One of the things that I see a lot when someone is fat shamed is the response “But she’s not even that fat.”  Other (direct quote) versions of this are “They treated me terribly and it’s not like I’m horribly fat” or “I don’t think she’s fat at all.”  I absolutely understand why it happens, not only are fat people routinely shamed for our body size, but the fear of being, or being called, fat is used to control people of all sizes.

The thing is that if someone is being shamed, stigmatized, bullied etc. for being fat, and we say “they aren’t fat” or “they aren’t even that fat”  in their defense, what we are also saying is that there is a size at which they would deserve that treatment, and that’s just not true.

Countering fat shaming by denying fatness says that the person doesn’t deserve poor treatment (which is true) but at the expense of reinforcing the incorrect idea that they would deserve it if they were fat (or some greater degree of fat), or that being called fat is an insult.  There is no size at which people deserve to be treated poorly.

We can answer fat shaming without further stigmatizing fat people with responses like:

• I wish we lived in a world where people of all sizes were respected
• Body shaming is never ok
• So what?  or So what if she is fat?
• Fat isn’t an insult, it’s just a body size.

It doesn’t matter how fat someone is, or why they are that fat, or what the outcomes of being that fat may or may not be.  They deserve to be treated with respect and it is completely ok for them to be that size. Yes, even if they weigh 2000 pounds. Yes even if you think their weight is “their fault.” Yes, even if you would never ever want to be that fat.  Yes, even if you can’t understand how they live. Yes, even if they have problems that can be correlated with being fat.  Yes, even if they have problems that can be causally related to being fat.  Yes, even if studies show that they cost society more.  Yes, even if they actually cost society more.  It is totally, completely 100% ok for someone to be fat.  Nobody needs anyone’s encouragement, justification, or permission to live in their body.  Period. This is true whether or not people are able to achieve permanent weight loss.  Fat people have the right to exist without bullying, shaming, or stigma period.

Assigning value to bodies based on their size is just wrong.  Yes, it is ok to be fat.  Bodies come in lots of different sizes for lots of different reasons and instead of jumping to the defense of someone being fat-shamed by insisting that they aren’t fat, we have the opportunity to make things better for everyone by pointing out that there is absolutely nothing wrong with fat bodies, or bodies of any size.

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What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

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Tara Erraught is singing Octavian in the Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier. It opened Saturday night. Of the six opera critics from London who reviewed her performance, 5 of them body shamed Erraught in their reviews. Some called her names, some suggested that it wasn’t possible that she could be a thin person’s lover, one wrote a review of about 250 words that failed to mention her singing. It seems that the only female critic was also the only one who didn’t body shame Ms. Erraught. (A writer for NPR compiled the egregious reviews and examined the critic’s reviews of fat male singers finding that *shockingly* no body shaming occurred in those reviews, but there was quite a bit of discussion of their talent as singers.)

In our society we choose our entertainers – singers, actors, dancers etc. – based on how closely they can approximate a single, unattainable, photoshop stereotype of beauty.  This is so common that when someone who doesn’t look like this displays talent we share it on YouTube, completely flabbergasted, with titles like “YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS” as if talented people who aren’t stereotypically beautiful are completely shocking.  That’s because we’ve been absolutely brainwashed to believe that only people who fit the current stereotype of beauty could possibly be talented.  We add another layer of crap when men get involve and try to enforce this stereotype of beauty based on their preferences.

In this iteration, five men who are opera critics have decided that they do not find women of Ms. Erraught’s size attractive.  They have also decided that, as professional opera critics, how attractive they find the singer is not only important enough to be worth comment in their reviews of the opera, but is in fact more important than how well she sings.

This idea – the women have must be attractive to men in order to be allowed to pursue our dreams, talents, goals etc. is rampant.  I get tons of hatemail that just says “no man would fuck you”  as if the most hurtful thing that any woman could ever hear (regardless of her sexual orientation) is that men don’t want to fuck her.

