Virgie Tovar

Fat people are not obligated to be disproportionate emotional laborers. They get to be angry, frustrated, and even difficult, just like everyone else.

We forego doctor visits because we know with near-total certitude that we are going to be told to lose weight. That we don’t need care — we just need to “cut back.”

So as you can see, “polite” bigotry is just bigotry. It's manipulative. It's aggressive. And it hurts people. Speak up against polite fatphobia!

To him, perhaps, my fat feminine body was acceptable to sexualize. I can’t say I learned a foolproof way of avoiding going on a date with a clean eater.

The politics of food are the politics of class, and the subtlety of those politics creates a kind of deniability that makes it hard to discern the rules of engagement. One’s success in ascending the ladder is marked by fluency with these invisible boundaries.

I find that clarity is the key to getting the exact heterosexual intercourse you want. Part of this involves taking the gloves off around discussions of my body. So, I said it in the ad:
“I weigh 250 pounds.”

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.

I don’t want to move the line of the socially acceptable body by 50 or 100 or 150 pounds. I want to get rid of the line altogether because the line hurts everyone — even the people who are seen as the “winners.”

Earlier this month I flew into JFK for the Glamour Women of the Year Awards (WOTY, for short) and took selfies with Gabourey Sidibe!

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