CHAPTER 6
SUCH A PRETTY FACE
Risk taking had never been a strong suit of mine, but at twenty-one, I’d discovered a deep drive to get away, to build a new life. In that new life, I told myself, I’d be a writer. I’d write dangerous new plays and explore whatever ideas suited me. I’d read the works of Valerie Solanas and Angela Davis and as many iconoclastic revolutionaries as I could manage. I’d apply to the jobs I most wanted and to the graduate-level courses I longed to take. I’d say yes to any new opportunities that came my way. I would, I told myself, become a risk taker.
And I did. I started writing plays, submitting them to festivals, seeing my own work staged by actors I liked, and being critiqued and complimented by writers I admired. I said yes to parties and weekend trips around New England. I took graduate seminars with professors and students I looked up to. My brain buzzed and popped like neon with the charge of new ideas and a bolder self. I was uncovering the contours of who I could be when I wrangled my fear, and I loved the shape I was taking.
The deepest risk-taking challenge was dating. I hadn’t really seen anyone since my first girlfriend in high school, nor had I made sense of the relationship or the breakup. Despite seeing a therapist regularly, I kept quiet on the subject of relationships. Even after several years, it still felt too tender to divulge, even in complete confidence to a paid professional. I told myself I simply hadn’t hung in there. I wasn’t a convincing enough cool girl. If I tried harder, suppressed the hurt feelings I was certain were unearned and unjustified, I knew I could do better if a second chance at love presented itself. I had to hope for some hypnotized partner to fall in love with my inner beauty.
That’s when I met my first love.
He went to art school, and early in our courtship he invited me to a student show of his photography. Haunting photographs hung on the walls, a ghostly kind of self-portrait of his changing body. He had started testosterone shortly before we met, and the double-exposed photos seemed to show his body as a specter as the hormones took root.
We lived two states away from one another and on the weekends would meet in the middle in Boston, spending long days together. He wrote me letters nearly every day, and I responded like clockwork. His love letters landed like a blow, knocking the wind out of me. I wrote back on thick paper, sometimes sprayed with perfume. He put the letters up around his bedroom mirror. You say such nice things about me. I figure if I keep looking at them, I’ll start to believe it.
Over time our Boston rendezvous turned into weekends at his apartment. We would lay together in his tiny bed and daydream of my postgraduation move to Boston. I started researching jobs and he started looking for apartments.
But every time I imagined our future, I couldn’t imagine myself. This beautiful life belonged to someone else, and he deserved someone better. Someone easier, prettier, cooler, and of course, someone thinner.
I had never seen a fat woman in love—not in life, not in the media. I had never seen fat women who dated. I had never seen fat women who asserted themselves, whose partners respected them. Because this was uncharted territory, I assumed it was also unexplored. My risk-taking resolution ebbed from my broad, soft body. How could he love me if it meant loving this?
Despite having what was described as a “very pretty face,” I was constantly reminded that my body was impossible to want. We were dating at the height of popularity of sites like Hot or Not and TV shows like The Swan. Everywhere I looked, bodies were openly critiqued and ranked, and mine steadily landed near the bottom of the scale—2, 3, 4. His thinness alone earned him a much higher standing. In the cruel calculus of dating and relationships, our numbers didn’t match.
But it wasn’t just him. I had learned that I was undesirable to almost everyone. Desire for a body like mine meant my partners were irrational, stupid, or resigned to settling for less than they wanted. In the years since my first breakup I had struggled to accept interest where I found it. No matter how a potential partner looked, no matter how enthusiastic they were, I couldn’t trust their attraction. I shrank away from their touch, recoiling from their hands like hot iron, believing their interest to be impossible or pathological. Any intimacy required vulnerability, and vulnerability inevitably led back to humiliation.
This is among the greatest triumphs of anti-fatness: it stops us before we start. Its greatest victory isn’t diet industry sales or lives postponed just until I lose a few more pounds. It’s the belief that our bodies make us so worthless that we aren’t deserving of love, or even touch.
Over the coming weeks, as these little fissures opened into wounds, I dressed them by retelling myself the story of our relationship. It had always been impossible, too beautiful and tender to be true. Maybe he had taken pity on me, doing a charitable deed by showing affection to a pitiable fat girl. I told myself he didn’t want to be with me. I told myself he was too gentle to do what he knew needed to be done and dump me. I told myself the best thing I could do for him was leave. So I did.
I didn’t know how to be loved. I couldn’t see it happening. So I broke both of our hearts.
Later in my twenties, after briefly dating a friend of a friend, I decided to return to dating apps. I was on Bumble for less than a day when I matched with someone. I sent him a message—just a waving-hand emoji, to see how he’d respond. This was the informal first step of my screening process. He didn’t make it to the second.
I said hello. He said: I love my women fat. Big girl usually means a big mouth too. Even a nice handjob is better when there’s a chubby hand doing the work lol. Usually bigger girls are better at pleasing their men though.
Welcome to dating apps.
Like any woman, I’d come to expect explicit photos, unwanted advances and, when I dared decline, epithets hurled too easily. But I also faced messages like these, tinged with entitlement to my fat body—a body that they expected was theirs for the taking simply because of the size of it. In their eyes, I wasn’t a new land to conquer, held no promise of the thrill of the hunt presented by thinner women. No, I would go willingly, grateful for their conquest.
But more than that, this message mirrored so many experiences I’d had before. It echoed fraternity brothers’ “hogging” competitions to bed fat women, their “pig roasts” to see who could sleep with the fattest woman, the endless barrage fat jokes on TV. It echoed the man in a bar who asked me for my number, face kind and expectant, before retreating to his friends to report back on their dare: he’d gotten the fattest girl’s number. It echoed the formerly-fat date who’d complimented me on my confidence, told me he “used to be like that, until I realized I wanted anyone to fuck me ever,” then asked me back to his place. It echoed the concerns from family and friends, dangling the promise of a loving, healthy relationship at a smaller weight: I just want you to find someone. Then, on top of all that, messages like these. Messages that received my body like tissue: plentiful, accessible, disposable, trash.
Fat people aren’t the only ones who live with the repercussions of anti-fatness in our relationships. Those messages also land hard with people who date us, love us, marry us, sleep with us. They get trapped too. After all, in our cultural scripts, a fat partner is a failure at best, a shameful, pathological fetish at worst. Desiring fat people is something deviant to be hidden, to find shame in, to closet.
But the data and research around fat sexuality paint a wholly different picture. In A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam analyzed history’s largest data bank on pornography viewers. They found that regardless of gender and sexual orientation, porn searches for fat bodies significantly outpaced searches for thin bodies. In fact, fat porn was the sixteenth most popular category, outranking categories like “anal sex” (#18), “group sex” (#24), “fellatio” (#28), and “skinny” (#30).1 “For every search for a ‘skinny’ girl, there are almost three searches for a ‘fat’ girl.”2 Gay men’s searches, too, revealed far more searches for “bears” (burly or fat men) than “twinks” (young, thin men).3 On his attraction to fat women, one man told Ogas and Gaddam, “Bigger girls will have more fun and will work twice as hard to meet the standards of the skinny girls most people find attractive.”4 But despite being surrounded by women of all sizes, viewers opted instead to drive their desire into safe, siloed, and one-sided experiences, away from the prying eyes of the world around them.
