CHAPTER 5
THE DESIRABILITY MYTH
I am walking home from work when I catch a stranger’s eye. She stares openly, slack jawed, looking my body up and down, over and over again.
“Excuse me,” she shouts. “Are you big enough yet?”
I keep my head down, eyes fixed on the pavement, walking swiftly, willing the moment to pass.
“Is everyone else seeing how fat this bitch is? Look at her!” She points at me, searches the faces of passersby. I do not respond, nor does anyone else. I walk faster, face searing red, wishing the world away.
Even in my silence, she is provoked, voice transforming itself from a shrill shout to a bared-tooth snarl. “How do you let that happen? Can you even hear me? I deserve an answer!” My heart beats heavy in my throat, stifling any response I might muster.
That evening, I struggle to concentrate or relax. My heartbeat shakes and clatters like a paint mixer in every inch of my skin. I am hopelessly vigilant, distracted by some complex calculus that might help me predict or prevent this stranger’s return. What little sleep I get is restless. The next day, I tell my boss I will work from home. I do not tell her why.
For months, I cannot think about what this stranger said—I can only feel it. I remember her constantly. Shame fills my body like a water balloon, fragile in its fullness. The simple act of walking down the street in a fat body called up a deep rage in a perfect stranger.
Our encounter took place across the street from my office. In the afternoons following, I catch myself staring out my window at the corner where it happened, remembering it like some fever dream. I become a knot of muscle memory, with tense forearms and fists, calves flexed and ready to run. Before I leave for the day, I check out the window again, scanning the street for her.
I stop wearing the dress I wore that day, first hanging it in the back of my closet, then giving it away a few weeks later. Its bold, magenta knit draws too much attention to a body that cannot keep me safe. I begin wearing baggy, nondescript clothing. Plain jeans and oversized black tunics. Long sleeves and large coats. Long necklaces over high necklines. But even with my new wardrobe and protocol in place, it happens again.
After a late night in the office, I walk out to my car. I hear light, shuffling footsteps behind me. At the end of the block, I check furtively over my shoulder. There, a sallow, older man is measuring his paces behind mine, stretching behind me like a shadow.
At the crosswalk, I look back again. His eyes are fixed on me.
“No one will ever love you,” he says, voice loud and tone plain. “Not looking like that.”
I walk faster, feeling for my keys inside my bag. I look back over my shoulder again, glancing back at him. He does not look away.
“No one will ever love you,” he says again, louder. The faster I move, the swifter his gait, and the louder his voice, this ghostly prophet following me between warm and distant streetlights.
My feet move quickly, keys locked between my fingers as makeshift brass knuckles that I know I will never use. I look again. He is still following, watching me closely, face slowly twisting into a mask of a grimace.
I round the corner. He matches my pace, then says it again, louder still, “No one will ever love you.”
I break into a run, sprinting to my parking garage, running up the stairs past the too-slow hydraulic elevator. I take the stairs two at a time, heart pounding in every inch of my skin, breath strangled by the certain danger behind me.
I start the car and drive out of the parking garage as fast as I can. I make quick calculations about what will keep me the safest. Hiding in my car would make me a sitting duck. Driving further up in the parking garage and waiting for him to leave would only trap me. I decide that the only way out is through this—through him—and I speed down the concrete ramps to the street below.
When I reach the exit, I nervously scan the sidewalk for my phantom aggressor. He is gone.
I drive home as quickly as I can, heart still racing. When I finally reach my street, my breathing slows enough to catch up to what has just happened. Suddenly, when I catch my breath, I am overcome. My tears come in waves, stronger each time, until I can hear myself wailing.
I am not humiliated or ashamed. I am terrified.
All my precautions failed. There is nothing I can do to stay safe. However I dress, whoever is around, I am always vulnerable. My body makes me a target.
Over time, I come to accept that there is nothing I can do to control these moments of unbridled aggression. I tell myself that these two strangers made their own decisions about what to do when they saw me. I tell myself that they alone were responsible for their own behavior, although I cannot quite believe it yet.
I do not tell anyone what happened until finally, weeks later, I work up the courage to disclose these moments to thinner friends. When I tell them, I am met with the reaction I fear: a battery of questions and rejections, a hypnic jerk that keeps them from settling into the difficult truth of things. What were you wearing? Did you say something to him? Did she look like an addict? Was he homeless?
The more we talk, the more my straight-size friends reach for any reason to push this information away, excuse it, make it somehow logical, expected, routine. Because to them, this unprompted behavior is unthinkable. Like men hearing about the pervasiveness of catcalling for the first time, thin people cannot quite reconcile the differences in our daily lives. It is too distressing to recognize that their fat friend lives with such a dramatically different reality. And it is too alienating to acknowledge the simple fact that their bodies have spared them from a tumult they never imagined. It is illogical. So, to them, it is impossible.
The world of straight-size people is a reliable one. In their world, services paid for are services procured. Healthcare offered is accessed. Conflict arises primarily from active decisions to provoke and is rarely—if ever—prompted by the simple sight of a stranger’s body. The biggest challenges with anyone’s individual body are their attitudes toward their own skin, not issues of security, dignity, or safety from bodily harm.