This, to me, is one of the critical intersections of feminism and size acceptance.  If we want to dismantle the patriarchy,  a huge part of that is ending this tradition of having “I would screw her” as an entrance requirement to the jobs we want or the ability to engage in things for which we have talent.  We have to stop allowing men to use the poor treatment of fat women as a way to try to control the behaviors and bodies of thin women.   What men find attractive should not drive who gets to sing, dance, act, be an administrative assistant, get into medical school or anything else.  Men who are paid to critique opera and instead choose to critique women’s bodies should be reprimanded and, if necessary, fired and replaced with people who are willing to critique opera.  To be clear, while I’m focusing on the treatment of women in this piece, these things aren’t ok when they happen to fat guy, or fat people of any gender.

If someone “can’t believe” a fat woman in a role because of her body size, it’s because that person holds prejudices against fat women.  That’s not necessarily surprising considering the culture we live in – where fat girls are relegated to the secretary or teacher in the school play, fat actresses almost never get to be the love interest but do get to deal with tons of concern trolling, and fat people who are successful at anything other than weight loss are ignored because of the ridiculous notion of “promoting obesity” until fat people are denied positive fat role models and representations of ourselves, and everyone else is denied these as well.  The fact that it’s not surprising of course does not make it ok, and we can and will continue to call it out when we see it, until the thing that is seen as clearly wrong is the body shaming opera critic and not the talented Mezzo Soprano.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

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Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

 

 

 

 

 

Recently researcher Alia Crum gave a group of subjects a drink called Sensishake, the label let them know that it was low-calorie with zero percent fat, zero added sugar, and 140 calories.

Another group of subjects were given a drink called Indulgence, the label let them know that it had high sugar, high fat, and 620 calories.

After they drank the shakes, the subject’s levels of ghrelin were measured.  Ghrelin, often called the hunger hormone, works in the human gut.  As levels of the hormone go up so do levels of hunger (to let us know that we need to find some food), meanwhile metabolism slows down (in case we’re in a situation where food is not available.)

The belief has been that ghrelin is secreted based on the nutrition one ingests.  The subjects in this study fit that pattern, the ghrelin levels of the subjects who drank Indulgence dropped about three times more than the ghrelin levels of those who drank Sensishake.

Just one thing:  Both groups actually drank the same thing  – a regular old milkshake with 380 calories.  The only difference between the groups of subjects was what they thought they were drinking.

Crum is clear that more studies need to be done before we fully understand the effects our beliefs have on our reactions to food, and of course she is right.  There are people who eat tons of food and have small bodies, there are people who eat a small amount of food and have large bodies.  We don’t know exactly how or why the way we feel about food can change the way we process it. We don’t know what effect a culture that is obsessed with talking about food and weight has on our bodies.  There is a lot about the human body that we don’t understand.  What we know for sure is that we don’t learn anything when people are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “IT’S THERMODYNAMICS FATTY!!!!”, and that we can’t say with any certainty that the size of our very complicated bodies can be manipulated using very simple math. It’s time to start asking questions and stop repeating tired tropes.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

 

 

 

Here on DancesWithFat we have some posts that are annual traditions, one of them is this post about The Underpants Rule.

I have found there are rules that, if I follow them, usually steer me in the right direction. There’s the Golden Rule (treat others as you would like to be treated) though I prefer the Platinum Rule (treat others as they would like to be treated).  But my most favorite life rule is The Underpants Rule and not just because I named it, and not just because its widespread implementation would end about 90% of the jackassery and fuckwittery that happens on the internet, and maybe 50% that happens in the real world.

The Underpants Rule is simple: everyone is the boss of their own underpants so you get to choose for you and other people get to choose from them and it’s not your job to tell other people what to do and it’s not their job to tell you what to do. To illustrate, if someone is considering saying something that starts with

• People should
• Everyone ought to
• What people need to do
• We should all
• Nobody should
• You shouldn’t
• blah blah things that have to do with underpants that aren’t yours blah blah

then there is a 99.9% chance that they are about to break The Underpants Rule. The only “exception” to this for me is about Civil Rights because they are not to be voted on or conferred, they just are, therefore everybody needs to respect everybody else’s civil rights.

Of course telling you that you should follow the Underpants Rule is, in fact, breaking the Underpants Rule which is pesky, so let me instead make a case for the Underpants Rule and then you can make your own choice.

