My Fat Body - A Word On Fat Acceptance

Okay, so I know that posting this here is king of cheating because this isn't even a new post. I am working on one right now; I have my deck doors swung open looking over Aro Valley and I have a custard square from Aro Bake, both of which are critical to writing success. This article is something I have written for Jason Mann's photography project Reclaim Advertising. All of the photos that appear throughout the post are pictures of me that Jason has taken as part of the project. You can see other photos here (including this one of my lady friend) and his wonderful girlfriend Coley has written a blog post here which explains more about Reclaim Advertising, and includes some of her writing for the magazine that Jason is publishing as a culmination of his work. I apologize if some of this article is a little boring or self indulgent for regular readers, as a lot of the stuff I have touched on I have written about before on this blog. I will be less boring next time, I promise. The custard square is helping with that.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but a serious epidemic is plaguing fat people. Symptoms include headlessness, waddling and the wearing of khaki shorts. The headless fatty affliction is most visible in news stories about the obesity epidemic; news stories pinned on scientific information which is usually funded by weight loss companies or gastric band manufacturers. Often cases of headless fatty can be seen in infomercials for diet pills and for bizarre and expensive contraptions that apparently make it easier for one to do a sit up, even though all that is required is merely sitting up.

I posed in these photos for Jason Mann’s Reclaim Advertising project because I was getting really sick and tired of how fat bodies are depicted in the media, both without heads and without dignity. I wanted Jason to take photographs of me being fat and sexy, because to me that seemed like a radical act. In the media fat is not sexy. Images of headless fatties, with their waggling asses and their shifting tummies are not seen as sexual, whereas close ups on tight buttocks and rippling abdominals seem almost pornographic. In our culture ‘fat’ and ‘sexy’ are seen as mutually exclusive because the word ‘fat’ is an insult. Lately I’ve been trying to change that, just in my daily life, in between blogging and going to work and drinking whiskey. I’ve been trying to use fat as a describing word, because saying that I am fat should carry the same cultural weight as saying that I have green eyes. Which is none. Waxing lyrical about being fat should be culturally weightless, if you will.

I decided to use the three letter F Word after reading the article ‘Does My Butt Look Fat?’ by Fat Acceptance blogger Kate Harding. Harding writes about how the word fat does not just mean fat in our culture. Harding observes that fat can mean ugly, smelly, unhealthy and lazy. Fat can mean ignorant. Fat can mean poor. Fat can mean unlovable or undisciplined. But fat never just means having more adipose tissue than other human beings.

The fat acceptance movement is trying to change that. Fat acceptance is based on the radical notion that human beings deserve respect no matter what their body looks like. It is not about promoting being fat. It is not about saying that fat bodies are better than thin bodies in the obnoxious tradition of ‘Real Women Have Curves’, because all women are real women. It is about rejecting body surveillance culture and body shame. Fat acceptance is often about separating ‘fat’ from ‘unhealthy’, and rejecting the assumption that it is possible to tell how healthy someone is based on what they look like. Fat acceptance is about how the Body Mass Index is bullshit, because unhealthy thin people are not getting the medical attention they deserve. It is about Linda Bacon’s medical mantra of Health At Every Size, because Pro-Health is more effective than Anti-Obesity. It is about ending discrimination because you can’t shame a person into being thin, because nobody wants to look after their body if they hate it. Fat acceptance is also about respecting the choices that people make for their own bodies, because health should not be a prerequisite for respect. It is about how nobody kicks up a fuss at cyclists or adventure sports enthusiasts for being a drain on the tax payer and the health care system. For me, fat acceptance has been about rejecting the urge to body snark as a bonding activity with my female friends. Fat acceptance is not just about fat people. It is for everyone, because everyone deserves respect.

I am so pants-wetting-ly inspired by the work of so many clever, insightful and provocative Fat Acceptance bloggers, whose work I have internalised and probably inadvertently plagiarised. Harding, who I mentioned above and who writes at Shapely Prose. Lesley Kinsel from Fatshionista; Natalie Perkins from Definatalie; Marianne Kirby from The Rotund, Elizabeth from Spilt Millk; Samantha Thomas from The Discourse, Frances from Corpulent; Tasha Fierce from Red Vinyl Shoes; Charlotte Cooper from Obesity Timebomb; Jessica from Tangled Up In Lace; Nick Perkins from Nicholosophy; Ragen Chastain from Dances with Fat; Melissa McEwen from Shakesville. These writers are part of a thriving and exciting fatosphere on the Internet where bloggers share their writing; where the sartorially minded post pictures post pictures and convene to discuss major ‘fatshion’ events like the release of infamous fat singer Beth Ditto’s Evan clothing range.

Saying the word fat is still hard for me, but thanks to the fatosphere it is easier than it has ever been. I have always known that I am fat. To find your best friend at my primary school you had to find someone who could fit their thumb and forefinger around your wrist. My wrist was too big. The next day I ordered only an apple from the school canteen. I was nine. By using the word fat I am trying to reverse the last thirteen years of body shame, starting with that apple. It’s not easy. Sometimes it’s actually hard. Advocating for fat acceptance does not magically cure every negative thing that I have internalised about my body. I haven’t forgotten the heckling in the street or the fat jokes or the Facebook group “Big Boobs Don’t Count If You’re Fat.” I have not reached a Utopian state of permanent body love, where it rains Maltesers and where there are limitless wheels of Brie. But I am trying.

These photographs are part of that. When Jason took those photographs of me it was a counteraction to every headless fatty photograph that I see in the media. I wanted to recreate a perfume advert, and reclaiming this kind of advertising was an action against everybody who has ever said that fat people smell, or that they are disgusting. (Do you know that when Lee Daniels, the Director of Precious, started working with Gabourey Sibide he was surprised she didn’t smell?) These photographs, like pictures on fatshion blogs and like Aquaporko, a fat lady synchronized swimming team in Australia, are about normalising fat bodies and separating ‘fat’ from ‘ugly’ and from ‘unhealthy’. These photographs are about humanising fat people. These photographs are about my head. And my fat. In the same frame, at the same time. Looking sexy.

