Jan Priddy’s Reviews > Blessings > Status Update

I don’t know who doesn’t let people say ‘fat’. Admittedly the Health At Every Size and fat-acceptance movements have gotten pretty badly co-opted and watered down since the heyday in the late aughts or so? But the grumpy leftist feminist writers and activists of that era — the kind of people often accused of word-policing — generally embraced the word. (NB: while I was and usually am on the borderline of fat sometimes called a ‘tweener’ in those days, I did hang out on the fatosphere quite a bit.) The idea was, “fat” as neutral fact instead of condemnation or moral shorthand.

I’ve often noticed fatphobia in older books (including most facilely and QUITE old, my beloved Hobbit. Dear JRR, we remember Bombur is fat! You do not have to say “who was fat” every time you bring up another way in which his fatness is making him vulnerable, ridiculous, or a liability!) including some that are thoughtfully written in many other respects. But to me, that old-fashioned fatphobia is a lack of self-consciousness around having fatness stand in for sins, weaknesses, any other personality; around making endless rather cruel jokes in the narrative voice, around having fat characters obligatorily useless at everything physical, etc. More modern writers who dance around the word are more likely to try to candycoat those attitudes if they have them, too, I suppose, but the word means less to me as a marker than the context.

Recent editors danced around their concern that I mentioned how thin my characters became... because they were necessarily vegan and traveling and gathering food. One character concerned that her husband would have found her body too thin since he'd loved her curves. Many of the editorial comments were like that. I didn't always know what to do with them. "Crazy" was a forbidden word. I got chewed for that one.

In Art History classes, one aspect of ancient art that was never commented on when I was a student (50 years ago now) was that prehistoric people celebrated fat because it was healthy—they knew what fatness looked like, not entirely accurately, but in a migratory, gatherer culture overweight was aspirational. It was survival.

Oh that’s very dispiriting. And perhaps part and parcel of the imperfect cooption/ill digestion of ideas from HAES and fat acceptance into the mainstream, I suppose: the editors know they’re supposed to worry about what “strident” fat readers will say, but don’t really understand WHY certain topics or depictions (uncritical embrace of diet culture is not the same as noticing you’re losing weight after an apocalypse!) would get their goat? So I suppose that makes it another topic with nebulous taboos, like a lower-voltage iteration of white people trying to talk about racism. Ugh.

I mean, we live in our bodies. For heavens’ sakes. We have to be able to write from and about them.