I chose a Health at Every Size practice because I am a fan of research, logic and math.  I think that the research clearly shows that a HAES practice give me a much better shot at health with way less downside risk than a weight loss- based health practice, knowing that health is not an obligation, a barometer of worthiness, completely in my control, or guaranteed.

There are people who think the exact opposite of that.  I know that because they come here and tell me so – they say that I should make a different choice.  This blog is my little corner of the internet.  It exists only because I created it and I am thrilled to pieces that people enjoy reading it, that people get inspired by it, that it gives people information to make choices etc. I try very hard to make sure that I always follow the Underpants Rule and never tell anyone else how they have to live and yet people come here and try to tell me how to live.  That’s annoying.

For this reason, I would never go onto someone’s weight loss blog and tell them all about Health at Every Size and quote research as to why I think it’s a better choice.  Those are not my underpants.

I do not enjoy (or believe) when people tell me that I need to become smaller to be attractive.  Therefore I would never say that thin women need to become larger to be attractive.  Besides the fact that I don’t believe it, those are not my underpants. (Not to mention that the path to high self-esteem is probably not paved with hypocrisy so doing to someone else exactly what I don’t want done to me seems ill-advised.)

The war on obesity is an underpants rule breakdown on a massive scale. A group of government, public and private interests (with various profit and political motivations) has chosen a group of people who are identifiable by sight and is now trying to tell us everything from how we have to prioritize health, to the path we have to take to become healthy, to how our bodies have to look.  Who died and made them Underpants Overlord?  Nobody. (I’m still waiting for my official fat person pony.)

My metaphorical underpants and my actual underpants have something in common:  if I want somebody else in them, that person will be among the very first to know.  I have definitely not invited the executives at HBO, Kaiser Permanente, the government, or the diet industry into my underpants.

Now, I’m not telling what to do (cause, you know, Underpants Rule) but I’m suggesting that if you don’t like it when people attempt to be the boss of your underpants, then maybe take a pass on trying to be the boss of someone else’s.  I’m fairly certain that “Do unto others exactly what you don’t want them to do to you” is the lead rule or the brick rule or something – at any rate a LOT of steps down from platinum and gold.

Remember, you are forever the boss of your underpants – occupy your underpants (with a nod to reader Duckie for that phrase)! I’m going off to see if there is a Guinness World Record for number of times the word underpants is used in a blog.

Underpants. Underpants. Underpants.

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What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

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Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

So based on a combination of what I want to write about and reader feedback, I’ve decided that I’m going to blog about my marathon training on Sundays.  I know that for some people posts about sports and such are triggering or just not enjoyable, this way people who don’t want to read that kind of thing can skip the Sunday posts (and who knows, maybe those who are interested will look forward to the Sunday posts…)

Things are different this time around. For my first marathon I trained to walk with the goal of finishing in 8.5 hours.  Some of you may remember that in a terrible, painful long day it took me about 13 hours to finish the Seattle Marathon with my Best Friend.  This marathon has an 8 hour time limit but they open the roads at 6 hours so it’s 8 hours while contending with traffic lights, no port-a-potties etc.   So this time I’ll be doing a run/walk combination, and Kelrick has once again volunteered to do this with me.

One of the things that I promptly forgot when I finished the first marathon, (when I was so sure that I would never ever do another one) was how freaking boring the training is. I train alone late at night (it’s always interesting to me that people congratulate those who get up at 4am to run, but freak out that I go out at 2am) and a lot of times it’s just a grind.  I’m doing this marathon for a lot of reasons that I’ll get into in later posts, but a love of running/walking is not one of them. I’ll take this opportunity to remind everyone reading that I’m not trying to be any kind of role model here, nor am I interested in being part of the bullshit good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy  This is about my desire to do a marathon and nothing else.

Music has been a really important part of my training, so much so that I actually rescheduled a run last time because my iPod wasn’t working.  It helps me to have some ritual around music as I do my run/walks, especially as they get longer. This time around it’s:

Beginning:  Mama Told Me Not To Come (In honor of a hilarious e-mail from my awesome mom)

Half-way:  Hold On, I’m Coming by Sam and Dave

End:  Rebel Beat by the Goo Goo Dolls

Outside of that one of my favorite past times is creating playlists for different training run/walks- for this marathon I have different ones for speedwork, tempo runs, and hill repeats so far.  If you have ideas for inspirational songs please feel free to drop them in the comments!