Get fucked, Anne Milton.

Anne Milton, I am offended by you. Well not you exactly, because fortunately I have never met you, but I am offended by how you think that doctors should use the word 'fat', rather than the word 'obese', to motivate people to lose weight. Milton, Britain's Public Health Minister, says:

"If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried (than) if I think I am fat," Milton, a former nurse, told the BBC. "At the end of the day, you cannot do it for them. People have to have the information."

Some really awesome fat acceptance writers have already written posts about Milton's patronisingly frustrating use of the word fat. A word which should just be a describing word, like tall or tan or curly-haired, but a word which is actually steeped in a culture of body hatred and of shame, a word that shrouds its venom beneath messages of healthy lifestyles and longevity. A word that is sometimes being used by fat activists with the radical notion that being fat doesn't have to be a bad thing or a death sentence or an albatross around your neck, and that maybe being PRO HEALTH instead of being ANTI FAT might be a more useful way of living life, because loving your body might be more helpful than fighting it. (And Michelle Obama, by the way, I'm looking at you as well. You're no Anne Milton, but I wish that my love of your well spoken poise, your humility and your kitten heels hadn't been tainted by the ANTI-OBESITY focus of your health program. Could you not plant vegetables and encourage kids to move around more often without placing the focus on hating their bodies? What about ANTI-PROCESSED FOOD? ANTI-POVERTY? PRO-BROCCOLI? PRO-HEALTHY BLOOD PRESSURE AND LIPIDS LEVELS? PRO HOT YOGA AND A SWIM EVERY WEEK? Would these not be better wars to wage, rather than starting the battle underneath our skin? And Michelle, while we're talking, maybe it would have been great if you didn't talk about your daughters' weight during your campaign? Maybe the children of America don't need to know that the First Lady hates their bodies?)

Coincidentally, I'm not the only person who is pissed at Milton.. Upon hearing her comments, fat activist Charlotte Cooper from Obesity Timebomb, wrote:

"I had to do a double-take when I first read this article. My initial reaction to a quick skim of the headline was: "Yeah! Call me fat! That's exactly what I want, skip this obese nonsense." I reject obese because I don't want to be defined as a victim of a terrible disease, as someone who need curing, as a tragic figure for pity and paternalistic intervention. But the definition of fat being mooted in this article is as something appalling and dreadful, a shaming weapon. These guys really think that fat is an insult, they don't get it as a marker of one's identity and experience, or a way of describing communities, or its politicised nature. What a shame the BBC did not have the breadth of vision to get quotes from people who might have an alternative viewpoint."

And Kate Harding, of Shapely Prose but writing for The Guardian, says:

"Believe me, I would love to live in a culture where fat merely means "having more adipose tissue than average", and in which that implies nothing about one's character. That's why I shamelessly call myself fat, no matter how many people insist that both the word and my body demand some measure of embarrassment and apology. But it's going to be a long while before fat is used in that value-neutral sense, and in the meantime we all know exactly what most people mean by it: you are disgusting, worthless, not quite human."

Andy by the way, Ms. Milton, you think that fat people "need the information"? You think that fat people need to be reminded about their unacceptable body? You think that fat people aren't reminded every day when they walk past heckling teeangers on a building site or when they walk into a shop to buy some jeans and they meet the gaze of the listless teenager behind the counter? Do you think that being called fat by a medical professional who aims to deliberately shame and humiliate is a good thing? Sorry, what was your job? The Public Health Minister? Oh right.

But maybe, what offends me even more than Milton, is the picture that news website Stuff used to go along with their article. (Speaking of news articles, I was quite impressed that the Herald Sun interviewed some fat activists in their coverage, rather than only lazily reprinting a Reuters article like Stuff did.) The picture wasn't a picture of Anne herself, because I actually had to use both my initiative and my Bachelor of Arts honed research skills to Google Image that one up up there. It was a picture of this person:

And when I was Google Imaging Ms. Milton, this person came up, originally used in a BBC article:

And this person:

And yes, these are people. These are not headless creatures from planet fat. The woman, at the top, might have been going through those gates to get on a train to visit her aunt or go to work or go to the beach or to see her friends. The second man, I wonder what he was thinking when he took off his shirt under studio lighting, a spectacle. The woman in the third photo is walking with her daughter or her sister or her niece. They might have been chatting, but we will never know because she has been robbed of her face and her dignity and her personality and her identity. These headless photos are so depressingly common and they really are also so incredibly insulting. When I think about it, I can conjure up a mental photo album of these images, clipped from every moral panic obesity article I have ever read and every flat stomach advert from down the side of my Facebook (because their advertising targeting system obviously isn't quite good enough to realise that I'm actually looking at fat acceptance blogs), as well as a never ending waddling parade of anonymous asses in khaki pants from every results-not-typical infomercial I have ever seen while staying home sick from uni and watching Dr. Phil. A photo album filled with people I don't know, who might have had their picture taken while at the supermarket or on the way to see their dad in hospital.

And another thing, if those pictures up there were photos of a thin woman from behind, a muscular torso and a girl with an itty-bitty-waist shaking-that-thing-in-your-face, these shots would be sexy. Or if they weren't sexy, per-say, they would at least be sexualised. Just because the woman is fat, the viewer isn't supposed to see her body as sexy. A fat body is obviously not appealing and a fat person obviously doesn't deserve a voice, because they are probably too busy eating anyway.These photos show just how society likes their fat people - othered, anonymous, and as a warning.