Virgie Tovar

This week I have been thinking a lot about home, and how home shapes the way we feel about our bodies.

What I’ve noticed, as a fat feminist, is that self-identifying as a feminist or an activist bears a different social cost depending on your body size.

There are a lot of places where fat people don’t feel safe because of fatphobia. What does it feel like to feel safe in your fat body?

Fat people often get so little attention that feels positive. When someone offers exploitative attention or exploits fat people it can feel really good.

It’s taken me a long time to write about this topic because I’m not an eating disorder specialist or clinician.

The other day I was having coffee and ice cream with my friend. We were talking about who we follow online.

I was introduced to the concept of ugliness when I was five years old. It was, for almost all intents and purposes, the totality of who I was. Fat was me. I was fat. I was taught that fat is the opposite of everything that is feminine, moral, and beautiful. Just like ugliness. But even though I still live in the awful world that made my traumatic childhood possible, I know for certain that ugliness isn’t a physical reality, it is a cultural fabrication. I truly believe that we are born with the capacity to see beauty in all things, and it is through the dispiriting reality of our cultural education that we lose that ability.

I spent most of last week in a southern California heat wave.

I finally left Goodwill with about 15 pieces and the sense that I had a new friend who donated her wardrobe. Fat intimacy and solidarity!

Though there was useful commentary, deeply personal stories, and some incisive observations, my problem with the episode is that it ultimately repeats a harmful framework:
Fat people (nearly all women) were on trial and up for observation (their privacy already considered non-existent) — not the fatphobic bias that had so clearly shaped their lives.