Virgie Tovar

Would you date a fat fetishist? It always feels complicated to answer this question, but I promise an honest one by the end of part two.

Jealousy is such an interesting thing to me. As immediate and intense as it feels when it hits, it has always struck me as a secondary — a smokescreen for something else.

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

A cake related fatphobic incident is that moment when it's time to eat cake, and an otherwise joyous experience gets ruined by a moralizing impulse.

There is not a single path to self-love, and so you must become an engineer of that process. We have to feel lots of uncomfortable things.

Like, "Yum, there is a table full of delicious food" but also, "Ugh, am I gonna hate myself after I eat this?"

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?

The point is: no matter how wonderfully delicious a man (or anyone) is, once you’ve seen him sneeze, fall, eat peanut butter or chew loudly, if there’s nothing else (or mostly nothing else), then he will ultimately make your skin crawl. So, there’s no point after all, right? In doing things the way we know how to do them?

I can say that dieting symbolized a lot of things for me. I work to claim a uniquely fat femininity that thrives when my belly is full.

Why is it important to call a diet a diet? Because 1. The truth is actually important and 2. Misleading language only benefits the person peddling it.