So I have 43 weeks of training until I show up for my next ass kicking.  Cross finish line, get medal.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

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Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

Marilyn Wann made me aware of a project by artist Anna Gensler.  She decided that it was time to do something about the objectifying messages that she was getting from guys on Tinder and Ok Cupid.

Awesome!

She decided that “I’m an artist, so my weapon of choice is art,”

Cool beans!

She “wanted to find a way to make these men feel objectified in the same way that they were making women feel.”

Ok.

So she decided that she would create naked drawings of them, created based on their picture but drawn to be “fat and not very well-endowed.”

Aw crap.

So what Ms. Gensler decided to do is attempt to make guys who are being jerks feel bad by drawing them to look more like guys she assumes they stigmatize for how they look. Basically, she’s trying to combat sexism with sizeism.  The idea of drawing guys who are being jerks to look more like guys who aren’t being jerks but do deal with a bunch of societal crap for the size of their bodies and the size of their dicks is seriously problematic.

The argument I’ve seen in support of this is that art, and especially art combined with humor, needs leeway.  I would argue if even if we agree with that, we should consider the use of what I’ve always heard of as the “Court Jester Rule” (though I don’t know and can’t find who to credit for the terminology) which is to say that in mocking someone as a form of humor – especially for activism –  you want to move up the chain of social power, not down it (such that it’s one thing for the Court Jester to mock the King, another for the King to Mock the Court Jester because of the balance of power between them.)  I think that the idea for the project is great, I think that including weight bigotry/sizeism is not.

In general I would suggest, no matter what their transgression, it’s not cool to try to make someone feel bad by comparing them with, making them into, or wishing them into, a group that is oppressed, even in an attempt at humor.

Marilyn wrote a beautiful e-mail about it that she agreed to let me share here. If you would like to e-mail Anna with your thoughts, she can be reached at gensler.anna@gmail.com (as someone who gets tons of hatemail everyday and someone who has definitely committed all kinds of -isms (racism, ableism etc.) out of ignorance and been (rightly, of course) called out on it, I would request that you consider writing from a place of education, but of course we each get to choose how we deal with oppression and The Underpants Rule applies here:

Hi, Anna:

I came across the Buzzfeed story today about your clever response to online-dating creeps.

I certainly share your vexation at these energy-drain wankers, from both personal experience and feminist principle. And I applaud your public critique of them.

However, I am opposed to your choice of using weight variation as a putdown in this project.

I’ve been a fat rights activist for 20 years. It’s a classic form of weight bigotry to imagine that being fat makes people who identify as men less manly and people who identify as women less “feminine.” That’s a great example of the intersectionality and mutual reinforcement of sexism and weight prejudice.

I see that you’re quoted in Slate as saying your drawings were “all based off of these guys’ profile pictures, so their faces and their general positions are the same, but from there I tried to make them look a little chubbier or scrawnier or just not particularly well-endowed.”

By using stupid mainstream ideas as a putdown (i.e., fat people can’t be hot or sexy; men should be big, not “scrawny;” men have to have big dicks to be good lovers), you’re reinforcing the same system of yuck that prompts men to be creeps online.

I’m sure that you can find a creative way to overcome such unnecessary and hurtful concepts in your art.

As my friend Jonny Newsome says, “The freedom bus doesn’t leave until we all get on.”

Wheee! – Marilyn Wann, author of FAT!SO?

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

First of all, just to let you know today’s blog might be triggering, it’s a discussion of some bigotry that I saw surrounding fat people with disabilities.

I saw a picture on Facebook today.  It was a disabled parking sign that said “Parking for disabled persons.  Not for fat people.  You should have a parking spot 3 miles away and be required to do jumping jacks all the way to the store.”  It didn’t look photoshopped but I hope that it was.  What I want to talk about is the discussion around it.

To my great joy many of the people on the FB thread were calling this the bullshit that it was.  Others seemed to divide fat people with disabilities into two groups (I want to be clear that this has nothing to do with actual fat people with disabilities, this is how people were discussing them) so I’ll frame my discussion from that perspective.