While Ogas and Gaddam’s research speaks only to sexual desire (not romantic attraction or aspirations), it certainly indicates that our cultural scripts around size and desire—that is, that thin people are inherently desirable and fat people are categorically undesirable—are rooted more in perception than research. The findings in A Billion Wicked Thoughts show us that, at the very least, attraction to fat people of all genders isn’t a niche occupied solely by those who celebrate their desire. Rather, it points to the idea that fat bodies may be among the most widely desired, but that desire may be repressed—possibly thanks to pervasive stigma.
The now-defunct Village Voice illuminated some of the challenges faced by self-proclaimed “fat admirers” in a 2011 cover story. In “Guys Who Like Fat Chicks,” reporter Camille Dodero shares the stories of several straight thin men who are predominantly attracted to fat women—and the social sanctions that threaten their masculinity and their social relationships. As one man put it, he was afraid to say he didn’t notice a thin, conventionally attractive woman in school for fear of being met with “What are you, some sort of fag?” But even as he began dating, those fears were realized. “A rumor spread that he was gay, which he didn’t bother to refute. Liking a fat girl was so much more of a preposterous scenario that he worried the truth would ‘make it snowball even more.’”5 Another man outlined similarly harsh social repercussions for expressing his attraction to fat women. “If someone starts talking about guys who like fat women or girls who like fat men, the first reaction is, ‘Ewww.’ [. . .] The second is, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ The third is, ‘That is so unhealthy, and you’re killing the person you want to be with.’ It all leads up to: ‘We don’t want to talk to you. Get the fuck away.’”6
Many men who are attracted to fat women find ways to express that desire while sheltering themselves from judgment and stigma. For many, that means seeking out pornography. Other straight-size men have secret sexual relationships with fat women, too afraid or disgusted to elevate those encounters to full-fledged relationships. In “Secret Relationships with Fat Women,” Virgie Tovar recounted the patterns of one such relationship of her own. “Everything was intimate and magical when we were alone, and then all of a sudden it would stop being that. I would go from being a charmingly eccentric bohemian to being a monstrously crass bother.”7
Tovar isn’t alone. Formal research hasn’t been published related to the phenomenon of secret fat relationships, but many fat people are familiar with its contours. When I asked fat Twitter users about their experiences with secret sexual and romantic relationships, the responses poured in:
“I let it happen because I thought it was the best I could do. He ended up being abusive and I still thought it was better than being alone. I tried to diet and lose weight in the hopes that maybe he would treat me better.”
“Pretty much anyone I have ever been with has tried to keep me secret. I peaced out when I realized what was happening.”
“. . . . yes. . . . I married him. I dumped his ass and he realized the error of his ways. He was 17 so it can be forgiven. We are in our 30s now and he’s happy im on his arm. Fat or not.”
“Yes. :’(I was so DEEPLY insecure and I thought him to be conventionally attractive – ‘out of my league’ – so I tolerated his shame about fucking me for over a year. Literally a year of my life given to someone who only took me on one public date.”
“Very few people knew we were dating. He refused to hold my hand in public. Went on for 6 months until he told me I HAD to lose weight, even so far as say he would monitor my weight loss. I dumped him the next day. The things he said and did still affect me today.”
“It took two years to get the confidence to leave. And it was nearly 7 years before I met anyone else – I regretted leaving so many times because it had been shit but it was something.”
These fat people found themselves bound to relationships that were lackluster at best, abusive at worst. They too had learned that their bodies made them impossible to want and that any relationship at all was a windfall to cling to at all costs.
When attraction to fat people is discussed, fetishism is never far behind. Fetishism isn’t in itself necessarily pathological; fetishes can be as simple as consensual kinks, particularly intense attractions, or simple preferences. But when fetishism is brought up with respect to fat attraction, it gathers like a storm cloud.
To be clear, there are attractions to fatness that take such specific forms that they are undeniably fetishistic. Feeders, for example, long to feed their “feedee” fat partners, deriving pleasure from watching their fat partner eat and, in some cases, from watching them gain more and more weight. Squash fetishes, on the other hand, indicate a desire to be sat on or pinned beneath their partner’s fat body.8
Some fat people happily engage with these fetishes and find fulfillment (or paid work) in their role. Some do not. But many fat people have felt fetishism thrust upon them without their consent.
Fat fetishism has deep roots for many fat people, especially fat women. For some, size, desire, shame, and sex are a rat’s nest, hopelessly tangled together. People who internalize anti-fat stereotypes—including the pervasive cultural belief that fat people are categorically unattractive or unlovable—are more likely to binge eat,9 as are survivors of sexual assault.10 Fat acceptance spaces frequently include heartbreaking stories of people whose relationships were kept secret by their partners. Worse still, some tell stories about working up the courage to share their experiences of sexual assault only to be categorically disbelieved. Given the pervasiveness of their experiences, is it any wonder that some fat people come to experience anyone else’s desire for them as predatory?
Of course, not all fat people have lived these sex and relationship horror stories. But many of us have become so acculturated to them that we come to describe the vast majority of fat attraction as fat fetishism. When fat sex and dating are discussed, there’s rarely room for simple attraction. But thin people are frequently attracted to other thin people without garnering suspicion of fetishism. They may find themselves drawn to brown-haired people, muscle-bound bodies, or tall partners. They can speak freely of the physical characteristics they like best: chiseled jawlines, long hair, slim legs. In the world of thin people, these are types, a physical attraction so universal that it is neutral.
Everyone, we are told, has a type. But if a thin person is reliably attracted to fat people, that type curdles and becomes something less trustworthy: a fetish. Fat people are so categorically undesirable, we’re told, that any attraction to us must speak to a darker urge or some unchecked appetite.
There’s no question that fat sexuality can be riddled with power imbalances and predatory behavior. But why is a healthy, natural attraction to fat bodies so difficult for us collectively to believe? Why do we so readily accept that thin bodies are universally desired and lovable, while so certainly rejecting the same prospect for fat bodies? Is there room to love the look of fat bodies without dropping into the sinister territory implied by a fat fetish? Can fat bodies be desired without becoming pathological?
For years, my body took center stage in my dating life. Dates constantly commented on my size, a knee-jerk reaction to their discomfort with their own desire. Over time, I came to experience any attraction as untrustworthy, as if danger lurked nearby. In retrospect, I worried for my bodily safety, as if only violence could develop an appetite for a body as soft as mine. And I worried that I would become a sexual curio, more novel than loved.
In a world so insistent that fat attraction is impossible, fat folks can end up experiencing all attraction as fetishism. And the culture around us reinforces that at every turn. The few fat love stories we see are fat people dating other fat people, usually in shared weight loss or food addiction programs, as with Mike & Molly or This Is Us. Fat people aren’t just surrounded by pathology; our bodies are seen as manifestations of it.
We assume most—if not all—fat attraction is pathological. Even some of us with a deep commitment to body positivity and fat acceptance speak in hushed tones about fat fetishism and the shame of realizing we’re dating a chaser, a feeder, or a fat admirer.
