I had other plans – I was going to write something thoughtful and well-composed about friendship and how homophobia hurts and limits all of us and definitions of love. Instead, I am writing about vag.

It’s come up in two very different conversations today in two very different places, the way women’s genitals are often perceived – by men and women alike – as dirty.

And it just emphasizes how little most women know about their own genitals. Your vulva is a pretty neat little package, okay? It does a lot of stuff! And that stuff is pretty important – and can be a lot of fun.

There’s still very much a double standard when it comes to women having sex; I don’t believe that’s going to change until it is far more common for women to stop being ashamed of and embarrassed by their sexual experiences and feelings.

Women have sex! Sometimes they have sex with other women. Sometimes they have sex with men. Sometimes they have sex with themselves. And sometimes there’s some combination of all of the above plus or minus some machinery.

None of that is inherently shameful or dirty.

The vulva consists of the external parts of a biological female’s genitals. That means the clitoris, the labia (major and minor), and the vaginal opening. None of that is inherently shameful or dirty either.

There is no one single right way for vulvae to look. It’s a little ridiculous and awkward, because of positioning, I know, to take a look at your vulva, but seriously: why should your gyno know more about the area than you? I’m pretty explicitly pro women knowing their bodies and being in touch with their own sexuality and health. Having a handle (oooh, ridiculous mental image) on what is all systems normal for your genitals is a pretty important part of that.

And let me tell you something else. If your partner is making you feel dirty and ashamed about your genitals (in a way that is not fun for you), then that person doesn’t deserve to have any kind of interaction with them. They need to get over that shit.

Whew.

To bring this back to fat, I say all of this even more emphatically to fat women: know your area. Given how many fat women report being desexualized and how many fat women loathe being naked with themselves, I think it’s even more important to remind every one that your genitals are your friend. (This can be complicated if you are trans or intersexed but it’s still important to take care of the area. Trans women still need to get their prostates checked, for example.) You don’t have to be ashamed of having genitals or of taking sexual pleasure in them.

If I were really on the ball this morning, I’d have a youtube clip of “Let’s Get It On” or something. I don’t have that, though. So I’ll just this: You aren’t dirty, your genitals aren’t dirty, and sex is no reason to be ashamed.

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Black and white pin-striped spats worn over purple granny-style boots on fat legs

I recently returned from my yearly goth family reunion (a.k.a. Convergence – 16 this year) which was, this time, located in Park City, Utah. Lemme tell you, my friends, 7000 feet is no walk in the park, especially if you’re climbing a bunch of stairs. WHEW. (In contrast, Orlando is, like 2 feet above sea level. I may be exaggerating. But only slightly.) Elevation issues aside, it was a fantastic weekend followed by a chance to see some family I don’t usually get to visit.

It was also, as it often is, a reminder why that line about fat girls having the best accessories is so true. While one vendor did bring some plus size stuff, it wasn’t stuff that fit (or interested) me. I had considered finally having a custom underbust corset made but got distracted by immediate gratification items instead.

Namely: spats.

I’m just warning y’all now, my outfits (especially skirts with doc martens) are highly likely to feature spats for the next little while. And there will probably be some hat photos as well because, hey, I bought two new hats. (I love hats and I love chartruese so when presented with a chartruese cloche there was only one option.)

Also, I bought a hot pink parasol. Stop judging me.

If there had been clothes in my size, I probably would have bought those over the totally painfully priced hats (that really are worth every penny). But the one night I dressed up involved a $26 dress from Avenue and an ancient B&Lu bolero that I got on clearance for under thirty bucks as well; the one night I got dressed up involved way more invested in accessories and makeup than in the fundamental items of clothing. (Even the purple granny boots from Duo were a clearance purchase and so, even with shipping, were under $50, I think.)

This is, in some ways, kind of awesome. I mean, it’s how we personalize our look, right? But it’s also super frustrating, even when you know that’s the situation and you aren’t expecting anything different. That’s why I don’t buy acccessories in straight-size stores, even if I happen to be in a straight-size store with a friend or something. They don’t need my accessory dollars when they’re blowing me off as a serious customer.

A lot of my accessories, maybe because I’m on my high horse about not spending money on accessories in stores that don’t carry my size, are handmade – either by me or other small business artisans. I’d rather support the etsy economy, for example, than the Anthropologie one.