The first group, as they defined it, were people whose disability is unrelated to, or the cause of, their fat.  Perhaps they have a disease, or had an accident, or they started to have mobility trouble and then got fat.  This group has something specific to point to as the cause of their disability that is very specifically separate from their body size.   Most of the people in the conversation seem to be in agreement that these disabled fat people should not be required to do three miles of calisthenics in order to deserve to shop, though many of them also wanted to point out that – based on absolutely no information or evidence – these people do not comprise the majority of fat disabled people, and they want us to know that there’s still “no excuse” for being fat.

The other group are fat disabled people who have nothing that they can “prove” made them disabled that isn’t related to their fat.  By the logic of people who want to punish disabled people for being disabled, these people’s obesity is their fault, thus their disability is their fault, thus they don’t deserve the same accommodations that other disabled people get.

The idea that people should have to pass some kind of test to prove that their disability isn’t “their fault” in order to be  accommodated is absolutely horrifying.  For one thing, who gets to be the decider?  If someone was disabled because they were driving drunk do they get a parking spot?  What if they fell mountain climbing or blew out their knees running (or doing jumping jacks for three miles trying not to be fat)?  I hope the obvious truth here is that it shouldn’t matter – people with disabilities should be accommodated, not interrogated.

Bottom line: Specific to this situation – the idea that you know more about a person’s disability based on their body size is ridiculous and one of many types of bigotry faced by fat people who also have disabilities. In general –  how dare anybody think that they are entitled to know the source of someone’s disability, let alone that they should get to judge it as worthy or unworthy of a parking space or any other accommodation.  As far as I’m concerned the entire discussion about accommodations for people with disabilities should revolve around the best ways to accommodate the most people possible from a place that is fiercely anti-shame, driven by the desires of people with disabilities. The idea of “fault” should never, ever come up.

Sadly we are not the jackass whisperer so we can’t stop people from posting this kind of drivel, but we can work hard to not be part of the problem, to educate ourselves and be intersectional in our activism, and to speak up and speak out against it.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!)   Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

Are you looking for a way to do some fun movement this summer (and get prizes for it?)  Consider a Fit Fatty Virtual Summer Vacation!

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post

I wrote yesterday about my issues with the idea that fat people should have to pay twice as much as thin people for the same customer service experience (in this case, transportation from one place to another in a seat that accommodates them.)  I got one response so much that I wanted to blog about it.  A good example came from Vicky:

While I understand why it is unfair to expect a larger person to pay more to fly, how is it fair that when I fly larger people take advantage of my size and take up part of my seat? I paid for the exact same ticket so why do I get less space? Once, a larger person even tried to convince me to fly with the armrest raised since they told me I didn’t need that much space.

Hi Vicky,

I appreciate you agreeing that it’s unfair to make a larger person pay more, and I can see where you are coming from in your question – I suggest it’s a matter of perspective and would ask that you consider the following:

Let me start with a quick discussion of what I think the problem is and then I’ll answer your question more directly. From my perspective the airlines arbitrarily created a seat size, ignoring the fact that many people wouldn’t fit in them.  They created shared space (like the armrests in the middle), and different planes have different seat and seatbelt sizes.  In general they’ve created a bad situation and left it to their passengers to sort it out amongst ourselves, suggesting that we blame each other and not them for the problems that the airline created. I think the problem is that the airline doesn’t have seats that accommodate everyone.

I think the choice for each of us to make is how we want to deal with it. You and I are in the same position -we both fit into an airplane seat.  There are other people who don’t fit into a seat and sometimes we’re seated beside them. The difference between us is that you choose to assert that it’s not fair to you, and that’s your right.  While I don’t love touching strangers I think what I paid for was travel from one place to another in a seat that accommodates me, and I all I really need is the amount of space that I take up – I have no need to claim empty space as “mine” and insist that it go unused regardless of whether or not someone else needs it in order to have the same experience I’m getting.

I choose to do everything I can to help give everyone the same experience that I get, because I recognize that the airline has put both my seatmate and me in a bad situation, but their situation is likely worse because they may be dealing with a ton of anxiety (and perhaps have been since they booked the ticket – another thing that you and I don’t have to deal with.)  Also, they know that if I complain and make the argument that I deserve a seat that accommodates me but they don’t because they are heavier, hip-ier etc., people will likely take my side and they could get thrown off the plane.