But when we do that, we imply that only thin people are worthy of genuine attraction—that, like health, happiness, and success, love can only be earned by thinness. Our inability to distinguish predatory sexual appetites from everyday desire ends up reinforcing the false idea that thin people lead fuller lives, deserve more, are more loved and more desirable.
Some workdays, after a difficult meeting, I would find my way to the nearby nail salon, carving out an hour from an interminably long day to gather myself, find a color, and renew my strength for what lie ahead. This was one of those days.
The TV was always mercifully on, its volume low and closed captioning scrolling by. As the evening news began, I let my eyes glaze over a story about a local pageant crowning high school Rose Festival Queens before suddenly being snapped back to attention. The news anchor’s mute mouth was moving and the closed captioning scrolls running haltingly by with the words obesity epidemic appearing again and again. The news anchor was telling viewers about the dangers of bodies like mine, the plague we had loosed on the world around us. As she spoke, her words were captioned beneath an endless b-roll of fat bodies. They were presented as monstrosities, faceless ghouls, specters of a terrifying kind of fatness looming over the innocent thin.
I had seen footage like this countless times before: fat people filmed from the neck down, reduced to the swells and rolls of our bodies, their tides made spectacle. It’s a trope that academic and activist Dr. Charlotte Cooper calls “headless fatties.” “As Headless Fatties, the body becomes symbolic: we are there but we have no voice, not even a mouth in a head, no brain, no thoughts or opinions. Instead we are reduced and dehumanised as symbols of cultural fear: the body, the belly, the arse, food.”11 The footage always comes from public spaces, shot without heads or faces present, presumably shot without the consent so few fat people would give. Instead, their bodies are filmed surreptitiously, in secret, to be ogled by network news viewers for years to come.
As this particular story unfolded, I recognized the trappings of familiar settings. The herringbone brickwork of Pioneer Courthouse Square, just ten blocks from my office. The gracious and verdant trees at Waterfront Park, where I walked when I needed to decompress. Unlike the endless b-roll from far away, this footage was local. These are places I went. And these bodies looked like mine.
My breathing quickened, eyes scanning the screen for worn black Chelsea boots. I looked for a low-slung belly in dark wash jeans. I searched for a motorcycle jacket, blackberry fingernails, the ends of long, honey blonde hair.
While the rest of the customers relaxed into their services, I was on high alert. I was looking for myself.
That news footage was the most recent in a long line of media portrayals of fat people, but it was far from the first. For my whole, short life, bodies like mine had been presented on camera with disdain, disgust, lurid curiosity. Bodies like mine had been used to elicit laughter, revulsion, pity, and inspiration. Whether on the evening news or a late-night infomercial, in a family drama, or a rollicking comedy, bodies like mine were rarely full people. We were set pieces, props to elicit a series of reactions from the more real, thinner people on screen. We weren’t people—we were just bodies. Disgusting bodies, funny bodies, pitiable bodies, fearful bodies, and sometimes magical bodies, defiant in the confidence we were never supposed to have. But never whole people. We were only rarely afforded our own plotlines, often relegated to being sassy best friends or miserable and pitiable unrequited lovers. When we were afforded real character development, it was always woefully limited, and the lion’s share of plotlines orbited around our size: either in triumphant weight-loss narratives or wretched, pathetic tragedies. But whatever our narrative, it reliably provided a template for thinner people’s understandings of what it meant to live in bodies like ours.
Scripted television and movies frequently present fat bodies as punchlines. Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson have made careers out of their strong comedic acting skill set, yes, and also out of scripts that overwhelmingly call for slapstick humiliation. In Pitch Perfect 2, the opening scene makes a joke of Rebel Wilson’s character, Fat Amy, who sings from acrobatic silks while her costume rips, revealing her genitals. Tammy’s trailer features its star, Melissa McCarthy, trying and failing to hurl herself over a fast food restaurant’s counter, then trying to rob the store by making her hand into the shape of a gun, building a plot around its low-income, fat main character’s absurdity. Avengers: Endgame, a smash hit grossing over $2.6 billion worldwide, finds each of the Avengers dealing with an earth-shattering grief and survivor’s guilt differently.12 Thor’s grief has manifested itself in alcoholism and weight gain, both of which are played on for laughs.
Dramas and reality TV often position fat bodies as pitiable or inspirational, two sides of the same flat coin. Near the turn of the millennium, FOX and ABC premiered two shows focused on weight loss and plastic surgery makeovers. The Swan (like its early 2000s contemporary Extreme Makeover) offered women the lives they dreamed of by giving them the bodies they’d dreamed of through drastic dieting, extreme exercise, and extensive plastic surgery.
Each episode began with an opening video detailing the contestant’s dreary, hopeless life. Often, personal stories included deep traumas—miscarriages, divorce, family abandonment—combined with deep distress over the state of their bodies. Contestants daydreamed aloud about how their lives would be different if they were thinner, their ears pinned back, breasts augmented, fat sucked from their waists and thighs. They yearned for bodies that exemplified a narrow, thin, and inescapably white standard of beauty, often lightening their hair and straightening their noses.
Sylvia, a twenty-seven-year-old Latinx woman from Chicago, shared her story of trauma, bullying, and abandonment, explaining that her shameful weight came from the foods popular in her community. The camera followed her as she bought elotes from a street vendor, and as she did she listed the dish’s ingredients: corn, butter, cheese, mayonnaise. The panel of all-white judges looks on, laughing heartily as one white judge clutches at her heart.13 The footage is painful to watch: white professionals and network TV judges laughing too readily at Latinx foods and traditions, as they simultaneously work to “help” a working-class woman of color. After watching a few short minutes of Sylvia’s story, the judges explain what they plan to do to her. A therapist diagnoses her trust issues, apparently based on the video presented. A plastic surgeon describes her face as having a “bland bone structure,” before outlining his plan: cheek implants, chin implants, a brow lift, nose straightening, ear pinning, and “a lot of liposuction. Hopefully,” he says, “that will inspire her to get on the program with Debbie,” a personal trainer. Sylvia will be restricted to 1,200 calories per day using Nutrisystem, a diet that’s been the subject of repeated lawsuits for allegedly causing gallbladder disease. For three months, she will work out for two hours each day, work with a therapist on camera, restrict her food intake, and undergo an intense battery of cosmetic surgeries and dental procedures. During that time, like all contestants, Sylvia was deprived of mirrors and, like some dystopian science fiction, her “work ethic” was monitored.
Sylvia’s episode ended like every episode of The Swan: with her grand reveal. She entered a baroque mansion through its double front doors to a dozen applauding attendees of her coming-out party, predominantly made up of the surgeons and dentists who treated her. Her hair was newly blonde, styled into extravagant barrel curls, face slick with heavy makeup. Her body was newly slender, clothed in a strapless satin pageant gown with showy, glittery jewelry. She revealed that her boyfriend proposed to her and that she accepted. In the world of The Swan, this meant that her new body was already paying off. The final step of Sylvia’s journey meant seeing her new reflection. Sylvia approached dramatically draped velvet curtains where, when they were drawn, she would face her reflection for the first time in months. The camera circled her face and body, searching for signs of tension as the show’s taut score built toward its climax. The willowy blonde host in a plunging, bejeweled evening gown asked Sylvia if she was ready, then drew the curtains. Sylvia, like so many before her, laughed and then wept, gasping her thanks to the panel of surgeons and trainers who transformed her. But despite her best efforts, Sylvia was not selected to compete in the season finale’s pageant.