What are your favorite accessories? Where did you find them? What do you think about accessories in general? I mean, sometimes it seems like more trouble than it’s worth to dig out a necklace, yo.

Dammit, now I’m totally clicking around etsy. I see new earrings in my future….

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I realize I have a… unique sense of style, okay? I know that sometimes people think I’m just a hot mess in action on the street. I am totally cool with that. And some of it comes from lack of availability (I was going to write the heart-wrenching tale of why I stopped going clubbing today but instead I’m editing a document that will never end) and some of it comes from me just not caring about your ideas of what people OUGHT to wear.

And yet, though it is not like I’m in any way responsible for it and it actually probably reflects poorly on me as a person, I kind of want to point my finger emphatically at people who have made fun of my sense of taste in the past and make that really obnoxious victorious HOOUAH!-ish noise that I tend to make when I’m playing fighting games or air hockey and I score.

Yes, I’m an obnoxious, competitive person. I realize that. I’m sorry.

But what, you might be asking (you might be, it’s possible! all things are possible!), is inspiring me in this particular finger-pointing direction today?

A collage of dress images, the cover of the current issue of Lucky magazine, and links from lucielu.com

The Margeaux Dress, from Lucie Lu, is featured in September’s issue of Lucky Magazine.

If you aren’t familiar with Lucky, well, it’s kind of awesome and intense and it makes zero pretense about what it is – a magazine for shopping. There’s no hard-hitting articles; there’s stickers so you can mark the items you want to eventually purchase. It’s a goddamn fashion wishbook is what it is and I don’t think it’s ever shown anything plus-sized before.

I, um, may be feeling stylistically vindicated just a little bit, okay?

*laugh*

I’ve actually got a different dress that I want to review for y’all (hint: go buy the wren dress because DAMN) but now I’m looking at the Margeaux in the new pin dot color combo….

One of the things that pisses me off more than anything else about accessibility issues and plus size fashion is that people judge fatties for not wearing stylish clothes (never mind that it’s hard as hell to FIND and AFFORD them) and then use that as justification to continue NOT PROVIDING ACCESS to stylish clothes. Dressing a certain way is not a damn requirement for basic human dignity but for people who DO want to dress that way, my gawd, it does help for places to sell shit that fits.

Lucie Lu is carrying pretty much everything that has been coming in new in a 4X and 5X. None of that 2 out of 17 items shit that some stores pull. Even the Tatum dress (teh cute one with the zipper) comes in the full size range.

I had kind of a hard day earlier in the week; some clothes I had ordered, with the highest of hopes, for Convergence arrived – and they didn’t fit. I can’t size up – they don’t make a larger size. And I felt kind of awful. I know it is the fault of the clothes but it’s still a blow, especially when you’ve gotten your hopes up.

But my Lucie Lu stuff fits and fits well. My wren dress is a 4X – the 5X is going to fit more like a 32/34 (I am gleeful that people larger than me can wear these clothes). And when I wore it the other day, a stranger who was obviously wearing straight sizes asked me where I got it (this happens with my chandelier dress, too).

That’s one of my favorite things ever. I’ve spent so much time mooning over fashion that is not available in my size. It isn’t that I want people in straight sizes to have that experience – though I’m not entirely immune to a sense of schaudenfreude. It’s that plus size fashion (combined with my unique style) isn’t generally that cool, you know?

It seems like a terrible, disloyal thing to say. But it’s true – especially of big box plus size fashion. It usually runs at least a season behind the mainstream trends. Which further limits the ability of the fatty who is into that sort of style or self-expression or just into fashion to express zierself through clothing.

Seeing Lucie Lu’s stuff in Lucky is the in-print version of having hundreds of people ask you where you got that slamming dress. It’s an experience a lot of fatties have never had because we’ve never had the tools – never had the access.

In some ways I think being sized out of so much has forced me to develop my own style and encouraged me not to care about other people’s opinions. And that’s a good thing. But it means slightly less when that’s the only option.

I want choices, dammit. I want us all to have options enough that we can try new things or throw on some old comfy pants if we feel like it – and I want both choices to be perfectly valid, totally normal.

It’s kind of a big deal for a small, independent boutique that only carries plus-size clothes to have made it to the pages of Lucky. It makes me proud of Lucie Lu and it makes me hope that Lucky will do more of this in the future.

