Dietland

by Sarai Walker

When I was around women who had grown-up lives, the kind of life I thought I should have, I felt suspended in time, like an animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

I was already fat. I was the worst that could happen.

We all want to be attractive to our partner, but being fuckable is about more than that. It’s about having a high fuckability quotient on the open market, as if we’re stocks with a value that rises and falls.”

“A fuckable woman doesn’t take up space. Fuckable women are controlled.”

“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”

that’s what I’d wanted—to be hot, to elicit desire in men and envy in women. But I realized I didn’t want that anymore. That required living in Dietland, which meant control, constriction—paralysis, even—but above all it meant obedience. I was tired of being obedient.

No prayers were offered up to the diet gods: I’ll go to the gym later; I didn’t eat dinner last night. There was pleasure that didn’t have to be bargained for.

I looked at my body, the body that had kept me alive for nearly thirty years, without any serious health problems, the body that had taken me where I needed to go and protected me. I had never appreciated or loved the body that had done so much for me. I had thought of it as my enemy, as nothing more than a shell that enclosed my real self, but it wasn’t a shell. The body was me. This is your real life. You’re already living it.

People had always insulted me by calling me fat, but they couldn’t hurt me that way, not anymore. I was fat, and if I no longer saw it as a bad thing, then the weapon they had used against me lost its power.

I was wearing bright colors, refusing to apologize for my size. The dress made me feel defiant. For the first time, I didn’t mind taking up space.

“I think it’s a response to terrorism. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all. We’re told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn’t that a form of terrorism?”

As far as he was concerned, if I didn’t make his man parts happy, I had no reason to exist.

“Virginia Woolf once wrote that it’s more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality,”