Sylvia’s appearance, like nearly every woman’s on The Swan, offers its viewers a clear and simple arc. Women’s lives are miserable because their bodies are hideous. Changing their bodies will open up the lives they’ve dreamed of—and, in the world of the show, it does. These newly glamorous “ugly ducklings” are welcomed into a more real world: one with happy marriages, obedient children, better jobs, and fuller lives. The Sylvia who ate elotes with her family was to be pitied. The Sylvia who restricted was to be celebrated as an inspiration for us all.
The Swan and Extreme Makeover created a template used for years to come. Most recently, Revenge Body with Khloe Kardashian has refined The Swan’s formula. Rather than focusing on a broad fairytale life promised by a thinner body, Revenge Body narrowed its focus: get revenge by getting thin. It’s introduction, voiced by Kardashian, lays out the show’s premise:
I’m Khloe Kardashian. Growing up, people called me the fat, funny sister. Until one day, I started working out, eating right, and putting myself first. And you know what? I’ve never felt better. Now I’m helping others transform by hooking them up with my favorite Hollywood trainers and glam experts to turn their lives around and shut down the shamers. Because a great body is the best revenge.
In the world of Revenge Body, the way to “shut down the shamers” isn’t to hold them accountable for their actions, to work through challenges in your relationship, or to heal from the emotional damage of shame—it’s to get thin. In Kardashian’s show, bodies are currency. Thin bodies are opulent, the representation of the old adage living well is the best revenge. Fat bodies cannot be living well—they are signs of shame, of failure, of succumbing to abuse. Only thinness can deliver wretched fat people from complicated relationships, heartbreak, and abuse.
One episode follows a queer couple, Sam and Nicole. Sam, a smaller fat person, exasperatedly tells the camera about her two-and-a-half-year relationship with Nicole, a larger fat and masculine-presenting person. We first meet Nicole as Sam walks in on her at a bar, hunched over a table full of burgers and wilted fried foods, asking for a side of ranch dressing. The table is covered with food—plates of deep-fried hot wings, onion rings shining with grease, thin hamburger patties with soft buns. The camera offers close-up shots of Nicole licking glistening fat from her fingers, offering viewers a kind of softcore pornography of disgust. Sam begs Nicole to stop eating the food on the table. “This is the reason why I’m . . .” Sam begins, searching for a word before backing up. “Covered up,” she finishes finally, deflated.
In confessional footage, Sam laments the state not of her partner’s conduct but of her body, wondering aloud how she’s “supposed to find the other person attractive if . . .” before trailing off. She explains that she and Nicole haven’t had sex in eight months and that she blames Nicole. “I do hold a lot of resentment toward her, because I know I would not have let myself get like this had it not been for our relationship.” In Revenge Body, failing relationships aren’t matters of communication, validation, or emotional support—changing bodies are to blame. And thinner partners, like Sam, are free to resent fatter partners, like Nicole, for failing to provide a body to which she is “supposed” to be attracted. Emotional support and healthy relationship practices don’t matter—only bodies matter. At the end of the episode, after time apart and significant weight loss, Sam and Nicole have not substantively worked through the emotional issues in their relationship. Sam has not excised her resentment for Nicole; Nicole has not moved through her resistance to Sam’s body mandates. But both are thinner. In a final scene in the grand setting of an empty Dodger Stadium, Nicole proposes to Sam, and Sam accepts, proving that, in the show’s parlance, a revenge body can mend a weakened relationship.
Revenge Body, like The Swan before it, offers an etiology of fat bodies. During Sam and Nicole’s episode, a personal trainer snaps at them, “The way you both got here? It’s because you both sat on your asses and didn’t eat well,” he says, eyes sharp with irritation verging on anger. This is not the thesis of the show—Revenge Body does not argue this point—it takes it as a simple fact and claims a kind of bravery in its “tough love” for Sam and Nicole, blaming them on national television for what it sees as objectively failed bodies. Where The Swan elicited pity for its contestants “unacceptable” bodies, Revenge Body called for anger. Remember that you are meant to hate this body. Remember that it is to blame for your failings, your shortcomings, your imperfect relationship. Remember that the only way to love this body is to be free of it.
Other reality programs seem most focused on stoking their audiences’ disgust and fear at the sight of fat bodies. TLC’s My 600 Pound Life seems to consider itself an objective and tender documentary, all the while treating very fat people as freakshows, displaying their bodies and medical struggles to fuel audiences’ disgust, revulsion, and sense of superiority. Viewers are invited into the power dynamic and narrative of a freakshow—a place where audience members’ bodies, bodies that otherwise feel woefully inadequate, become suddenly superior by comparison. At least I’m not that fat. In 2016, BBC Three’s Obesity: The Post Mortem purported to reveal “the dangers of fat to the human body” by televising a postmortem examination on a fat woman whose body was donated to science.14 This unquestionably cruel premise made a cautionary tale out of a person who died, opening her naked and dismembered body up to open mockery and judgment from a nation of viewers at the one time she couldn’t object or even consent—posthumously.
In 2005, on The Tyra Banks Show, the supermodel wore a fat suit to “experience what it’s like to be obese.”15 Banks put on prosthetics, ill-fitting and drab clothing, a wig, outdated glasses, a hidden camera, and a fat suit to make her appear to be my size—roughly 350 pounds. “I started walking down the street and within 10 seconds, a trio of people looked at me, snickered, looked me right in my eye and started pointing and laughing in my face [. . .] and I had no idea it was that blatant.”16 While the intended message of Banks’s show wasn’t a harmful one, its execution left much to be desired. Real fat women were invited onto the show to share their experiences—not as supermodels who could remove their fat at the end of a day, but as living, breathing fat people who lived with open harassment regularly. Still, Banks’s day of suffering took center stage, leaving the model in tears, to be consoled by the women who lived in the body she’d worn as a costume for just one day. Even when fat stories are told in nonfiction programming, thinness commands the spotlight.