So if I’m seated next to someone who doesn’t fit (whether they are fat or their shoulders are broad or whatever) I do everything I can to make sure that they know that they aren’t the problem, and that I’m happy to do whatever it takes to make them as comfortable as possible. I might lean into the aisle, offer to raise the armrest, not complain about them touching me, treat them in a pleasant and respectful manner etc.

Case in point – once a guy with long arms in the middle seat told me that he was super stressed because he was on a deadline at work and he couldn’t wait until we could use our laptops. When were in the air and he got out his laptop we realized that he was going to have to be elbowing me in the side the whole time in order to work. It sucked, I don’t like touching strangers and I don’t like being elbowed in the side for three hours but I understood his situation and I chose to smile and tell him it was no big deal.  I’m telling this story to illustrate the point, I don’t want a cookie for doing it – I think it’s just basic human respect.

I’ve seen people pout, sigh, roll their eyes and declare that it was unfair that they had to sit next to a fat person. That’s certainly an option that you can choose.  Recently on a flight as I sat down, the very thin women who would be my seatmate said “If raising the armrest is more comfortable for you, feel free to put it up.” Though I declined because I prefer it down, I thanked her profusely and she shared with me that she had seen a fat person abused by their seatmate once until she was reduced to sobbing, and decided then and there that she would never act like that and that she would make flying as comfortable as she could for anyone she could.

I can’t make the airlines give everyone the experience I get (or, at least, I haven’t gotten it done yet) but I can damn well choose what kind of traveler I’m going to be and I’m going to choose compassion over “fairness” every time.

You and I currently enjoy a nice experience – we buy a ticket for travel from one place to another and know that it will include a seat that accommodates us.  I don’t know about you but I would rather fight to make the airlines give everyone the experience that we get, rather than complain that the fact that they don’t forces other passengers into a bad situation.  As always it’s your choice.

~Ragen

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Reader Pauline let me know about a conversation on the site Etiquette Hell about flying while fat.  The conversation is indented and may be triggering, you can skip it and still understand the point of the blog:

Question:

I travel to the US twice a year. I would absolutely love to be able to afford first class or business seats, but I can’t. I always fly coach. The problem is this: I wear American size 22 pants, not because of my stomach; it’s because of my hips. They’re large and I have huge saddle bags. I always book an aisle seat to make sure only one person will be bothered by my saddle bags. And even though I try to lean to the opposite side as much as I can, part of my thigh still spills into my unlucky seatmate’s seat, making me very embarrassed. I read airlines/flights forums where people who could have easily been my seatmates complain about the passenger of size who should have booked a first class seat and let me tell you: Do I feel guilty! but I just can’t afford it.

So I have a few questions for all of you fellow E-hell readers and Ms E-Hell Dame: what should I do? What’s your opinion on the issue? Do you have similar stories? Have you been the “offender” or the “offended”?

Just for the sake of information: I’m 5″7 and weigh 270 pounds. When I weighed 230 I still had huge saddle bags. 0510-14

Answer:

When I fly, being a BBW, I always go first class on an aisle seat.   That is just the cost of travel for me, imo.   In the pre-boarding seating area, I can tell which passengers the other flyers are secretly wishing they are not seated next to (squirming children, wailing babies, and big people) and I prefer to be as accommodating as possible to my fellow travelers so that I am not perpetuating stereotypes and prejudices.  In other words, I never presume I am entitled to more seat than I paid for and if any body part of mine has the potential to spill over into someone else’s purchased space, I need to make sure I pay for enough room to contain my body within the zone I “own”.   That may mean flying first class or buying two plane seats side by side.

That isn’t the advice you were probably hoping to read but it’s one I firmly believe in.   And I don’t think this just applies to fat people but physically fit and athletic men or tall people can also easily usurp more space on a plane than their ticket allows.

Let me start by saying that she, and every other fat flyer, is allowed to believe and do whatever she wants.  If she believes that “not perpetuating stereotypes and prejudices” means paying more than a thin person for the same customer experience that’s her right. My issue here is that she is saying that, as an etiquette expert, she “firmly believes” that doing so is good etiquette.