But for fat people, the world we walk through is unpredictable and unforgiving. Even walking down the street becomes complicated, uncertain, unsafe, as we pass through the gauntlet of a Greek chorus singing our tragedies back to us. No one will ever love you. Can you hear me? I deserve an answer.
Strangers’ interjections about my body, my food, my clothing, and my character are a daily feature of my life as a very fat person. The fatter I become, the more jagged the remarks, a razor wire drawing a ragged cut through the day. At size 20, the comments were insistent and pushy, often offering “helpful” advice on diet and exercise, or on how losing weight would help me “land a man.” At a size 26, they began to curdle, souring into strangers spitting their disdain on the bus or at a street corner. And at size 30, they became menacing, a chorus of grim reapers foretelling my death, ferrying me across the river Styx.
This phenomenon became so prevalent that I began to shorthand it to friends as fatcalling. Named for catcalling, fatcalling comprises the unending stream of comments, judgments, and commands that inundate the lives of fat people, invited only by our bodies passing into a stranger’s field of vision. Like catcalling, fatcalling is fully unearned, uninvited, and counterproductive, and it becomes an exhausting fact of life for those targeted by it. It is a well-known phenomenon, especially among fat activists and very fat people. In 2015, photos of a fat man dancing went viral on the notorious trolling site 4chan. “Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week,” the caption read. “He stopped when he saw us laughing.”1 Author and fat activist Lesley Kinzel faced strangers in a Home Depot parking lot shouting “Damn, bitch, you are huge!”2 Even Vogue has written about the ubiquity of fatcalling.3
Like catcalling, fatcalling sometimes masquerades as a compliment but quickly sours. One fat teen shared their story in curriculum from the anti–street harassment organization Hollaback:
School had just gotten out and, just as I did every other day, I met my girlfriend to walk her home. Holding hands, we passed one of the busiest buildings where a [guy] with a bunch of his [friends] whistled and called out to us, “Nice! How can I get in on this?” [. . .] I called back, “Lucky for us, you can’t.” [. . .] At this point, about four large high school boys came towards my girlfriend and I. I could feel my heart rate skyrocket. The one who I told off continued, “Whatever. You’re just a fat, ugly dyke, anyway.” They all laughed and I could totally see one hungrily staring at my girlfriend. I pulled her closer and we walked home without another word, but that didn’t stop them from shouting at us across the block, calling us dykes and sluts.4
Psychologist Jason Seacat conducted a study to determine just how frequently fat women felt judged in the world around them, asking fifty overweight and obese women to write down every instance in which they felt judged or insulted as a result of their weight. On average, the women reported three incidents every day.
Some of those involved inanimate objects, like turnstiles and bus seats that were too small. But many involved interactions with other people. One woman said a group of teenagers made mooing noises at her in a store; another said her boyfriend’s mother refused to feed her and commented that she was so fat because she was lazy. Seacat was inspired to do the study after watching a group of teens at his gym loudly harassing a fat woman, who eventually gave up and left the gym.5
Like catcalling before it, fatcalling is rarely about compliments, attraction, health, wellness, or any other benefits to the person being harassed. As Lesley Kinzel puts it, “public harassment by a stranger isn’t about making you feel good. It’s about putting you in your place, and reminding you that as a woman, your social purpose is to look appealing to guys.”6
But despite these clear lines between our experiences of catcalling and fatcalling, my thin friends still struggle to grasp the latter. And there are so many similarities between these twin phenomena.
Like street harassment facing thinner women, fatcalling is also rooted in a deep sense of entitlement to others’ bodies—an entitlement that is affirmed in nearly every aspect of our culture. Women’s bodies are always at men’s disposal, there to comment on, to ogle, to touch, and to take. Women are expected not to “provoke” men with our style of dress, expected to take men’s constant come-ons as compliments, because boys will be boys. Women carry mace, learn self-defense techniques, develop networks to notify other women of men who assault and sexually harass us. Catcalling, like assault and harassment, are facts of life that we’re expected to account for in our daily lives. And we do, often as a matter of survival.
Fatcalling shapes that unpredictable world in which fat people live. Will a passerby smile warmly, or spit an epithet at my broad, soft body? Will a doctor examine me, offer up treatment options, or will I be ejected from her office? Fatcalling offers only intermittent reinforcement—the uncertainty of abuse, replicated on an all-consuming, societal scale. As a fat person, I have developed a Pavlovian response to situations that may invite fat hate. Left wondering whether or not it would materialize, I have learned to anticipate it everywhere, because it could show up anywhere.
Anticipating and avoiding fatcalling is baked into every aspect of my life as a fat person. It determines how I will get home from work, and when, for fear of running into another of the phantoms that haunt the streets around my office. Should I walk, I may encounter my past assailants. If I take the bus, I will be met with the screwed-up faces of my fellow passengers, all suddenly placing bags on the seat next to them. Some will look up nervously. Others will nod warmly and tell me that standing is good for me. Give those muscles a chance to do some work, hon. On rarer occasions, a stranger will become aggressive, demanding I stand or stay away. When I reach my stop, I will hear his voice echoing behind me: It’s a wonder the bus doesn’t bottom out when she’s on it. Don’t come back until you’re half your size!
