fat

This piece is for you, my non-Black friends, my non-Black family members, my non-Black activists, my non-Black educators, and my non-Black partner. This piece is for you, because whether you know it or not, you benefit from anti-Blackness.

My swimsuit phobia started in middle school — that breeding ground of body shame and fear. One minute I’m a kid excitedly putting on my pink two-piece and running into the ocean, the next, I’m avoiding any place where people are known to live in their swimsuits and I might be forced to wear one.

Yesterday, the big news in food science was that BUTTER ISN’T BAD FOR YOU AFTER ALL! It turns out that butter, like other saturated fats, isn’t the health demon-food that we were once told it was. I think now we’re supposed to do Kermit-arms and dance around rejoicing that we can butter our toast with impunity.

From my earliest memories of splashing my siblings at the community swimming pool, I had an idea of what lifeguards looked like — young, tall, and lithe, with tanned limbs and form-fitting swimsuits meant to accentuate the athleticism of their bodies.

I had always considered myself to be extremely body positive. I loved my body! I had several close friends who were fat activists, and I was working hard to be a good thin ally. But despite all of that, I wasn’t ready for the changes that were happening in myself.

If you asked me to guess what was going through her head, I would say she was in shock that a fat lady would wear a tight skirt, belly in full sight. This feminist act of taking up space, tacitly but clearly making room for myself in a fatphobic culture, is a bold-but-crucial move if you’re my brand of fat babe.

In the same way women benefit from seeing other women who actually look like them, so do men. Hardly any major clothing brands make plus-sized menswear and those that do barely advertise them.

Although the hunt for the perfect outfit at the thrift store was a thrill when I was thin, as a fat person, the hunt was just downright depressing.