In 2014, a dating website, Simple Pickup, replicated Banks’s experiment, this time on a series of dates set up online. The introduction announces that “the number one fear for women dating online is that they’re going to meet a serial killer. The number one fear for men? That the woman they meet is going to be fat.”17 This isn’t a social experiment so much as a ruse, one not depicting the real-life experiences of a fat woman dating but rather pranking thin and muscular men with a high-drama bait-and-switch. The camera shows a woman’s profile, featuring photographs of her thin, bikini-clad body, followed by a time-lapse application of a fat suit to an otherwise slight woman. She rubs her prosthetic belly while blowing kisses to the camera. Her laugh comes easily—this is a lark. As the dates progress, she baits the men. “You look just like your picture. It’s crazy.” “I can’t say the same,” responds one date. “You look so different from your picture,” says another. “Maybe it’s—I’ve been trying on this new lipstick, what do you think?” she answers coquettishly. Her behavior bears no resemblance to the straight fat women I know, often battle-scarred by their date’s awkward and judgmental comments, with elaborate trap lines and disclosures to preempt further harm. The video comes across less as a “social experiment,” as its tag line claims, and more as an extended practical fat joke.18 The video went viral, and as of 2019, it has garnered more than thirty-three million views. “Kudos to the guy who stayed!” gushed Cosmopolitan.19
Some programs go even further, encouraging condescension toward and bullying of fat people as a favor to us, as a way to motivate our weight loss. (Note: all available research indicates that fat shaming leads to weight gain, not weight loss, and worse health outcomes—as do shaming and bullying for any reason.) Perhaps the most iconic example of this is The Biggest Loser, a primetime reality show that made a long-running hit out of exploiting fat people’s emotional pain. The show followed a cohort of fat people competing with one another to see who could lose the most weight—all in front of a national audience. Contestants’ calories were severely restricted and lengthy, extreme exercise routines became the crown jewel of the show. Its stars weren’t the contestants but trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, who openly berated contestants who asked for breaks, often resorting to name calling and personal judgments. The show ran for seventeen seasons, from 2004 to 2016. A national study followed contestants for years after the show and found, among other things, that the show’s tactics had left their metabolisms permanently damaged in what one doctor with the National Institutes of Health called “frightening and amazing.”20
Despite this damning evidence regarding the show’s approach, in 2019, USA Network announced that The Biggest Loser would return to the air the following year. “We’re reimagining The Biggest Loser for today’s audiences, providing a new, holistic 360-degree look at wellness, while retaining the franchise competition format and legendary jaw-dropping moments,” said a statement from network president Chris McCumber, adding that USA was “excited to add another big, buzzy show to our growing unscripted lineup.”21 Even in a culture that increasingly pays lip service to body positivity and “wellness” over dieting, fat shaming never seems to go out of style.
In the last few years, a new kind of fat representation has become repopularized, much of it echoing Tracy Turnblad, the lead character in John Waters’s iconic film-turned-musical Hairspray (1988). Tracy, first played by a young Ricki Lake, has quickly become an icon for many young fat women, especially fat white women, and it’s no wonder why. So many portrayals of fat people make our bodies into morality tales, warnings of the dangers of assumed gluttony or imagined sloth. Our bodies are consistently depicted as befores, forever yearning to become afters. But Hairspray bucks that trend. Tracy Turnblad’s character development doesn’t hinge on weight loss, remorse for “letting herself go,” or guilt for her size. She is not a tool to stoke audiences’ disgust, condescension, pity, or rage. She does not stand for anything, is not a symbol of capitalism run amok, or self-loathing, not a representation of bloated wealth or lazy poverty. Tracy simply stands for herself. And in recent years, more characters have begun to follow suit. Hulu’s Shrill, Netflix’s Dumplin’, and AMC’s Dietland have all offered scripted versions of strong fat protagonists—all brought to life by fat writers who painstakingly work to eke out space simply to exist in the only bodies they’ve ever had. TLC’s reality series My Big Fat Fabulous Life follows Whitney Way Thore, a fat dancer who isn’t waiting for weight loss to live her best life. These programs—featuring fat characters, created by fat writers, played by fat actors—offer a rare glimpse into the lives of fat people as we are, not as thin people imagine us to be. Still, these characters remain painfully limited. All these shows center the stories of straight, cisgender, teenage, and adult white women in stubbornly heterosexual narratives. They focus on lead characters who are fat, but not too fat, and most center bodies with etiologies, explanations for bodies that deviate from the thinness audiences will expect. Yes, fat stories are rarely told by fat people—but when they are, they’re told by and about those of us whose bodies are, aside from their fatness, already marked by privilege. The stories of fat white women are scarce; LGBTQ fat people, fat disabled people, and fat people of color are exponentially scarcer. Even when fat stories are produced, we’re only offered one standard deviation from privilege.
Sometimes, the fat white women at the center of fat stories are party to the continued exclusion and erasure of women of color. When Isn’t It Romantic? was released, Rebel Wilson, proudly trumpeted her role as its romantic lead. “I’m proud to be the first ever plus-size girl to be the star of a romantic comedy,” said Wilson on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. But years earlier, Queen Latifah had starred in The Last Holiday and Just Wright. Just two years before Wilson’s role, Mo’Nique had also starred in Phat Girlz. Upon being corrected by Black women on Twitter, Wilson began blocking those who sought to correct the record. She later stated that it “was never my intention to erase anyone else’s achievements and I adore you Queen Latifah so, so much.”22 Still, her critics remained blocked and uncredited. Still, the lion’s share of fat stories stubbornly center whiteness.
As much as some plucky, relatable fat characters have come into the mainstream, there’s another side to confident fat leads. In reality shows and scripted programming, fat people are frequently used as props for building thinner people’s confidence. In Greta Gerwig’s critically acclaimed Lady Bird, the lead’s best friend, Julie, plays a classic fat archetype—a best friend with no meaningful storyline or character arc of her own. When Julie learns she’s been cast opposite Lady Bird’s crush in their school play, she poignantly tells her self-absorbed best friend why it matters so much to her. “It’s probably my only shot at that, you know?” Julie’s most meaningful, personal scene finds her sitting alone on her couch on prom night, wearing a sweatshirt while she stares sadly at the television. Her night only begins when she gets a call from Lady Bird, the thinner character with a more real life.
Recent fat sitcom characters, confident though they may be, are still played for laughs—and their seemingly misplaced confidence becomes part of the joke. The show 30 Rock saw its lead, Jenna Maroney, gain weight and make a punchline of herself, finding success and a new stream of cashflow from her new catchphrase “me want food!” Parks & Recreation featured Jerry Gergich, an exceptionally kind fat man with a kind and beautiful family. More a running joke than a character, despite his deep kindheartedness, Jerry is blamed by everyone for everything. His sweetness, deeply good heart, and thoughtful gestures don’t matter; his body is still played for laughs, still inviting the blame for anything that goes wrong. Even confident fat characters have been reconfigured in thin folks’ imaginations to be the butt of the joke. Our bodies are never just bodies; our stories, never our own.
Most media portrayals of fat people are designed to elicit a narrow band of reactions from thin viewers: Pity, which leads to inspiration. Anger, which fuels judgment. Disgust, which is believed to kickstart motivation, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Too often, these are the only reactions prompted for audiences when fat characters are on screen. And like the emotions they cue, the messages and tropes used in so much fat media representation are a similarly limited, well-tread territory that reduce fat characters to punchlines and punching bags.
Over the last thirty years, the majority of fat representation has pushed just a few reductive narratives that are tired, hackneyed, and as ubiquitous as ever. One of the most popular messages about fat bodies in film and television is that fat bodies are disgusting and funny. This is often promulgated through the use of fat suits, or “weight prosthetics,” allowing disproportionately thin actors to portray fat characters as repulsive punchlines without ever engaging an actually fat person. These narratives overwhelmingly feature thin people dressing as fat people, often for the express purpose of mocking us and our bodies. The 1990s and early 2000s were replete with fat suit performances designed to elicit disgusted laughter, and they largely fall into one of three categories.