The threat of fatcalling prevents me from wearing short sleeves, even on the hottest summer days, because I remember the passerby that stared at my arms and said plainly no one needs to see that. (I turned calmly and said, “It’s 102 degrees out. What do you think I should be wearing?” He shrank away. I have not worn a sleeveless dress since.)
Fatcalling determines when and how I buy groceries. I have come to expect the occasional stranger removing items from my cart at the grocery store (melon is much too high in sugar), then puffing up with self-congratulatory pride. As I stood in the pasta aisle last year, one man simply stared at me, stunned. No wonder, he muttered as I pulled a box of orzo from the shelf. Now I buy my groceries late at night, when the store is emptied of do-gooder critics, or I order them for delivery.
The threat of fatcalling means I stay wary of new jobs, keeping close tabs on the number of straight men in a given organization. A fat friend told me about her male colleagues’ lengthy conversation, going on about the women at work they’d like to sleep with. They pointedly told her they’d never sleep with her. I just wanted to work, she told me, deflated. As with catcalling, her experience with fatcalling had become a sad reality, a painful truth that was the price of living in the only skin she’d ever had. As she told me, we both knew that no one would stand up to it, no one would stop it, and it was our job to soldier through. So we do.
Because fatcalling, too, is widely anticipated and affirmed. Shows like The Biggest Loser and Extreme Makeover glorify “tough love” for fat people, while shows like My 600 Pound Life feature a never-ending intervention, a Mobius loop of fat suffering. For over a decade, blockbuster comedies were centered around characters played by actors in fat suits. Norbit, Shallow Hal, The Nutty Professor, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Big Momma’s House made a meal of fat jokes, shaping their whole cinematic raison d’être around punchlines that ginned up disgust with fat bodies—especially fat women’s bodies. Fat jokes are made even by comedians of all political persuasions, even the most politically progressive ones. Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show, famously tweeted about fat women:
“Oh yeah, the weekend. People are gonna get drunk & think that I’m sexy!” — fat chicks everywhere.”
@trevornoah, October 14, 2011
The prevalence of fatcalling in media has prompted life to imitate art—or, at least, real-life practices are validated by widespread media affirmation. Now, most straight-size people default to one of a few reactions to seeing bodies like mine: deep pity, condescending instruction, cruel harassment, or jokes that soften the ground for all of the above.
But despite the many similarities between fatcalling and catcalling, the former is rooted in a different set of cultural impulses. While both flow from a deep-seated entitlement to others’ bodies, fatcalling allows harassers to believe that their actions are truly a service to those they harass. When sexualized, fatcalling is meant to throw fat women a bone and provide us with the sexual attention we’re never expected to get. If it’s diet advice or overt verbal abuse over the size of our bodies, we’re expected to greet it with open arms, a much-needed wake-up call to pull us from the rock bottom that we have so clearly reached. Sometimes fatcalling is a series of harsh realities, fancying itself to be tough love. You’re going to kill yourself, is that what you want? I hope you enjoy your foot amputation. Fat people are expected to greet such remarks as a shock jock kind of truth-telling. I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking. Thanks to thin strangers’ noblesse oblige, we are freed from our delusion that our bodies are acceptable. We now know that we are fat, that we are repulsive, and we are now freed to become thin.
The sexualized side of fatcalling looks different from catcalling too. As a fat woman, I am not instructed to smile. Catcallers do not consider themselves to be wooing me, concocting faux romances in their minds. I do not face the inconvenience of chivalry. I am not worth that much. Instead, I face the grislier side of sexual harassment: unsolicited disclosures of men’s rape fantasies, a violent expectation of full access to my body, and the certainty that any assault will be met with my gratitude.
These attitudes don’t just impact fat women. Fat men are expected to be sexually frustrated, starved for attention, impossibly lonely, pathetic with the thin women they must so desperately want. On a 2017 episode of Family Feud, Steve Harvey asked contestants to “name a reason a woman might end up with a chubby man.”7 Their responses were a telling outline of popular beliefs about fat men:
| Fatty got money! | 34 |
| She’s fat/digs food | 23 |
| She’ll look better | 12 |
| She’s in love | 9 |
| He’s warm/cuddly | 6 |
| He won’t cheat | 4 |
Each response indicated a toxic set of underlying assumptions about fat men. Fat men weren’t afforded the freedom to be simply handsome, interesting, charming, or a catch. They had to provide some other auxiliary benefit to warrant the attraction of any woman. These men had to be wealthy, they had to make her “look better” by comparison, or they had to be companions in overeating (“she’s fat/digs food”). If fat men were worthwhile partners by any measure, it was because they “won’t cheat,” or, as writer Philippe Leonard Fradet puts it, “either a) he wouldn’t do anything to ruin the ‘only sure thing’ he has in his current relationship, and/or b) no one else would want to be with him.”8 Any physical attraction to a fat man was pronounced in strictly desexualized terms (“he’s cuddly”). Of the one hundred respondents, only nine offered that a woman—any woman—might fall in love with a fat man.
