look great’ or ‘are you sure you want to eat that?’ – all with the same fundamental viewpoint that fat is bad and that you are not good enough.
So who is going to tell you differently than yourself? Who else than you will provide you with positive messages, with counter-arguments and with what is essentially love?
Your brain cannot necessarily differentiate between the sources of the messages. It takes an unbelievable amount of self-awareness and energy to separate each individual comment from each other and make individual judgement calls. So instead, bombard your brain with messages of the opposite values.
Do this.
Write down your insecurities. What are your most prominent thoughts about yourself and your body? Be honest with yourself. No one has to know this or see the list. Just be completely honest. Write it down. Dig out all the self-hatred and put it down on paper.
Then change the statements to a positive. Even if you struggle to believe it yet. If it says ‘my thighs are gross’ on the paper, you write down ‘my thighs are wonderful’ on a new piece of paper. ‘I am unattractive’ becomes ‘I am beautiful’ and ‘my boobs are too saggy’ becomes ‘my boobs are saggy and that’s perfect’. #SaggyBoobsMatter.fn16
Congratulations. You now own a list of statements to tell yourself as much as you can. Figure out when you want to say them. Is it every time you take a dump? Each morning, during your morning coffee? Is it right before sleep? When you are on the bus to work? Will you draw a heart on your hand to remind yourself?
Keep saying it. Even when it feels like you are lying to yourself, when it feels like acting, when you feel silly and overdramatic.
Because once upon a time, you were a tiny baby and you were not aware that anything about yourself could be wrong. Then a bunch of adults, who should have known better, made sure that a cascade of negative messages were drilled into your tiny child’s brain. That is the child to which you are speaking. That is how far back you have to go in order to change things. Even if you now, as an adult, feel like you have learned that logically, there is nothing wrong with you, there is still a child-version of you somewhere who was taught the opposite.
Keep repeating your affirmations to yourself. Say them out loud. Listen to them. Believe them. And eventually, feel them.
There is a good chance that you have rarely seen fat bodies. You will certainly have difficulties finding us on television, in magazines or in mainstream pornography. We are rarely written about and described in novels. Even in negative portrayals, it is rare to actually see a full-bodied fat person, apart from, of course, when we are mentioned in the news and we are only headless bodies with EPIDEMIC written underneath. Or we are a meme that someone posts on a friend’s Facebook wall with the caption: ‘Your girlfriend, lol’, because people are just so funny, so, so funny.
So considering how often you even see fat people, imagine how little you see naked fat bodies. There is a good chance you have only ever seen yourself, maybe one or two fatties on some beach, a parent or if you have been so lucky to have sex with one.fn17 Compared to the vast amount of naked thinnies out there, it is very unbalanced.
This makes fat bodies – and particularly naked fat bodies – seem strange. Like an oddity, something secret and possibly unacceptable and wrong. Whereas the thin body or the muscly body is normalised and idealised. Even if the thin or muscly body is not your sexual preference, it probably does not disgust you. It’s just neutral. It’s just a body. The fat body, however, might disgust you. I had to look at many fat, naked bodies before I stopped cringing and wanting to look away. Even though I knew that this body was as worthy of love as all other bodies and even though I felt it in my heart that this body was a beautiful body, my instincts all told me that this was a bad body.fn18 A wrong body. This is a normal reaction to have. I have spoken to a myriad of self-loving, fat-glorifying, super-cool fat activists who found fat bodies repulsive, some did so for years into their fat activism. This feeling does not make you a bad fat person – you are simply indoctrinated to hate fat bodies alongside the rest of society. The hatred and invisibility of fatness is taught to us before we even start having a language. And so subtly, that we do not even realise that it is happening. Part of this is simply because we do not see it often enough for it to be normal.
But hey, should we not change that?
Look at fat people’s naked bodies. The ones that have consented, of course, I do not suggest you go out and buy yourself some binoculars and start roaming bushes. I actually actively forbid you to do that. But look at them. Go on the internet and look up the Adipositivity Project.fn19 Two wonderful photographers called Substantia Jones and Shoog McDaniel take nude photos of glorious fat people and put them up on the internet. There are fat nude calendars and prints that you can buy. I suggest you make it your wallpaper on your computer and your phone, that you get the calendar and put it up on your wall, that you make the website your homepage, so it pops up whenever you open your computer. Make sure that wherever you look, there is a naked fat person. Until it becomes normal. Until it stops feeling dangerous or wrong. Try looking at fat bodies – not as a warning or ‘thinspiration’. Just as a fat, glorious body that exists and is allowed to exist.