The first fat suit narrative shows a fat person’s pitiable and limited life as a fat teenager, a gray and grainy “before” picture offered up as a tempting contrast to the technicolor “after” of the thin life that inevitably follows. Flashbacks to Monica Geller’s youth on Friends found her fat and awkward. In Just Friends, Ryan Reynolds donned a fat suit to play Chris Brander, a formerly fat man whose “friend zoned” high school rejection led to major weight loss and an adulthood marked by endless sexual conquests. Fatness humanizes a thin person, makes sense of their adult insecurities and neuroses, and evens the playing field between the audience and an otherwise impossibly thin example of the beauty standard. Over the course of the story, we watch these recently thin protagonists come to accept that now that they’re thin, they’re deserving of the love and acceptance they’ve gained. (Stars, they’re just like us!)
The second narrative offers fatness as evidence of or a consequence for bad behavior—a satisfying kind of schadenfreude offered as poetic justice for shallow and cruel characters whose terrible psyche is finally manifested in a body the story regards as objectively terrible. Ben Stiller’s bullying character in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story got his comeuppance in a final fat-suited scene, showing Stiller shirtless, surrounded by open bags of chips and popcorn, his naked belly covered in crumbs. In the books and films of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the fatness of Dudley Dursley and his father, Vernon, seem to be offered as evidence and manifestation of their stunted empathy and craven cruelty.
The third narrative is more overtly mean-spirited. In it, fat characters are played by thin actors for a mocking, cruel kind of comic relief. The Klumps, Austin Powers, and Norbit all used this approach: put thin actors in fat suits to play exaggerated, food-obsessed, physically repulsive, socially dense, and painfully unselfconscious people for laughs. Mike Myers’s Austin Powers films featured a fat-suited Myers playing Fat Bastard, an angry, forever flatulent Scot known for constantly eating—eating human babies and little people, in particular. In The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy played an entire fat family, including Professor Sherman Klump, an accomplished scientist whose gluttony and clumsiness are reliably played for disgusted laughs. The trailer finds Professor Klump knocking a woman over on the dance floor, being called fat by his boss, and knocking over a table full of equipment to riotous laughter from a lecture hall full of students. At home, he dines with his family while his father angrily rails against weight loss. “I know what healthy is,” he snaps, drowning a plate of meat and potatoes beneath cups of gravy.23 Tyler Perry and Martin Lawrence caricatured fat Black women in their respective Madea and Big Momma’s House franchises. The fat caricatures in these narratives are unquestionably cruel, designed exclusively to mock and shame fat people.
In all of these narratives, thin people write the script, thin people direct the movie, and thin people play fat people—and all center thinness as normal, good, and right by depicting fatness as a shameful, troubling, or comedic transgression. These are fat narratives created entirely absent of any actual fat people. All three present fatness not only as a changeable characteristic but as a prerequisite for a real, human, well-rounded life. Fat characters have not earned fat actors. Their stories are not worthy of fat writers.
Even more insidious than that is the quiet underpinning offered by fat suits. Fat suit narratives subtly assert that thin people know as much as (or more than) fat people do about what it’s like to be fat, that fat bodies are only temporary, and that fat people who stay fat are simply shirking their responsibility to create a body that would earn them respect.
There is a cultural weight to fat suit narratives, and it pulls everyone down. These narratives are contrived by thin people for thin audiences, regularly taking a set of assertions for granted:
1. Becoming thin is a life accomplishment and the only way to start living a real, full, human life.
2. All fatness is a shameful moral failing.
3. Thinness is a naturally superior way of being.
4. Fat people who stay fat deserve to be mocked.
Fat suit narratives set up a painfully overt power dynamic, reinforced over and over and over again. But it’s one that’s so ubiquitous that we’ve come to passively accept it, using sheer exposure to quiet the objections of our conscience, which reminds us of what we already know: there is more than enough body shame to go around in the world.
Another predominant storyline is that fat love and sex—especially confident fat sexuality—are laughable. Fat sexuality becomes so unthinkable that the mere thought of it becomes a punchline. In Pitch Perfect, Rebel Wilson’s character, Fat Amy, says she joins her college a capella group to get away from “all [her] ex-boyfriends,” a line played for laughs. How could a fat girl have multiple ex-boyfriends and how could they possibly want her back? Pitch Perfect 2 finds Rebel Wilson’s character, Fat Amy, as a star soloist in a high-production performance at the Kennedy Center. She descends from the ceiling on acrobatic aerial silks and, as she swings from them, her costume rips at the crotch, revealing her bare buttocks. The camera seems to relish showing us the exaggerated disgust of the audience. One announcer shouts, “She’s turning—brace yourselves!” while the other shrieks, “Not the front! Nobody wants to see the front!” before both revert to horror movie screams. Her fat body is depicted as being so comically undesirable that it unleashes terror in everyone who sees it.
The 2000 Tom Green comedy Road Trip also made a running joke of the categorical repulsiveness of fat women. In its trailer, we find out that Kyle (DJ Qualls) finds a love interest. Rhonda (Mia Amber Davis, a plus-size model) is Black and fat, her casting a lazy visual gag against Kyle’s pale, diminutive frame. Later, Kyle produces plus-size leopard-print panties to show his friends. “Did you kill a cheetah?” asks one incredulously, before the camera savors each of the men’s disgusted responses and mock-retching. The simple fact of sleeping with a fat Black woman is a joke unto itself. That punchline is compounded by Kyle’s inability to meet the expectations of his straight, white, thin peers—presumably that he should pursue a thin white woman.24
2007’s Norbit makes fat sexual repulsion into a full-length movie. In it, Eddie Murphy wears a fat suit to play Rasputia, a domineering fat Black woman who bullies her thin partner, Norbit, into a relationship. In grade school, Rasputia chases off Norbit’s bullies before asking if he has a girlfriend. When he says no, she says, “You do now,” and drags her unwilling boyfriend away by the hand. The two stay together into adulthood, when Rasputia grows into a shrill, sexually domineering and oblivious stereotype of a fat Black woman. In the film’s trailer, she tells a friend that she “can’t keep Norbit off” her, before the trailer shows Rasputia breaking their bed repeatedly by launching herself onto her cowed, unwilling partner. As in Pitch Perfect 2, Rasputia’s body causes horror in everyone who sees it. At a water park, the theme from Jaws plays ominously as she takes her seat at the top of the waterslide, bystanders and children shrieking at the sight of her bikini-clad body descending the slide. Like Saartjie Baartman, the South African woman put on display in nineteenth-century European freak shows for her large buttocks and distinctly fat Black body, Rasputia’s body is frequently depicted as a monstrosity, played for both fear and disgust. The film is one long fat joke, all hinging on the idea that this fat Black woman is categorically undesirable, that she has only found a partner through a comedic kind of abuse, and that being desired by a fat Black woman is something to fear.25
Some films find fat attraction so categorically inconceivable that it requires head trauma or hypnotism. In the Farrelly brothers’ Shallow Hal, Jack Black’s character needs to be hypnotized in order to find a fat woman attractive, paving the way for a feature-length fat joke. Amy Schumer starred in I Feel Pretty, in which her character, Renee, sustained a head injury that left her believing she was thin, gorgeous, and irresistible. Rebel Wilson’s role in Isn’t It Romantic? followed suit. Wilson’s character, Natalie, believes that a man may be making a pass at her on the subway when, as it turns out, he only wants to steal her purse. She runs away, running into a steel post and knocking herself out. When she comes to, she finds herself trapped in a romantic comedy in which her leading man, played by Liam Hemsworth, falls in love with her at first sight.