Fat men’s sexuality remains contested territory in our popular imagination. TV and film comedies in particular act out our conflicted cultural understandings of fat men’s sexuality. On one hand, fat men are depicted as bumbling, flawed, and unintelligent, but likeable and partnered with conventionally attractive, thin women (Homer Simpson in The Simpsons, Peter Griffin in Family Guy, Doug Heffernan in The King of Queens, Uncle Phil in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Jerry Gergitch in Parks and Recreation, and so on). On the other hand, fat men are portrayed as sexless, emasculated, socially discomfiting, and repulsive to women (Garrett Lambert in Community, Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, Fat Bastard in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me). On the rare occasion a fat man is depicted as lovable, his appeal is often both nonthreatening and decidedly unsexed (Albert in Hitch, Jacob Kowalski in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Schmidt in 2012’s 21 Jump Street reboot, and even Sir John Falstaff in many of Shakespeare’s plays). In comedy, such as in Family Feud, while fat men might be loved, they won’t be desired.
Fat trans people, too, bear the brunt of fatcalling. Trans people who are fat face constant misgendering, their gender expression inscrutable to the thinner people around them, buried beneath layers of fat that stubbornly genders and desexualizes their bodies. And those bodies—incomprehensible in both gender and size to the smaller, cisgender people around them—put them at the margins of the margins, struggling to stay safe. Writer and journalist Katelyn Burns writes about the dual burdens of fatphobia and transphobia:
Skinny women are scared to get fat, fat women are depressed by being constantly told that they are not worthy. That fat women are not worthy of love, of affection, or of respect. Not only was I stuck in the wrong gendered body for myself, I was also stuck in a body shape that has been deemed unacceptable by society at large.9
Indeed, our cultural imagination seems to cast fat trans and nonbinary people as failures in two rites: failures to embody the thinness that is expected of everybody and failures to uphold a binary understanding of gender as hypermasculine or hyperfeminine. Professor James Burford and illustrator Sam Orchard, in their chapter of Queering Fat Embodiment, explore these restrictive narratives. “Often, these values emerge through the figures of the ‘trans person trapped in the wrong body’ and/or ‘thin person trapped in a fat body.’”10 While these narratives may resonate with some, too often they are our only cultural scripts for understanding fat and trans bodies. In that way, not only are fat trans people desexualized, the very narratives of their own bodies are wrested from them too.
When viewed through the lens of binary gender, the influence of misogyny on anti-fat bias snaps into focus. A 1996 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology looked at the attitudes that undergraduate students held toward fat men and women, illuminating a troubling double standard. The study’s participants viewed fat men’s sexual experiences on a par with those of thinner men, but saw fat women as “less sexually active, skilled, warm, and responsive, and perceived her as less likely to experience desire and various sexual behaviors” than a thinner woman. Participants also viewed fat women as “less sexually attractive, skilled, warm, and responsive” than fat men.11 That is, while participants viewed fat men’s sexual experiences as comparable to thinner men’s, fat women were seen as both less desirable and less desiring than both thinner women and fat men. In that way, fat women become sexual objects living in a world devoid of sexuality. We can neither desire nor be desired, which means we’ll accept any sexual attention with gratitude. Notably, though, a 1997 study found higher levels of eating disorders and sexual dysfunction in fat men than in their thinner peers. Study participants expressed a “lack of desire for sex, lack of erotic fantasies, and lack of motivation in sexual advances.”12 Like so many fat people, these fat men had internalized the belief that their bodies unsexed them. Indeed, fat people of all genders are expected to be grateful for any sexual attention we get. Because wanting us is unthinkable, we must never be desired.
But it’s that precise impossibility of desire that keeps us unsafe, making us colossal targets for sexual harassment and violence. And, in 2017, conversations about sexual harassment and violence took center stage like they never had before.
On October 5, 2017, the New York Times broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s constant, systematic acts of sexual assault. Dozens of actors came forward with horrifying stories of rape, blackmail, physical intimidation, and torpedoed careers. In the months following, more titans of industry fell, victims of the circumstance only they created. Politicians, writers, musicians, filmmakers—countless public figures have been publicly accused of sexual harassment and assault by deeply brave individuals from all walks of life.
Together, these survivors reawakened a movement created by activist Tarana Burke some ten years earlier. The MeToo movement showed the chilling prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially among women. The movement has led to a sea change in cultural tolerance for sexual violence and misconduct. For once, institutions have begun to publicly decry the behavior of the men who make remarks, who expose themselves, who consolidate and abuse their power, who demand our bodies.
The people coming forward—mostly women—are young and old, rich and poor, famous and unknown. And overwhelmingly, they’re thin. But 67 percent of American women are plus size. So, where are they?
In 2017, twenty-one-year-old Quantasia Sharpton filed suit against Usher for failing to share his herpes diagnosis with her before she says they slept together. Quantasia was just one of three people to sue the singer, but she was the only one who appeared at a press conference. And she was a fat Black woman.
