Virgie Tovar

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!

I've gone into Lane Bryant about 68 times in my life, and each time I'm lucky to leave with a faux-snakeskin belt or wide-shaft boots in an on-trend style. Most of the clothing, however, is draping, muted, and made up of superfluous yards of fabric covered in condescending ruffles and flowers. Imagine a fat baby going to a funeral for her former fat self and you've got Lane Bryant's general look.

Man in 36D who fat-shamed our flight attendant, what happened to you? What (or who) shaped you into someone who could take so much from others?

My favorite thing about this trip was that I spent my time in Vienna with fat feminists by my side every single day.... Occasionally, our bellies bumped into one another and then rebounded for just a second, like balloons. The familiar physics of fatness multiplied by two or three. I felt like we spoke in shorthand, the language of shared experience.

Health is the banner we have raised in defense of weight loss surgery, The Biggest Loser, putting children on diets, shaming our friends and family members, fat jokes, weight-based workplace discrimination, and heavily processed low-calorie meals with no nutritional value.

Fatphobia morphs into a conversation about looks because fatphobia targets women. The bigotry is masked through this gendered decoy.

I have met many people who can't say no. We all benefit when we speak clearly and frequently about what we need in order to thrive.

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.

I hadn't been to a club like this one — the kind full of straight men who are probably homophobic and at least a little coercive, who smell like Old Spice deodorant and have enough disposable income to keep an open tab (the kind of men I'd been taught were "a catch") — for a very, very long time. I tried to remember exactly how long. A decade? More?