Virgie Tovar

As much as I love the idea of family, I actually like not being married, and I actually like not being a mother right now.

To many who have experienced the gruesome reality that is diet culture I know 'You Have The Right To Remain Fat' makes complete sense.

When we both moved to San Francisco in our 20s, she moved to a wealthy neighborhood and I moved into a neighborhood where old men had phone sex on the pay phone at the laundromat. Our friendship threatened her world in a way that it didn’t mine. The people I knew had neither wealth to protect nor any desire to play at that game, and so their lives were inspired by a freedom I adored. The kind of freedom that allows you to talk about shitting and fucking over dinner.

One of the things that has become exceedingly obvious to me is how our current cultural attitudes toward fat people are steeped in bigotry.

I know that not everyone has the same appetite for The Vent, but when it comes to doing work around diet culture and fatphobia, venting is a powerful tool. For people who are in the process of healing from diet culture, we are often wading through an enormous ocean of misinformation, gas lighting and dirty ol’ lies. Without access to venting, our emotions and thoughts occur in sort of a vacuum where we can easily talk ourselves out of what may well be very astute analysis.

Ali Abbassi’s ‘Border’ movie ultimately reminded me of what happens when we meet someone who reflects our power back to us.

I came to realize that even though I was certainly a bona fide member, that some fat people were far more acutely marginalized than me.

The word “bully” makes us think we’re talking about a tiny handful of anti-social individuals when in fact we’re talking about a group of people.

Shade is a resiliency tool constructed and wielded by those who have been forced to survive systems of unfairness. Shade isn’t polite, but everyone knows that the high road is over-sold to oppressed people! I knew I had to begin my own complete anthology of fat girl shade. And I thought I would start the chronicle here with Take the Cake. This tale is one from the vault, and it starts in high school.

A lot of people don’t know this, but fat activism has been around in the United States since the 1960s. Yes, it’s true!