And, yes, it makes me feel smug that I’ve been raving about the clothes for a while now. *grin* The thrill of discovery! I’ll chalk it up to that. And then I’ll go order that bolero with the shirred sleeves because hello, beautiful, you should belong to me.

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In 1986 (until 1993), a show called Designing Women aired. It was a comedy, centered on the interactions of four women and a man running an interior design firm in Atlanta, GA.

Designing Women was a landmark show – it was often incredibly topical. It’s also dated – the attitudes and politics are liberal but they are 1980s liberal; viewing it now, from 2010, there is so much that is problematic. But I can’t take away the experience of watching it, growing up in Atlanta, GA, and I can’t take away the experience of watching Delta Burke play Suzanne Sugarbaker.

Delta Burke herself is a really interesting woman. She was born in Orlando, FL, in 1956 (the same year as my mom, actually) to a single mother. She was voted Most Likely To Succeed in her high school superlatives and she was a beauty pageant contestant – the youngest Miss Florida titleholder.

When I was a fat little 9-year-old girl (I think I was 9 when I started watching it), though, I didn’t know any of that.

Delta Burke is gorgeous. But she also has this amazing laugh (I told you I’d mention it, S) and this demeanor that is, in the character of Suzanne Sugarbaker, by turns incredibly frustrating and incredibly endearing. Suzanne the character was a rich, spoiled, former beauty queen with the biggest entitlement complex ever. She was the perfect catalyst to talk about issues of class and race (her friendship with Anthony was baffling to me because of the way she often treated him) (seriously, I cringe when I think about a lot of what she said on the show) but, at the time, she was also deeply sympathetic: sheltered and strangely innocent and insecure and genuine.

Also, Suzanne Sugarbaker was fat.

Now, Delta Burke didn’t start the show off that way and, in retrospect, she actually wasn’t all that big – I don’t know that she ever made it into actual plus sizes or if she was Hollywood fat. But she was noticeably larger as the show progressed and she was noticeably larger than the other women on the show and they actually dealt with it as a plot point – both comedically with jokes about her bad attitude when dieting and more painfully, like when it was time for her high school reunion.

They Shoot Fat Women, Don’t They? [4.11]
Julia: Suzanne, it’s just human nature. People love to see beautiful women get old or fat.
Suzanne: All my life I’ve had to fight my weight, and I admit, food has been my security blanket. But also, I just gain weight more easily than some people, like you… you’ve always had that tiny waist and those skinny little legs. But I can’t be that, and people have always tried to make me be that.
Julia: Suzanne, you’re not alone. I’d be willing to bet most of the people in this country are overweight.
Suzanne: The point is it’s different for women, especially beautiful women. Just look at Elizabeth Taylor. I bet I’ve seen National Velvet maybe twenty times, and if she never did anything else in her life, what a contribution that was. But all of a sudden because she got fat, it was like she no longer had the right to live in this country. That’s how I feel right now. Drugs, alcohol, cancer… whatever your problems, people are sympathetic…..unless you’re fat, and then you’re supposed to be ashamed. I mean, everything is set up to tell you that; magazine covers, clothes. ‘If you’re not thin, you’re not neat, and that’s it.’ And if looks are all you’ve ever had…
Julia: What do you mean ‘If looks are all you ever had’? Suzanne, first of all don’t be a dummy. Your looks will never be in the past tense. That face speaks for itself, and it’s here to stay. And secondly, even if that weren’t so… who cares!
Suzanne: What do you mean?
Julia: I mean, you and I are getting pretty far along in life, and I have been able to figure out a couple of things.
Suzanne: Are you gonna give me the key?
Julia: Yes, as a matter-of-fact I am. In the end it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about you. You have to be exactly who and what you want to be. Most everyone is floating along on phony public relations. People who say being beautiful, or rich or thin makes them happy — people who are trying to make their marriages and their children seem better than they actually are…. and for what?! Appearances. Appearances don’t count for diddly! In the end, all the really matter is what was true, and truly said, and how we treated one another. And that’s it.

I often talk about my nascent fat acceptance and working at Lane Bryant and reading Susan Bordo. But, you know, maybe some of it started right there, with Suzanne Sugarbaker who, racist and classist and ableist and everything else you can imagine as she was, still managed to put into words the pain I felt at the way I was treated for being a fat kid.