First of all, the idea of choosing our behavior so that we don’t “perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices” suggests that if people choose to stereotype us or hold prejudices against us, we are responsible for “solving” that by mollifying our bigots with our  behavior.  The problem with stereotyping and prejudice is the stereotyping and prejudice, not the victims of it.  The solution to prejudice is neither weight loss nor paying twice what our bigots pay for the same service.  People are allowed to hold personal stereotypes and prejudice but they should not be allowed to institutionalize them and the groups who are the victims of their bigotry are not required by the rules of etiquette to participate in our own oppression to make them happy.

To agree with her, we have to believe the idea that some people deserve seats that they fit into and others don’t- such that those who are fat, muscular, tall, broad-shouldered etc. should have to pay more than people who aren’t fat, muscular, tall, or broad-shouldered to get the same customer experience – specifically transportation from one place to another in a seat that accommodates us. (I’ll point out that while many fat people have been thrown off planes or forced to buy a second seat for being fat, there is no policy about tall, broad-shouldered, or muscular passengers and I’ve never heard of one of them getting thrown off a plane or asked to purchase a second seat for taking up “more than their space”)

I happen to fit in one seat (my fat goes front to back more than side to side.)  That gives me some privilege when it comes to flying and I think the appropriate use of that privilege is to say “Why aren’t all the passengers getting the same experience that I get, and how can I hep them fight for that”  rather than saying “obviously people my size and smaller deserve a better/cheaper experience than people who are larger than us or shaped differently.”

This argument seems to me to also be an extension of the “good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy.”  “I am willing to pay twice as much as the person next to me for the same customer experience so that I don’t perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices” sounds very much to me like the way that many fat people feel that we have to justify our requests to be treated with basic human respect (ie:  I have a juicer, I exercise, and I only eat vegetables that were dried with a towel knitted by someone’s Nana, so I deserve to not be bullied.) Both are a version of “I’m not like those other fat people so I deserve to be treated better than you would treat them”  I think that’s bullshit in any guise.

The belief that fat, tall, muscular or broad-shouldered people are obligated to buy two seats or pay for first class or we don’t deserve to fly, has a number of ramifications. If an employer wants to fly candidates to a job interview it will cost them twice as much to interview one of us, if a job involves travel it will cost the company twice as much to hire one of us, if we want one of the jobs that helps us engage in activism or puts us in front of people (speaker, performer, stand-up comic etc.) it will costs venues twice as much to book us.  People who make this argument are saying that it’s acceptable not just to say that fat, tall, muscular or broad-shouldered people need to have twice as much money as others to take a vacation, but also to do our jobs, attend a wedding, graduation, or even a funeral.

I think that if you don’t want civil rights, then you fight for everyone to have them, and once they do you choose not to avail yourself of them. Nobody is saying that if airlines give all passengers the same experience regardless of size that she has to take them up on it, she is still welcome to purchase two seats or a first class seat.  I think what isn’t  cool is to make a decision that just because you can afford to pay twice as much, or because it’s ok with you that you don’t get the same customer experience as people who don’t look like you, you suggest that good etiquette requires that everyone who looks like you agrees with that.  It seems to me that she might be getting internalized oppression confused with etiquette.

As a member of a few groups that many people choose to stereotype and hold prejudices against I understand that those people would prefer that I at least shut up and, even better, if I wouldn’t mind being participating in my own oppression by doing whatever they think I should do.  In this case that includes paying twice as much as them for the same experience, or acting like the problem is that fat, tall, muscular and broad-shouldered people exist, and not the fact that they built planes as if we didn’t, and make policies as if we don’t deserve the same experience they give passengers who aren’t fat, tall, muscular or broad-shouldered.   As an activist, I’m completely unwilling to do that.  People are allowed to be prejudiced and suggest that they deserve a different experience than I do because we look different, but I do not have to participate in that, and I won’t.

For the record, I fly all the time for speaking engagements and I cannot recommend Southwest Airlines enough. They did some super shitty things in the past, they were asked to make changes and they did.  I boycotted them until they made the changes,  and now I fly with them as much as possible and recommend that my friends support them as well (no, I don’t get anything for promoting them, I just appreciate that they are committed to giving me the same experience as their thin passengers.)  Their passenger of size policy can be found at http://www.southwest.com/html/customer-service/extra-seat/index-pol.html

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If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.