Allow me to talk about porn for a second. People with fat bodies are hardly ever seen as sexual. If they are, it is often grotesque or hilarious. It will be a fat woman trying to sexually assault an innocent man because her sexuality is so laughable and aggressive. Or her dildo will require car batteries. I once exclaimed, on a podcast, that I watched porn and that this was a feminist sin. I declared that I would stop watching porn and become a good feminist instead. A few months later, a couple of women came up to me after a show I had done. They had the attitude that I adore the most in people approaching me after gigs. The attitude of, ‘Right, we really want to like you, but you massively fucked up, so allow us to educate you for a second.’ Being called out on your problematic behaviour is painful to the extent that I almost enjoy it as a physical, masochistic pleasure. This group of women told me that feminist porn exists. They gave me the names of websites that I should check out. I said ‘I will give it a look’ in the only way you can ever tell a group of people that, yes, you will soon be masturbating to something they have given you, and inevitably your mind will occasionally wander and you will see their faces. Hopefully, by providing you with this feminist porn information, you will now be imagining my face the next time you masturbate to it. Hi.fn20
Watching feminist porn was very different to watching mainstream porn. First of all – you have to pay to watch it. Which is the ethical thing to do, when you think about it. My first instinct was a feeling of entitlement – why should I pay, when I can get it for free elsewhere? And then you realise: it costs money to produce. When shooting a porn film, you need porn actors, camera people, light, a pizza for the pizza delivery person to arrive with, a couch, hopefully a bunch of wet wipes, you know, all the porn things. Of course you should have to pay for it. If you don’t, you are essentially stealing from porn actors. And wefn21 support people working in porn and sex workers.
Second of all, feminist porn included people of all shapes and sizes, colours, genders and sexualities. It was a complete and utter mind-fuck.fn22 There was not a single moment where I even considered questioning if any of the people involved had consented to it. It was clear and obvious that everyone enjoyed being part of it. That everyone was turned on by this – and by each other. I saw fat people being allowed to be sexy and wanted and fucked by people wanting to fuck them. Lesbian porn that felt so different from all the lesbian porn I had ever seen before. I could not figure out why it was so different – why it was better – until I realised that we were seeing it through the eyes of someone actually lesbian. Not a straight cis man. It felt like the difference between kissing girls at private parties when I was a teenager, with one eye open to see how the boys were reacting,fn23 and when I finally kissed a girl because I fancied her, because I wanted to kiss her because I wanted to feel her lips. And there is a massive, massive difference. One is for the pleasure of men and one is for the pleasure of us. After I watched feminist porn, watching the mainstream, free porn felt wrong. It felt like watching Barbie dolls rub up against each other. It killed my boner. And I started looking at bodies differently – and my own sexuality differently.
You have done it before, during the myriad of awful diets you have taken upon yourself to finish. You have removed ‘toxic stuff’ from your life before. Only, they told you that the toxins were sugar, carbs, pasta, soda water and cake. Yet, for days, sometimes weeks, maybe even years at a time, you managed to live without it in your life because you believed, hand on heart, that this was good for you. That this would lead to happiness.
Has it ever worked? Have you ever thrown a chocolate cake into the bin and poured dishwashing soap all over it, to make sure you could not dig it back up later, when the cravings kick in – and then felt an overwhelming sense of calm and happiness?
I think it is time to eliminate other toxins from your life. I urge you to remove everything from your life that makes you feel bad about yourself. When you look through your social-media feeds, be aware of how you feel. In a world of filters, selfie sticks and teenagers with social-media experts on their payroll, there are a lot of posts that are incredibly staged and with the potential to make you feel bad. If a photo makes you feel bad, you spend money on feeling better. That is the simple reason why this happens. That is the reason why adverts will have thin women laughing at salads, and hair adverts where the hair is thicker, shinier and less static than yours will ever be. ‘Likes’ on social media have become almost a currency – where, if you have enough likes, brands will get in touch and give you free things. So when you see someone drinking an expensive cappuccino in a fancy cafe in a sort of blueish faded filter with a model friend of theirs, while you are sweating at your desk with a stained tea mug in your hand and pimples all over your face, you are meant to feel bad. You are looking at someone whose job it is to make you feel worse about your life. And I do not blame these social-media personalities – if anything, I am impressed that there are now teenage girls who are millionaires because they found a way to start a business without having to get a white, rich man in a suit to hire them. But back to you.
When you are going through this odyssey towards self-love, you do not need anything to startle you and get you off your course. Unfollow, unfriend, hide, block, mute. Do this to every single social-media account you follow that makes you feel bad. Whether it’s your friend from school or whichever famous vlogger. This does not make you petty or jealous. It just makes you a person who is susceptible. And, we all are.
Once you have blocked, removed, unfriended and deleted all the accounts that make you feel bad about yourself, add new narratives. Find all the fatties on the internet that you feel inspired by. There are fat people in sports, fashion (fatshion), popular culture, science, art, porn, comedy, dancing, yoga – whatever you are into, there will be fat people there that you can follow. There are accounts specifically for photos of fat people eating, fat people flipping you off, fat people doing everyday things, fat people travelling. Fill your life with fat people.
Do it now, I’ll wait.