The online response was swift and ruthless. Popular figures like comedian Lil Duval lined up to make cruel jokes at Sharpton’s expense, often distancing themselves from fat shaming even as they publicly ridiculed a fat woman. Each of the following tweets received over six thousand likes:
I refuse to believe Usher fucked this.
— @lilduval, August 7, 2017
I also hate fat shaming but someone said “okay so did Usher give her herpes or Hershey’s?”
— @_AmmBURR, August 7, 2017
somebody said usher went from smashing chili to smashing pork n beans. i hate fat shaming but y’all . . .
— @_lesbiTREN, August 7, 201713
The idea that Usher, a handsome pop and R&B icon, could desire Quantasia Sharpton, a beautiful, young fat woman, was unthinkable. To thousands on Twitter, not only was Usher’s desire for Quantasia impossible, but her self-advocacy in the face of his alleged recklessness had to be met with a wall of resistance. It had to be shut down. The Root writer and editor Monique Judge wrote, “You look at fat black women as being mothers and aunties. And if we aren’t maternal—because the expectation that we must be is some bullshit—that doesn’t make us any less desirable.”14 Quantasia had stepped out of those limited, maternal roles and was publicly punished for doing so.
I was fifteen years old and a size 18 when, for the first time, a man told me he’d fantasized about raping me. He told me that he longed to pin my hands behind my head, longed to hear me tell him no. You’ll be my fat whore, he said. You’ll fight me off, but you’ll love every minute of it.
While jarring, this was far from the last time it happened. Over the years, more and more men would disclose their desire to assault me. When I told one to stop, in my mid-twenties, he was taken aback. I thought you were liberated. You should be grateful. I was queer, which overwhelmingly meant I should be sexually flexible, available to be posed in any scene or position needed for men’s gratification. I was also fat, which meant I’d be grateful for what I got. Even if it was violent. Even if I didn’t consent.
For my thin friends, these rape fantasies were more of a rarity, the provenance of a particularly depraved kind of man. For me, it was so commonplace as to be routine. But more troubling than that were the reactions from thin people I didn’t know as well. A family friend and self-proclaimed feminist, upon hearing about this onslaught of fantasies, congratulated me. Isn’t it great to be wanted? And, more troublingly, There’s a lid for every pot. As if I had been disheartened about the selection of men who would take me. As if their violence was a sign of hope.
One friend asked why I hadn’t told anyone sooner. I was surprised by her question when the answer felt so evident. Like many women before me, when I share stories of harassment, catcalling, unwelcome advances, and violence, I am met with pushback. Unlike other women, that resistance comes as a question: Who would want to rape you?
There’s a common misconception that fat bodies cannot be desired. This could not be further from the truth. Fat people date, marry, hook up, get lonely, and get laid just like anyone else. Yet still, we are regularly depicted on screens and pages, by media and loved ones, as undesirable and undesired. Fat Amy, Rebel Wilson’s character in Pitch Perfect, is depicted in a hot tub full of men competing for her attention. Within the context of the film, this is played as a joke: How could so many muscular men want someone so fat? In Norbit, Eddie Murphy donned a fat suit to play a sexually voracious and demanding fat Black woman who constantly nagged her thin partner into unwanted, repulsive sex. Even the sympathetic portrayal of a sexualized fat woman in the Farrelly brothers’ Shallow Hal, Hal’s love interest is only attractive because her suitor is blinded to her body and only able to see her as an impossibly thin Gwyneth Paltrow.
Those depictions both rely on and reify long-standing beliefs that fat people are isolated, unloved, desperate, voracious. So, when we are harassed, catcalled, and assaulted, those moments are supercharged with entitlement and violence. This was supposed to be easy. You were supposed to want me more than I want you. And when we don’t, they lash out.
It took me years to disclose my own experiences. Because, like any woman, I knew that stepping forward would mean standard denials, scrutiny, dismissals. But for all our talk about sexual assault being an act of power, not desire, as a fat woman I knew that those statements always came with caveats, asterisks, footnotes. I knew that my body was reliably withheld, an obvious exception to the rule. After all, we’d be grateful for whatever we got. Who would want to rape us?
This desirability myth—the deep-seated, ubiquitous cultural belief that fat people are categorically undesirable—means that our assault and harassment is unthinkable to most. But fat people experience sexual violence, and some are even targeted because of the likelihood we won’t speak out. And who would want to rape you? is more than an anecdotal experience or a cultural meme. Academics at Brigham Young University found that fat survivors of rape were dramatically less likely to be believed than thinner victims.15 In Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination, Sondra Solovay tells the story of one fat woman who was harassed by a physician after surviving rape and another who sought a pregnancy test. “‘My doctor said I couldn’t get pregnant, I was fat, who would want to make me pregnant?’ She was pregnant.”16 The desirability myth ensures that fat survivors will stay silent—and if they don’t, they still won’t be believed.
