Opinion: These people are fat. It’s none of your business
Opinion by Sara Stewart
(CNN) — I’m aware of the inherent cliché in saying that someone’s “so brave” for talking publicly about their own struggles. But it’s a challenge not to associate that term with Aubrey Gordon, who spent the past six years working with filmmaker Jeanie Finlay on the documentary “Your Fat Friend,” which played this summer at the Tribeca Film Festival and is set for mainstream release soon. What Gordon points out in this documentary is: In a culture obsessed and financially enmeshed (to the tune of trillions of dollars) with the “wellness industry,” complete with endless flowery language around self-care and body positivity, how is it still the case that fat people are so routinely treated as subhuman?
Gordon is a writer who began her career as an anonymous blogger with the pen name “Your Fat Friend,” named after a letter she sent to a friend as an explainer of how she, as a 350-pound woman, would like to be addressed.
“Just say fat,” Gordon reads from her essay in the film. “Not ‘curvy’ or ‘chubby’ or ‘chunky’ or ‘fluffy’ or ‘more to love’ or ‘big guy’ or ‘full-figured’ or ‘big-boned’ or ‘queen size’ or ‘husky’ or ‘obese’ or ‘overweight.’ Just say fat.”
She wrote this as a private missive, but subsequently published it on her blog. It went viral, launching Gordon as a sharp and all-too-rare voice championing dignity for fat people. Since then, she’s written two books and become the co-host of the acclaimed podcast “Maintenance Phase,” where she and co-host Michael Hobbes pick apart the diet and wellness industry, from the Presidential Fitness Test to the fen-phen craze to the current Ozempic obsession.
But much of the film is devoted to Gordon’s personal life: her relationships with her loving parents, life with her dog in her cute Portland, Oregon neighborhood and primarily the many indignities, large and small, she encounters as a fat person in a world programmed to view large bodies with disgust.
In one of the film’s bleakest anecdotes, she opens up about her trauma around flying. From the moment she knows she has to get on a plane, to the process of boarding and knowing everyone around her views her as a burden and a liability, she describes the physically-sick feeling of existing as someone others view with hostility, anger and repulsion. (She has also written about resisting the term “fatphobia” to describe this behavior, arguing that “discriminatory attitudes are not a mental illness.”)
She also chronicles years of being written off by doctors she’s seen, health professionals who often refuse to treat the thing she’s come to them for and go straight to telling her to lose weight before she comes back. Gordon, who has struggled with an eating disorder, says she went through an eight-year span where she simply stopped seeking medical help at all.
Author Roxane Gay has spoken and written about this hypocrisy — the notion that fat people aren’t paying enough attention to their health, when they are reviled by the professionals from whom they seek help or treatment. In a 2017 interview with Lindy West, Gay said, “Half the issues that fat people face happen because of accumulation of lack of health care. It’s not that you just are fat and all of a sudden you have diabetes or high blood pressure, it’s that you go to the doctor for a physical or strep throat or heart palpitations and they just say, ‘You’re fat, lose weight,’ and they don’t treat you, and then you stop going to the doctor. And then 10 years later, of course you’re an explosion of medical issues. Because you’re a human body and you haven’t seen competent medical professionals. It’s a disgrace.”
As Gordon acknowledges, many thin people (whether they are medical professionals or strangers) presume they know better than a fat person what that person should and shouldn’t eat. Gordon recalls one woman removing a melon from her grocery cart, telling her it has too much sugar. “It’s a melon!” Gordon exclaims incredulously to the camera.
But as she and other fat activists have publicly said for years now, it’s laughable to think they are unaware of nutrition and health recommendations, of the benefits of exercise and the dangers of diabetes and other obesity-related diseases. Listening to her describe a nonstop intrusion of strangers’ cutting remarks and disapproving looks and overheard comments from people desperate to lose five or 10 pounds — anything, Gordon points out, to avoid looking like her own body — is to begin to understand the severity of the damaging scrutiny to which fat people are subjected.
What Gordon is doing that’s so radical, in concert with the writing and advocacy of people like Roxane Gay (“Hunger”) and Lindy West (“Shrill”), is pointing out that at a very basic level, all of this is no one else’s f–king business. That some people’s bodies are just meant to be fat. In fact, as she says in the film, a majority of American bodies are overweight. That means that all of the anti-fatness, all of the hand-wringing and finger-pointing and shaming, is directed toward most of the people in this country — who are expected to take it with an apologetic smile and never, ever push back against the routine dehumanization they experience. And, god forbid, never advocate for actual celebration of fat bodies.
Because pushing back, as Gordon has experienced, can have terrifying consequences. At one point in the film, she is doxxed: Her personal information is published online, including her home address and her social security number. “It stands in such sharp contrast to the number of, for example, thin people who will post about body positivity and show themselves eating a piece of pizza. And from a thin person, the post will get comments like, ‘Yay, get it! Go. We love it.’ And from a fat person it will be met with death threats, right?” she told People.
There is a significant feminist rebellion inherent in advocating for fat acceptance — and fat celebration. As West has written, “When you raise women 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. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.”
Gordon also comments, in the film, on the obsession with monitoring the way in which public figures — especially female ones — change shape, as if we are all entitled to know how and why they did it. To judge their choices. Gabourey Sidibe, Rebel Wilson and Adele are all examples of celebrities who’ve radically changed shape in recent years. Gordon’s public plea for people to maybe step off and leave Adele alone reached the singer herself; the film points to a tweet from the singer thanking Gordon for the essay.
All of that said, Gordon’s suggestions for how to effect change in the world as an ally (I’m a thin person, made all the more so by a bout with cancer) are a little tougher than she makes them seem in the film. So I did a little research and curated a few tips from fat activists online:
“The assumption that fat people want to lose weight, that they are or should be dieting, that they hate their bodies or are uncomfortable with themselves, is incredibly damaging and perpetuates the self-loathing that fat people are taught to feel,” wrote Melbourne-based Chloe Papas in the lifestyle site ABC Everyday. “Don’t assume a fat person in your life wants to change their body, and most of all, don’t assume they want advice on it.”
“Anticipate the needs of fat people in my life, do my best to meet them, and fix it when I fall short,” resolved Logan Howlett in EverydayFeminism.com. “For example, I’m teaching a wellness self-management class, and when I went to check out the room I’d be holding the class in, I made sure there were comfortable chairs with no arms so anyone fat in my class wouldn’t have to wrestle with uncomfortable chair arms.”
“Call out comedians who tell fat jokes, in public forums,” writes author Rebecca Rose Vassy, who proposes “ten radical ways to be a fat ally” on the therapy site TamaraPincus.com. “It’s not enough to not laugh at a fat joke (and many of you still do, let’s be honest). You need to tell standup comics, late-night hosts, and yes, even your friends and coworkers that their ‘joke’ was punching down and simply not funny. Do it in tweets or comments or groups where others can see and hear your objections, and the joker has to answer for it. You might be thinking ‘it’s just a joke’ but trust us, anti-fat humor does a level of psychological and emotional harm that is no laughing matter.”
“Erase the words ‘obesity epidemic’ from your vocabulary,” says Dani Beckett in Vice. “Demonization of fat bodies is a classic scapegoating tool employed by governments. When they talk about the ‘obesity epidemic,’ they’re using coded language to get you to blame systematic societal problems (poverty, crime, climate change) on poor communities and communities of color. You’re smarter than that.”
And go check out “Your Fat Friend” when it’s in theaters. I’m betting it will change how you view your interactions with fat people in your life — and greatly enhance your willingness to challenge the dismal way they’ve been treated for just about forever.
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