While fat women are often portrayed as comically undesirable, fat men are often presented as unintelligent, oblivious, angry, or thwarted. American sitcoms frequently center around nuclear families, and those nuclear families regularly feature fat, hapless men married to thin, gracious women. Homer Simpson is an animated fat icon who is also famously unintelligent, incompetent, interpersonally oblivious, and negligent. His fat is such a stalwart feature of the show that, in one classic episode of The Simpsons, Homer purposefully gains weight so that he can seek disability-related accommodations to work from home. Following in Homer Simpson’s footsteps is Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, also fat and unintelligent. Peter’s size is frequently a plot point on the show. In one episode, his fat body causes him to develop his own gravitational pull powerful enough that household objects and small appliances fall into orbit around his body.26 In another, he eats thirty hamburgers in one sitting, causing a stroke that leaves him paralyzed, limping, and with impaired speech. Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson are archetypes of fat, white, middle-class sitcom fathers whose size is openly ridiculed and who are too ignorant, gluttonous, and lazy to change their bodies.
When those fat sitcom dads are working class, however, they become angry and thwarted. Ralph Kramden, star of the classic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, is a modern root of this particular archetype. Kramden, played by Jackie Gleason, is a fat white working-class bus driver who frequently engages in get-rich-quick schemes. He threatens to abuse his wife, Alice, so frequently that his most famous catchphrase was uttered through gritted teeth, with one balled-up fist held in front of his face: “One of these days, Alice! Pow! Right in the kisser!” In the 1970s, All in the Family’s Archie Bunker became the fat white working-class sitcom father of note, both cantankerous and proudly regressive in his politics.
By the 1990s, many of TV’s most notable angry fat dads were Black men. Family Matters’ Carl Winslow was forever irritated by his nerdy neighbor Steve Urkel, frequently erupting in thwarted anger at the teen. On The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, seemingly the entire personality of the family’s patriarch, Uncle Phil, was comprised of mild irritation and major anger. The quicktempered father figure is wealthy, Ivy League educated, and professionally accomplished as an attorney and a judge, but he still bears all the hallmarks of an archetypal working class thwarted, fat sitcom dad and a stereotypical angry Black man. Fat white fathers are afforded the opportunity to be unwise, negligent, and happily oblivious to the world around them. Fat Black fathers are marked by their short tempers and are forever thwarted by their own families.
Some fat characters are consumed by revenge, soured by their own failing bodies. Two of the 1990s’ most iconic sitcom villains were fat people. On Seinfeld, Jerry’s fat postal worker neighbor, Newman, constantly plotted to undermine him, earning him a spot on TV Guide’s “60 Nastiest Villains of All Time”27 list and making him #16 on Rolling Stone’s “40 Greatest TV Villains of All Time” list.28 Newman tattles on Jerry’s bad behavior to Jerry’s parents, causes a flea infestation in Jerry’s apartment, and hides bags of lazily undelivered mail in Jerry’s basement storage space. Like Ralph Kramden, Newman frequently launches shortsighted get-rich-quick schemes, such as driving empty cans and bottles to Michigan to redeem them for ten cents instead of New York’s five-cent rate. As with many sitcom dads, Newman is neither thoughtful nor intelligent, but he is constantly scheming, either to accrue wealth or to take down the show’s thinner title character.
The Drew Carey Show took the fat villain archetype one step further with Mimi Bobeck, a fat personal assistant who works with the show’s title character. Mimi’s clothing resembles that of a circus clown, all ruffled muumuus and shapeless caftans, and her sky-high blue eyeshadow appears to be modeled after famed drag queen Divine (herself the inspiration for The Little Mermaid’s Ursula, another iconic fat villain). Early in the show’s run, Mimi is established as Drew’s nemesis after he denies her a job because of her makeup. In subsequent episodes, Mimi torments Drew, gluing his hand to a pornographic magazine and later sending an unconscious and nonconsenting Drew to China. Mimi frequently insults Drew’s weight, frequently calling him “Pig.” Like Newman, Mimi’s character is scheming and fixated on causing harm to the show’s titular (and less fat) protagonist.
But thwarted, revenge-hungry fat villains are not solely the work of sitcoms. NBC’s long-running police procedural drama, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has repeatedly featured plots centering fat villains who ultimately murder their tormentors. In the episode “Mean,” Agnes Linsky is a working-class fat high school senior who is relentlessly bullied by a group of mean girls at her private school. The mean girls murder one of their friends, then accuse Agnes of being the perpetrator. After the group’s arrest, Agnes hopes her bullying will end, but their final act is to take candid photographs of Agnes naked, changing in the school locker room, and circulate them to the rest of the class, unleashing a new wave of bullying from all sides. In the final scene, Agnes admits to murdering one of the bullies, tearfully telling detectives, “It was never going to stop.”29 In the episode “Fat,” a Black man, Rudi Bixton, is beaten by two thin white teenagers simply for being fat. Rudi’s fat younger siblings retaliate, assaulting his assailants as payback. When his assailants escape any legal accountability, Rudi fatally shoots them. When Rudi is convicted of murder, he is not present for the reading of the verdict, having been rushed to the hospital for an emergency amputation caused by his diabetes. One detective wonders aloud if a prison sentence is even necessary, since he assumes Bixton will soon die of the diseases brought on by his fatness.30 Even when fat characters are endlessly tormented, defending our families and ourselves still makes villains of us.
Fat bodies are endlessly portrayed as the result of laziness, gluttony, and dysfunction. In Mike & Molly, the show’s title characters meet in Overeaters Anonymous, its premise explaining why its leads have such abjectly failed fat bodies. In This Is Us, Chrissy Metz plays Kate Pearson, whose entire persona seems to revolve around her fatness, including her binge eating disorder. Kate’s character has long been slated for a so-called “weight-loss journey,” with NBC going so far as to famously mandate weight loss in Metz’s contract as a requirement for her acceptance of the role.31
Even more infamously, the premise of Netflix’s Insatiable hinged on its lead character’s dramatic weight loss. Its lead character, Patty, is a fat high school student, relentlessly bullied for her weight. Patty is frequently depicted as slovenly and unable to stop binging on junk foods. Unable, that is, until she spends a summer with her jaw wired shut, returning in the fall as a thin and glamorous young woman with a thirst for revenge. Now, as a thinner—and more real—character, Patty can take her place as the show’s lead, having shed her dysfunctional and pitiable fat body. In Insatiable, as in so much of film and television, fat bodies are always temporary, symptomatic of either pitiable dysfunction or sinful sloth and gluttony.
The theses about fat bodies presented in mainstream television and film are neither benign nor accidental. These well-worn tropes are extraordinarily reductive, and their impacts are far-reaching, both creating a social template for thin people’s understandings and judgments of fat people, and simultaneously laying a narrow foundation for the kinds of people fat folks are allowed to be. Media representation of fat characters is tightly tied to a handful of wildly oversimplified stereotypes, perpetuating and magnifying them and flattening us in the process.