All this leaves fat people, especially fat women, vulnerable to sexual violence that is so ubiquitous it can be openly discussed and even systematized. In 2018 Cornell University’s Zeta Beta Tau chapter was put on probation for a “pig roast” contest, to see which pledges could bed the largest number of fat women. “The rules were simple: Would-be brothers allegedly earned points for having sex with overweight women. If there was a tie at the end, the victory went to whoever had slept with the heaviest woman. New members were told not to inform the women about the contest, according to a university report.”17 Like many other fraternities, the brothers and pledges of Zeta Beta Tau participated in the long tradition of “hogging” and “pig roasts” designed to humiliate fat women by bedding them on a dare.
Researchers Ariane Prohaska and Jeannine Gailey, in studying men who participated in hogging, identified the related phenomenon of “rodeos,” in which a group of men pull names from a hat to see who will be tasked with bedding a fat woman. When the sexual encounter occurs, it is watched, photographed, or videotaped by the other men, who may then reveal themselves in order to humiliate a naked and vulnerable fat woman who dared to trust a man with her body and desire. Prohaska and Gailey identified two primary motivations for hogging, pig roasts, and rodeos: Men view fat women as “easy targets” for sexual encounters, which gives men status in their peer groups, and men use hogging as an “excuse” for either their insecurities about their ability to date “thin” women, their drunkenness, or their attraction to fat women.18
That is, for men who participate in hogging, pig roasts, and rodeos, fat women are either a prop with which to build their own masculine credibility or a human shield to protect themselves from their own insecurities. When mixed with the bleach of toxic masculinity, the ammonia of the desirability myth sets fat women on a path to pervasive sexual harassment and assault, with no end or respite in sight.
Still, fat survivors face a staggering hill to climb. Despite the advent of the MeToo movement, fat survivors are largely shut out, still believed to be both undesirable and untrustworthy, unreliable narrators of our own painful experiences.
Our national conversation about sexual assault and harassment was—and is—a crucial flashpoint. Notably, it has been largely led by Hollywood actresses, the Jessica Albas, Salma Hayeks, and Rose McGowans known for their beauty. But in order to flourish, our national conversation will have to hold space for women whose leadership we struggle to respect, whose bodies we struggle to embrace. Even those who, in our heart of hearts, we still expect to be grateful.
We are in the midst of the largest-scale explicitly feminist conversation our culture has had in my lifetime, and we are in the throes of major changes around sexual violence and harassment. But today, the average American woman wears a size 16. And those plus-size women—the lion’s share of a nation—have yet to be heard.
There are stories I proudly tell about my feminist lineage. My grandmother giving my mother a copy of The Feminine Mystique for her fifteenth birthday, in 1963. My grandfather trying to pull me out of high school to attend the Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization, explaining to me in detail the impacts of globalization on women half a world away. My mother, in the mid-90s, sharing that when she needed to command a room at work, she’d channel Hillary Clinton. My niece at the Los Angeles Women’s March, flanked by both grandmothers and her mom. Her sign read I can be president.
There are stories that shaped my own feminism. The diversity training we underwent at my high school, when I saw the viciousness with which my wealthier white classmates rebuffed any discussion of racism at our school, jumping immediately to I never owned any slaves. Seeing a trans guy at school go to the boys’ bathroom every day, only to be bullied and beaten. Walking through record stores with friends of color, wondering why mall security seemed to follow us everywhere.
I grew up with feminism, proudly lifted it high, felt its ragged edges, looked unflinchingly into its troubled past, pushed it to grow into a brighter future. Feminism was discussed often and openly at home. But as a fat kid, and a queer kid, despite my deep allegiance with the movement that had brought me into being, there were facets of feminism that never felt right.
My body, my choice was a rallying cry for pro-choice action, but it was often misappropriated by thinner feminists to foist diets upon fatter feminists, like me. And it never fully translated for trans women, who were told their bodies weren’t theirs, their choices invalid and their identities unwelcome.
But the one I came to struggle with the most was an old classic: rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power.
I had long railed against sexual violence and the culture that allowed assailants—predominantly men—to assault survivors—predominantly women. I had long felt the cold, slapping rain of that culture sting my face, had long decried it with the indignation of the uninitiated. But it wasn’t until my late twenties that I felt its gale force winds carry me away.
I was twenty-nine when I decided to move out of my apartment. The rent had been hiked for the fifth straight year in a row, and I found a house that I was wildly in love with, almost certainly available. My landlord required sixty days’ notice, so I gave it. Ten days in, my new house fell through. In a rapidly gentrifying city, for a young organizer, most rental rates were wildly out of reach. After searching desperately for days, I finally decided to make a plea with the property manager. He had always seemed friendly, all warm smiles and goofy jokes. Besides, I was only fourteen days in to giving notice. With forty-six days left, they couldn’t have rented it yet, could they?
I stopped by the office on my way home from work. I picked up a package and spoke with him for a few minutes. I felt the friction in his voice when he mentioned his ex-wife.
“Break ups, huh?” I offered weakly.
“Not break ups, ex-wives,” he corrected. “You know how they can get.”