And, you know, she put it into words and she dieted on the show (and in real life) but that’s not what stuck with me (well, the way dieting made her miserable and unhappy, the way the people around her hated when she was dieting and liked her well enough just the way she was, that stuck with me) so much as the way Suzanne Sugarbaker – Delta Burke herself – always looked beautiful. The idea that a fat woman couldn’t be attractive was just RIDICULOUS when you were faced with Delta Burke.

And if that was a lie, if there were really profoundly beautiful fat people, well, what else was our culture lying about when it talked about what fat people were and were not? It was a crack in the wall and then that wall crumbled.

Delta Burke doesn’t seem to be into fat acceptance at all. She’s got Type II Diabetes and so even her Wikipedia entry mentions that she’s trying to lose weight “for her health.” But she’s also working (getting ready for Steel Magnolias on Broadway), married to the same man she has been married to for years (Gerald McRaney, y’all! He was on Designing Women, too, as Suzanne’s ex-husband), and doing what she has always seemed to do in the face of difficulty and disapproval – living her damn life. Hell, she’s got a line of plus-sized clothes that are a lot of the things I hate in fat clothes (skirted swimsuits, okay) but she’s also got some 100% awesome pieces (retro halter swimsuit with ruching!) which she models herself. I kind of wish I could sit down with her, though, and tell her how much Suzanne’s indomitable will meant to me when she refused to be cowed in the face of disapproval, how much Delta Burke’s own persistent positivity modeled for me a way to deal with having to slog through shit.

She doesn’t get mentioned much anymore. It’s been a while since she’s been in the public eye. But I remember her. I check up on what she’s doing from time to time, and I am always reminded how much that smile of hers meant to me.

This clip is from the first season, the second episode. It’s really more about Dixie Carter’s character – and Julia Sugarbaker was FIERCE, y’all. But this is a clip from an episode where Suzanne was being mocked harshly by the new Miss Georgia World and the little shot of her listening at the door is kind of something else.

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Here’s the deal: Jess Weiner, who is something of a self-styled self-esteem guru has been talking about Huge a lot. She and Seventeen magazine have that Body Peace Treaty (I’m linking to Lesley’s post on the subject instead of the Body Peace Treaty itself because her commentary is so, so, so apt and I’d rather send her the traffic than Seventeen, honestly) that makes me cringe so much. Weiner recently wrote a short piece about the actors from Huge taking the pledge in real life:

I had a chance to talk to the entire cast of HUGE (including hottie trainer George played by Zander Eckhouse) and they were so excited about the Body Peace Treaty that they all decided to take the pledge!

Now, see, I’m not here to make sure everyone thinks fatties are dead sexy. That’s not the point of fat acceptance. Attraction is a deeply personal thing, after all, and while I think cultural construction does absolutely play a role, at the end of the day I don’t care how many people want to bone me.

But come on. Seriously, Jess Weiner? You really, truly went there? If you’re all about the healthy self-esteem and the “you are awesome just the way you are” then why are you perpetuating the same old cultural beauty standards?

George the character is endearing. I love that he has tried, in his awkward, only-slightly-older-than-the-campers way, to provide some guidance for the guys in his cabin – and that he handled Alistair’s hygeine issues with so much sensitivity. George is a great character and the actor who plays him IS a hottie, if you go for that sort of blond, surfery dude thing.

But Zander Eckhouse is not the only hottie on that show – nor is he the only hottie involved in Weiner’s little article. In fact, by elevating him, with his traditionally beautiful characteristics, above the other, fat actors, she’s pretty much destroying her entire message and rewriting it to say: be okay with your body but you’ll only be hot if you look like this guy.

Way to help improve the self-esteem of young adults, yo.

I am not the president of Team Ian – that would be Lesley. *grin* But I’ve sent my proverbial membership dues in to Team Alistair and Team Wayne and I’m considering the membership forms for Team Trent even though I don’t really go for jocks.

And let’s just talk about Team Becca, okay? And, hell, Team Will – Nikiki Blonsky looks AWESOME in this show in every scene. She has such a phenomenal smile, in addition to her other qualities.

This is a show full of damn attractive people. Hotties everywhere. In swimsuits.

Ahem.

Bullshit like this pisses me off because it is such half-hearted acceptance – it plays into the same old oppressions, the same old limitations we’ve all been beaten around the head and shoulders with until we’re sick.

