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I don’t want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body. I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable with its size and shape, to tacitly endorse the idea that fat is shameful, to pretend I’m something I’m not out of deference to a system that hates me.
Fat people are helpless babies enslaved to their most capricious cravings. Fat people do not know what’s best for them.
When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world.
We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.
my reaction to my own fatness manifested outwardly instead of inwardly—as resentment, anger, a feeling of deep injustice, of being cheated. I wasn’t intrinsically without value, I was just doomed to live in a culture that hated me.
His life was beautiful and marked with loss; maybe not more than anyone else’s, but when you only expect the best, heartbreak is a constant.
her rigid expectations about the Correct Way to Do Things border on disordered (motto: “If you clean your bathroom every day, you never have to clean your bathroom”).
Dad was the entertainer, but I’m funny because of my mom. She has a nurse’s ease with gallows humor, sarcastic and dry; she taught me to cope with pain by chopping it up into bits small enough to laugh at. (My dad would go full Swamps of Sadness when anything went wrong. If the printer ran out of toner, he couldn’t speak above a whisper for days.)
Every comedian on every stage is saying what he’s saying on purpose. So shouldn’t we be welcome to examine that purpose, contextualize it within our culture at large, and critique what we find?
Tosh is a bro-comedy hero, specializing in “ironic” bigotry—AIDS, retards, the Holocaust, all with a cherubic, frat-boy smile—the kind of jokes worshiped by teenagers and lazy comics who still think it’s cool to fetishize “offensiveness.”
The tide of public opinion has always turned, invariably, on coolness. People just want to be cool.
Then we picked blackberries and made a pie and we swung by my parents’ house—it was still my parents’ house then, not my mom’s house, not truncated and half-empty—and
I didn’t see it coming, because I was a child. I didn’t understand what a relationship was—that the whole beauty of the thing is two people choosing, every day, to be together; not one person, drunk on love stories, strangling them both into a grotesquerie of what she thinks she wants.
How could I be a bride when I was already what men most feared their wives would become?
It is considered highly unlikely—borderline inconceivable—that he would choose to be with me in a culture where men are urged to perpetually “upgrade” to the “hottest” woman within reach, not only for their own supposed gratification but also to impress and compete with other men. It
Women hit on him right in front of me—and the late-night Facebook messages are a constant—as though they could just “have” him and he would say, “Oh, thank god you finally showed up,” and leave me, and some dire cosmic imbalance would be corrected.
Well, sorry. I am a human and I would like to be with the human I like the best. He happens to not be fat, but if he were, I would love him just the same. Isn’t that the whole point? To be more than just bodies?
When I think back on my teenage self, what I really needed to hear wasn’t that someone might love me one day if I lost enough weight to qualify as human—it was that I was worthy of love now, just as I was. Being fat and happy and in love is still a radical act. That’s why a wedding mattered to me.
Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t engage. It’s what they want.” Is it? Are you sure our silence isn’t what they want?
It felt really easy, comfortable even, to talk to my troll. I liked him, and I didn’t know what to do with that. It’s frightening to discover that he’s so normal. He has female coworkers who enjoy his company.