I didn’t, but I knew what he meant. I felt myself tense at this familiar undercurrent of hostility toward women. I imagined him telling his friends she’s totally crazy—like, psycho about any woman who left him. A flash of what happens when men like that think you’ve betrayed them. I had a sudden urge to leave, quickly and casually. I reminded myself of our many warm interactions, dissuaded myself from that instinct to leave. The moment passed. The conversation moved on.
After a lull, I explained to him that my housing fell through. The situation was overwhelming—Where would I go? Where could I live?—and I heard my voice shake as I asked him, Have you already . . . Is there any chance . . . Has the unit been rented yet?
He told me it had, that a couple was moving in and needed it as soon as possible. We were actually going to see if you needed to leave sooner. I shook my head, feeling the sharp heat of impending tears.
He read my face, comforted me. “It’s a rough situation. You’re really feeling it, huh?” I nodded.
He had brought a crushing problem to me. Now he would bring its solution. He would, he said, be willing to talk to the renters, see if they could wait a week for the next available unit. He thought a woman across the hall was getting ready to leave.
I was overwhelmed, submerged in a wave of gratitude and relief.
“Would you?” I exhaled an ocean.
“For you? Of course.” He smiled. He would call them first thing in the morning.
My thanks spilled out of me, like an overflowing glass. I could not thank him enough, I told him. I was so grateful and used every superlative I could muster.
What happened next is blurry, lost in a haze of adrenaline. What I remember is that he asked me to go to dinner with him that night, asked me if I wanted to come back to his place to listen to records and see what happened. What I remember is being compared favorably to his ex-wife. You’re so sweet—not like her, of course. What I remember is declining as though defusing a bomb, careful to cut the right wire, careful not to move too quickly or make too much noise, body taut and breathing measured. What I remember is the way his face turned, the warmth that drained from his voice. The couple would probably say no. It’s probably not worth the trouble. You shouldn’t bank on staying here.
What I remember is lying in bed all evening, in silence, acutely aware that the man downstairs had the key to my apartment but still unable to move. What I remember is thinking of who I could call and anticipating the deep, sharp sadness that would come when they inevitably tried to talk me out of what had happened.
Weeks later, I called a friend who was an attorney. The friend was shocked, indignant, angry. They advised hiring a lawyer to write to the property management company, tell them what had happened with their employee, and let them know I was prepared to take action.
But I wasn’t. I thought of the warmth in his face beforehand, his stories about his child. I thought about having to tell my coworkers why I was taking a day off work to go to court. I thought about telling my family and friends, envisioning each of their reactions, one by one. And I thought about the reactions from the lawyer, the company, the court. Who would want her? Shouldn’t she be grateful for the attention?
And despite everything, I was. My body had always disqualified me from desire. It had always been posited as something for partners to look past so they could see the real me. It was a moat, and it made me a fortress that would never be attacked. I had been told for years, explicitly and implicitly, that I was simply too ugly to assault or harass. In that moment, despite everything, I felt afraid and I felt strangely validated. I had been so thoroughly shattered by the relentlessness of fat hate and the desirability myth that I felt, for once, that someone had seen me as beautiful enough to want.
I was confused. I was hurt. I was terrified of my own home, of leaving a forwarding address, of telling him where to find me. I was a tangle of thorny fears and instincts, perplexing and shameful reactions to a situation I was sure I should have prevented.
And yes, I was grateful. After all, who would want me?
Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about power.
This slogan, it struck me weeks after this experience, was the provenance of straight-size feminists. I hadn’t been raped, certainly, but I had been coerced and threatened. It felt luxurious, insisting that sexual assault and harassment was only about power and never about desire. But as a fat woman, in that moment, it had felt so multifaceted. His actions and threats were enabled by power, of course, but they were more multidimensional than that.
What drew him to me was that I appeared to be an easy mark, and I was. What drew him to me was that I wouldn’t be believed, so I wouldn’t say anything—and I didn’t. What drew him to me was the endless stream of sayings about fat women, the symphony of sexualized whispers that prepared him for this crescendo of a moment. Better blow jobs and they’ll do whatever you want and try so hard and so grateful in bed all softened the ground for what came next. He knew that I was queer and that I had dated straight men, which meant that anything he wanted was something I could enjoy or feign enjoying. What drew him to me was the certainty that I would be sexually pliable both in partners and acts, a living doll who would never resist. What drew him to me was that my body made me too untrustworthy to be believed, so I would never speak up.
It was about sex and it was about power. It was also about desirability, beauty, privilege, and manipulation. From our disparate positions, both of us were well acquainted with a machine that silences fat survivors even before we speak. That machine is fueled by every joke, every comment, every deeply held belief that fat people cannot be wanted by anyone who isn’t settling or somehow pathological in their desire. It is oiled by every media caricature of fat people as desperate, lonely, sexually voracious, driven crazy by unfulfilled desire.
And that machine is protected by the well-intentioned friends and family members who cannot quite bring themselves to grapple with the harsh reality, depth, and pervasiveness of fat hate. It is protected by a vicious instinct that can arise within even our closest loved ones: a predatory instinct that blames its prey for its own demise.