For some fat people, stories like these may ring true: they may be members of Overeaters Anonymous, like the title characters in Mike and Molly. They may have been ridiculed by thin lovers’ friends, like Mia was in Road Trip. But even if they do ring true, fat people’s lives are so much more than our bodies. Fat people have complex interior lives, complicated love lives, professional triumphs, and personal tragedies.
As it stands, the lion’s share of fat stories are told by thin people whose limited imaginations reduce us to our aberrant bodies, but there are exceptions.
I first saw Can You Ever Forgive Me? alone. In it, Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, an author whose work has lost interest, audience, and sales. She struggles to make ends meet, living on a shoestring in a cramped, messy apartment. Over the course of the film, she uses her writing talents to solve her financial problems—not through writing new books but through forging correspondences from Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, and other literary luminaries. McCarthy plays Israel as she reportedly was: a prickly lesbian trying to eke out a living in a literary world that didn’t want her work.
The film is a discomfiting symphony, all cacophonous accountability. Israel’s ex, played by Anna Deavere Smith, offers insight into the demise of their relationship with the exhaustion of returning to well-trod territory. The FBI closes in on Israel as she continues to sell forged letters. She is held accountable for her behavior from her agent, her friend, her ex, and ultimately law enforcement. On every front, Israel is forced to face the consequences of a lifetime of bad behavior. Her character arc is a simple and internal one: Lee Israel realizes she’s lived her life as an asshole, and that, as she presents her allocution in court, she has reaped what she has sown.
Lee Israel, both as she is played by McCarthy and as she lived, is no role model. She is neither a queer hero nor a fat icon, nor is she a triumphant underdog to be celebrated by her respective communities. But as the film drew to a close, I found myself weeping, a cathartic and guttural kind of cry. This was the representation I had needed for so long. Not a meticulously crafted Fabergé egg of a character, nor an impermeable fortress of a heroine. No, McCarthy’s portrayal of Lee Israel was better than that. She had a privilege often reserved for thin men and exquisitely beautiful thin women. She was excruciatingly human, and she was deeply unlikable.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? doesn’t present its lead in contrast to more real thin people. It does not force her through a weight-loss story arc to earn her redemption. It does not seek her redemption. Like Mary Louise Parker’s character in Weeds, Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep, Hailee Steinfeld in Edge of Seventeen, Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Woody Allen in nearly everything, McCarthy’s Lee Israel was an asshole. As with those thinner counterparts, Israel’s body is not chalked up to her character; it remains almost entirely uncommented upon. Her body is her body. Her character is her character. And her character is unsympathetic. Can You Ever Forgive Me? wasn’t refreshing because its lead was a jerk; it was refreshing because she was a person.
In 2016, Taika Waititi directed Hunt for the Wilderpeople, starring Julian Dennison as Ricky Baker, a fat Māori boy whose preteen vandalism and hooliganism have made him the problem child of New Zealand’s foster-care system. Baker is finally placed with his estranged aunt who, for the first time, shows the boy genuine love and care, embracing his quirks and working to make him happy. Shortly thereafter, his aunt passes away, leaving Ricky with his gruff uncle (Sam Neill) as the two voyage through the wilderness and grief together. Ricky Baker is flawed, having lived through so many traumas in his continuing childhood, but Waititi presents him as comedic and endearing, frustrated and vulnerable, tender and real. His body does not determine his story—his experiences and his character do.
“Can I show you something?”
A family member hands me her iPad, her face lit up with eager excitement. She holds it in front of both of us, sidling up to me, watching me closely for a happy or grateful reaction—something to reinforce her discovery. Instead, she watches my face fall.
On the screen are before and after pictures from surgeons’ offices, advertisements for gastric bypass, and lap band surgeries. On the left side of the screen is a woman my size, slouching and exposed, in fitted workout clothing. Next to her is an image of that same woman, beaming and standing tall, half her previous size.
I am before. I am always before.
“I saw these pictures and I thought of you. Think of how much healthier you would be. The partners you could date. I know you love clothes—you could wear whatever you want!”
She pages through the pictures, watching my face for the happiness she’s sure will come. The relief she imagines when I learn that there is a way out of the body that I have—all it will take is $23,000 to cut that body open, truss its organs, and leave it to shrink itself.
But in this moment, I have already been gutted.
I search the faces of the images of the “before” women. They stare ahead, blank, stony, knowing that the bodies they have—the ones they are not meant to have—will live on in this photograph.
When we reduce fat people to their bodies, to “before and after,” or to bellies and rolls, we come to think of fat people as bodies without personhood. Fat bodies become symbols of disembodied disgust. As in a news report, at the very moment we are meant to be learning about fatness, the conversation is devoid not only of the voices of fat people but of our very faces.
These images—flattened, inhuman—reinforce so much troubling thinking about fat people. Whether background visuals on the news or before and after photos in advertisements, we are more symbol than human. We become effigies, archetypes, morality tales, punchlines, threats, epidemics, but never just people. We are captured, pressed between pages like butterflies, forever frozen to illustrate our anatomies. We do not speak. We do not move. We are only and forever bodies.
Fat people are afforded a voice or a face when our bodies change or when we express the grief, regret, guilt, and shame that thin people imagine must come from having bodies like ours. What they do not consider is the crumpling that happens when you see your body, every day, represented as a cautionary tale for someone else. If you are not careful, you may become a monstrosity like me, a before desperately awaiting an after. Because after, you can be heard. After, you are not required to renounce your own body in order to be accepted and embraced. You may share your experiences, hopes, dreams, plans, without weighing them down with caveats, dress sizes, inches, or pounds. After, you can have a face. After, you can smile. After, you can speak.
My body does not afford me those luxuries. My body is before.
But I don’t choose to believe that.
I choose to believe that fat people can be genuinely attractive, truly loved, actually lovable, sincerely wanted.
I choose to believe that my fat friends and family members who are in love are loved fully, are fulfilled in those relationships, and that their partners are not somehow damaged for wanting them. I believe that my past loves with fat partners weren’t some symptom of a sinister sickness for either of us, but something real and worthwhile.
I reject the notion that fat attraction is necessarily a fetish: something deviant, tawdry, vulgar, or dangerous. I choose to believe that my body is worthy of love—the electric warmth of real, full love. In many ways, it’s not that simple. But in some ways, it is. I choose to believe that I am lovable, as is my body, just as both are today.
I believe that I deserve to be loved in my body, not in spite of it. My body is not an inconvenience, a shameful fact, or an unfortunate truth. Desiring my body is not a pathological act. And I’m not alone. Despite the never-ending headwinds, fat people around the world find and forge the relationships they want. There is no road map, so we become cartographers, charting some new land for ourselves. We live extraordinary lives, beloved by our families, partners, communities. Fat people fall wildly in love. Fat people get married. Fat people have phenomenal sex. Fat people are impossibly happy. Those fat people live in defiance of the expectations set forth for them. Their fat lives are glorious and beautiful things, vibrant and beyond the reach of what the rest of us have been trained to imagine. Let’s imagine more.