I hear these kinds of things all the time:  I know that fat people eat this way because it’s what I did when I was fat, or because I’m fat and I eat that way, or because “everybody knows” that.  I know that all fat people are sick because everyone who comes to my medical practice who is fat is sick.  I gained 20 pounds after a bad break-up and lost it with Slim Fast (or whatever) therefore someone who has been fat their whole life and has been on 15 diets can lose 200 pounds by doing what I did.

This is going wrong on a bunch of levels. The first thing to do is to separate personal experience from research.

The mistake that I see most often is people confusing their own experience with everyone’s experience. Each of us can only speak for ourselves and what we think and our own life experiences.

This also leads to some issues wherein people’s personal sample is limited – I once had a counselor who specializes in Binge Eating Disorder say that I must have BED because in her experience everyone who looks like me has it.  I reminded her that her experience included a sign on her door that indicated that she was the person to see if you have BED.  By her logic I could say that everyone who wears a sweater vest had BED because everyone she sees in her practice who wears sweater vests also has BED.

It also leads people who simply have no understanding of a situation try to figure out how they would solve it if it were them, based only on their own experiences.  Depressed?  Snap out of it.  Alcoholic?  Stop drinking.  Anorexic? Start eating.  Fat?  Get thin.  These “solutions” aren’t evidence-based, they are what people think based on their limited understanding, and perhaps lacking the emotional intelligence and intellectual humility to understand that they may not have any frame of reference that would allow them to understand someone else’s experience.

It also leads to the false conclusion that if one person has an experience – everyone who is “like” that person in some way can also have that experience.  So saying that one fat person losing weight and maintaining the loss means every fat person can do it is very much like saying that one person surviving going over Niagara Falls in a barrel means everybody can do it.

In the end, our experiences are a great way for us to learn about ourselves, and a horrible way for us to learn about other people – and the more different we are, the worse our experiences are as a tool for understanding others (which is really important as we work to make our activism intersectional.)  It’s also one reason why there is so much power in talking about our lived experiences as fat people – and hearing from as many fat people as possible.  Recently in a panel discussion of people who work on “childhood obesity” we were asked how to do that work and avoid stigma.  I said that I didn’t think there was any way to call for the eradication of every child who looks a certain way without stigmatizing them (as in:  I don’t want to stigmatize fat kids, I just want to make sure that within a generation they don’t exist.)  The woman beside me mentioned that she had never thought of it that way.  Often when someone sees me working out and asks how much weight I’ve lost they are completely shocked to find that I’m not interested in weight loss – they literally didn’t know that there are fat people who aren’t trying to become thin.

That speaks to one of the problems that fat people face which is that, from diet companies to that ridiculous letter written to a fat runner,  people actively try to can speak for us – or shout over us – for their own reasons whether it’s about profit, ego, bullying or something else.  The more we talk about our own experiences, the more we educate not just those who might mistreat us, but those who might not be aware that they have options like Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size available to them.  That said, each of us can only speak for ourselves and our experience (and those who agree to have us speak for them) and it’s important to remember that as well.  There is power in our experiences – our stories –  and I think it’s worth it to fight to tell them, and to make sure that they are not told by others, and there is wisdom in knowing the difference between our experience and those of others and not confusing the two.

Like the blog?  Consider becoming a member! For ten bucks a month you can support size diversity activism, help keep the blog ad free, and get deals from size positive businesses as a thank you.

What do member fees support?  Between e-mails and Facebook private messages I get hundreds of requests a day (not including hatemail of course) from academic to deeply personal. I get paid for some of my speaking and writing (and do both on a sliding scale to keep it affordable), but a lot of the work I do isn’t paid so member support makes it possible (and let me just give a huge THANK YOU to my members, I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support!) Interested?  Click here for details

Here’s more cool stuff:

My Book:  Fat:  The Owner’s Manual  The E-Book is Name Your Own Price! Click here for detail

Dance Classes:  Buy the Dance Class DVDs or download individual classes – Every Body Dance Now! Click here for details 

If you are uncomfortable with my selling things on this site, you are invited to check out this post.