This machine is fueled, too, by my beloved feminist peers. Often, feminist discourse stays focused on sexual harassment and assault that don’t reflect the fullness of fat women’s experiences—nor do they reliably reflect the experiences of trans women, immigrant women, older women, poor women. There is a violence that comes with catcalling and sexual violence targeted at people who are culturally and sexually defined by their lack of desirability. Fatness has long been used as an attack on feminist movements. During the US movement for white women’s suffrage, those opposed to women’s civic engagement frequently depicted suffragettes as fat, unattractive, shrill, and demanding. In 1910, one humor magazine took aim at these fat, demanding, unreasonable women, portraying one such suffragette with a mean expression, an indisputably fat body, tight and “unbecoming” clothing, and unattractive, unfeminine men’s oxford shoes. She holds a wooden spoon in one hand and a rolling pin in the other, implicitly threatening to hit the reader. Amy Erdman Farrell’s Fat Shame analyzes this salient, early attack on fat bodies as both a site of and motivation for women’s dissent. “The caption reads, ‘Speaker of the House.’ What a joke to suggest that women need more rights! Look what the desire for public citizenship has done to this woman, the cover says: it has turned her into a primitive, coarse beast, too ugly, too big, too fat to be a woman.”19 By contrast, Farrell describes a pro-suffrage poster that shows a young, thin, conventionally beautiful suffragist leading a march of young men behind her, “transfixed, it seems, by her beauty. The desire for suffrage, for the rights of public citizenship, has made this young woman all the more beautiful, all the more attractive to the gentlemen in her midst.”20 As with any political attack, we lose when we take the bait, and this first wave of suffragettes had taken the bait. In so doing, they ushered in over a century of feminism that insisted feminists could—and sometimes must—be sexually desirable to straight men. Despite their stalwart opposition to the sexual objectification of women, predominantly white feminist movements have long distanced themselves from these politicized stereotypes of feminists as domineering, unsexed, unattractive, and fat. In so doing, whether intentionally or not, feminist movements have acquiesced to the sexual economy asserted by their opponents: fat women are both undesirable and unlikeable, and therefore not useful to the movement. As such, the perceived alignment of feminists with fat women became a political liability.
While that approach has slightly softened over time, contemporary feminism rarely addresses the unique needs and barriers faced by fat women. Mainstream feminist conversations remain focused on misogyny that targets women that are thinner, whiter, wealthier, and more traditionally feminine than most of us. Popular campaigns like New York’s Stop Telling Women to Smile posters depict thin women with straight faces, a deadpan response to a ubiquitous command of thinner women. Not only are fat faces notably absent from those campaigns, but the specific harassment faced by fat women is missing too. These campaigns remain important and instructive, but they are also incomplete, leaving out the millions of American women who wear plus or extended plus sizes.
No, those prominent feminist campaigns and conversations don’t make room for catcalling as an expression of repulsion or rejection, or the complex morass of emotions and dynamics that comes when men want someone who is defined by their undesirability. They grapple with what it means to be considered sexually accessible as a thin woman who is sexually liberated and active but leave out fat women whose sexual disposability is assumed because of the impossibility of finding her attractive.
Making room for fat women’s experiences in feminist spaces is straightforward. It requires simply adjusting our understandings of sexual violence to exist beyond the framework of desirability (even though we already insist that it is about power, not about sex). But for all of us, thin and fat alike, expanding our framework would require acknowledging an axis of experience that we tend to think of as both organic and earned. Even among the most socially conscious of us, fatness is considered to be a moral failing and well within our control. As such, thin bodies have earned their reverence and fat bodies have earned their natural consequences: public shaming, denial of healthcare, and a grisly side of sexual violence. Fat people have chosen to neglect our bodies, the thinking goes, so we are not owed any deeper thought or sympathy.
In order to acknowledge fatcalling and sexual violence targeting fat women, thin feminists would have to acknowledge that bodies like mine should not be publicly shamed. Thin feminists would need to return to the radical root that insists that no survivor of sexual violence deserved what befell them. None of us are asking for it—certainly not for daring to live in the only bodies we have.
But somehow, for many feminists, that feels too close to home. Acknowledging the pain of fat women would mean acknowledging their own complicity, often unthinking and unintentional. It would mean implicating their own bodies and sacrificing the privileges they feel certain they’ve earned. If we used the full force of feminist movements to argue against the validity of the privileges that come with living in a thin body, those privileges might fall away.
Making space for an emerging constituency in any movement is a straightforward, albeit difficult, task. Its ingredients are simple: listening, believing, adjusting, and collaborating. But sharing power has never been easy, and, like acknowledging other axes of oppression, making room for fat women within feminism will require some discomfort of the thinner women around who it has been historically centered. It will require their willingness to entertain the idea that their bodies are not accomplishments and that fat bodies are not failures. It will call upon the willingness to believe that they themselves might become fat someday and might still need feminism then. And it will rely upon those feminists’ willingness to sit with the discomfiting knowledge that, despite the relentless, whipping winds of misogyny all around them, their bodies have still afforded them some shelter that others don’t have.
To those feminists, my question is this: Can you love fat people enough to sacrifice your comfort?