Hope, but only for so much. Accept your body, but only to a certain point. Love yourself, but don’t ever dare to think you might be hot.

Seriously, y’all, fuck a bunch of that. If I had to pick the most attractive person out of the crowd that makes up the Huge cast, Zander Eckhouse might catch my eye but that’s not where it would settle.

And, you know, like I said, attraction is a personal thing and no one is obligated – even fatties! – to think fat people are hot. Hotness isn’t the point. But when you’re a fucking self-esteem advocate who is supposedly invested in helping youth feel better about themselves and be more accepting of all kinds of bodies, one would think you’d be a little more responsible about your damn parenthetical remarks.

“Oh, hi, y’all, love your bodies but isn’t this traditionally attractive boy just the hottest? You may be smart and funny and good looking but you won’t measure up to the mainstream heartthrobby good looks of the thin dude.”

Yeah, I’m paraphrasing. BUT COME ON.

It’s one throw-away line in a (skimpy, shallow) article, I get that. And Zander Eckhouse’s little Body Peace Treaty pledge thing is…. Well, I don’t know what it is. It sure ain’t about making peace with his damn body. *laugh*

But to single him out above all the other actors who participated just reinforces that he’s got a privilege the other actors will never have and that Jess Weiner is still buying into the same old same old when it comes to who gets to be considered hot and who gets to be denied sexual attractiveness based solely on an arbitrary number.

45 Comments

I think about words a lot. Which, I mean, I’m a blogger and a writer and an editor so that might be stating the obvious. I think about words a lot and, by the nature of my activism, one of the words I think about the most is the word fat.

It’s a great word, in my opinion. It’s not a particularly lovely word – I find very few single-syllable words to be lovely, especially those with the short-a sound and the harshness of that consonant t. (Exceptions all involve th – mouth and thigh being particularly glorious.) No, fat is one of the basics, one of the learning-to-read words. It’s cat and bat and hat and sat and mat and so on. It’s one of those words that is so intrinsic to our English-speaking mouths that we don’t think about it; it just comes chopping out from the space between our front teeth.

Fat is adipose tissue. When a noun is modified by “fat,” an adjective, it’s a descriptor; it signifies that the noun possesses comparatively more adipose tissue than a thinner version of that noun. It’s a word steeped in comparison and contrast. It’s not a binarism – fat and thin do not oppose each other, as much as some folks try to reduce the multiplicity of bodies and body types to such a simple, inaccurate head-to-head (pound-for-pound?) competition. Fat and thin both are part of a spectrum. The center point is not an arbitrary Ideal Body Weight: it’s just one more point.

That’s why I object to “overweight” as a descriptor. Over what weight? The weight other people think I should be even though they have no experience with my body composition beyond looking at me? The weight a BMI chart says I should be? The weight a fashion magazine thinks I should be? The only thing I’m over is all the effort to Other my body.

There are lots of other words people use. Curvy, chubby, stout, voluptuous, zaftig, fluffy, big-boned, thick, and so on. But they don’t really describe my body in a meaningful way when I want to talk about my particular body experience.

Sure, my body is curvy. But that speaks more to the profundity of my ass and the size of my breasts. It doesn’t say a damn thing about my body composition – especially since, really, curvy is a thing women (and other genders) of any weight can be. Curvy has become code for a very specific kind of fat and I am not that kind of fat. It’s not the word for me.

Chubby is, apart from also being a slang term from my youth for an erection, just plain wrong when it comes to scale. (You see what I did there?) If chubby is meant to indicate a certain specific, moderate level of fat, well, am I extra chubby? Extra extra chubby? It’s not a bad word. But it’s not the word for me.

There are a lot of vintage Lane Bryant ads, and ads from other catalogs, that advertise clothing for the stout woman. There is something, I think, very evocative about the word stout. It conjures up, for me, particularly British matrons with flowers on their hats and sensible, thick-heeled pumps. Basically, the Queen of England is stout. It’s awesome. And there’s something very solid about it, something that inspires confidence, I think. But, again, it’s not really an accurate descriptor for me.

Voluptuous and zaftig – they’re both efforts to glamorize bodies of size. Voluptuous might as well be curvy for all it’s a damn euphemism, for all it’s only applied to certain figures. And zaftig, which really is a phenomenal word is just an effort to make it sound better – as though fat in English isn’t good enough. Both voluptuous and zaftig have been applied to me, and I dig them, but I don’t dig them as community-wide descriptors because I don’t think we should be ashamed to speak plainly when it comes to our bodies.

