too sexy for my box
September 5, 2002 08:02 AM

Everyone, however astonishingly cool, has an element of the ridiculously stupid about them. You, too. I think we can all agree on that.

Mine is. Sometimes, when people tell me what I think, I actually believe them. I think lots of us do this.

We were walking down P street the other night. And some twit girl bumped into me. Hard! She was smelly (perfumey). She was inebriated. She was rude (I mean, she didn't apologize). And my response to this was to say "I'm invisible. It's because I'm fat."

Hello! Let's look at this situation, shall we? I am so obviously not invisible, and she was so obviously a rude girl [but not a rudegirl, though that would have been interesting]. If this was indicative of any social problem, it's rudeness, not fat hatred.

Earlier this summer I was reading a lot of books about societal perceptions of fat people. It ended up making me feel that everyone hated us and found us horribly ugly, and that we all need to be very serious in order to overcome this great badness. Not to overabuse the valley girl so, but - that is so not my experience.

Yes, I get less attention from men. That's to say: I don't suffer the massive invasions of my space by men that I did when I was less fat. Thank fucking god. And yes, I do have a harder time finding cute clothes (especially cute clothes that aren't built for eight-foot-tall amazons with itty asses). But my career has proceeded at the same pace since I left college. And when I look at senior managers, the few women I see look pretty fat. Many of them even have bad hair.

It's not that fat hate and fat discrimination don't exist. I mean. I own a television. Still. So much of the material meant to raise up the great fat dominion has the potential to subtly smush us. I think that's crap. I want books about fat acceptance that advertise the new fucking fat world order. I want kick ass books, not wimpy little books that talk about how much we hurt and get hurt. Pain pain pain. Bah! I'm not reading any more.

Ahem. Basically, I want Fat!So? with serious content.

I feel pretty much the same way about feminism, queer activism, pretty much any other social equality movement. A new cynicism is creeping into my activist research, spawned by the tendency of these media to just present problems without solutions or action. I hate having to put so much distance between myself and the interesting things I read, but at the same time, I'm thinking stop whining.

I don't know if that's addressed to them, or to me.

[By the way, I totally stole the title of today's entry from Tish; it was just so appropriate.]