I am not a goddamn Persian cat; I am not fluffy. Seriously, y’all.

Similarly, big-boned has got fuck all to do with my body. I mean, yeah, I have bones. And because bodies vary, in every way imaginable, some people’s bones really are larger and/or heavier than other people’s bones. That is really interesting. But it doesn’t determine how much fat I have. At best, it’s an apologetic excuse for just being larger than everyone (taller, sometimes); at worst, it’s an excuse founded in extreme embarrassment about body size.

Thick is a really interesting term to me. But, uh, yeah, I’m thicker than thick is supposed to be, I think. There’s nuance there with which I’m not entirely familiar – it seems to get applied to a lot of women who aren’t fat at all to me, they just have hips and thighs. Pear-shaped women, if we’re using fruit. Mmmmmmm, fruit.

There are plenty of other words that have been thrown my way over the years. But, for my linguistic energy, fat is still the best thing out there. It’s not a fancy word but I don’t need it to be. It’s one of the first words we learn to read; it’s basic. It’s as basic as “This is my body.” My body is many things. My body is fat.

The objection, of course, is that fat is used as an insult, is used to tear people down. It’s a successful insult because of the cultural perception that fat is bad.

I tell you what, my fat is not bad. It isn’t morally wrong, nor is it poorly behaved. It simply is. I’m not afraid of my fat and so I am not afraid of the word. “You’re fat,” (or, more commonly from trolls, “Your fat”) is a statement of fact, not an insult. Why, yes, yes, I am fat. Isn’t it delightful?

There are friends, generally thin, who cringe when I use the word. They won’t use it. I don’t blame them; they don’t exactly have signs over their heads proclaiming them okay and not being insulting, after all. But I’m going to keep using it, repeating it, saying it all the damn time. I’m going to keep normalizing it. It’s a normal word! It’s fat!

A lovely word? It doesn’t need to be. It’s better than lovely. Let’s use it some more.

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When I was a child, I was obsessed definitions. I wanted to know, with deep familiarity, as many words as I possibly could; there was one notable summer that I spent bouncing back and forth between reading a dictionary and an out-of-date encyclopedia set. Words, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, are really all we have when it comes to shaping the world*.

Words are, of course, an imperfect medium. No one has the exact same sense of a word, the same intonation, enunciation, connotation. We’re all estimating everyone else’s meaning – sometimes we are quite accomplished at it, and sometimes we are dismal. Steven King describes writing as something of a magic trick: the writer tells you to imagine a rabbit on the table and you, the reader, imagine a rabbit on the table. But the rabbits the writer and the reader envision are in no way assured of being the same beyond the basic details – the details described in words.

One of the things which has always fascinated me about language is that without the words to describe something, that something may as well not exist. If there are no words to conceptualize a thing, can we even comprehend it? (I’d argue that when it comes to personal experience there are some things that may be exempt from this, those ineffable moments which cannot be communicated with any degree of reliability but which move us in profound ways.) I think this is why the act of naming is such a powerful one, especially in genesis stories around the world.

None of this is new in the world of ideas. Heraclitus used logos (the word) to name the principle of order and knowledge, the things that were known about the Universe. (I was as obsessed with mythology as I was with words for a while there and my North Georgia public school library was, perhaps predictably, heavier on the Greek mythology than anything else. So I know other cultures developed this concept, probably earlier. But my very first frame of reference for it comes from Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.)

And yet, this imprecise communication, it’s what we have and it’s how I’ve built my life; one description at a time, I have piled them up until there is a world that I know the face of, with which I can interact, in which I know how to survive and, at times, even thrive.

It’s a world I know how to navigate. And I’ve made my way, by and large, on the power of words, through my practice with them as a tool for communication.

Into this context, then, I want to introduce the idea of hope.

I’m an optimist. My belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity is distressingly stubborn. I often feel gauche and silly because jaded (hipster) cynicism always seems so much more worldly, so much more urbane and the way to be if one wishes to be taken seriously (being taken seriously has been, in many ways, the central struggle of my identity). However, it seems the most I can manage is to temper my optimism with realism and I think I have come to terms with this, for the most part. I am an optimist.

It isn’t that we, as a species, get it right all the time, not at all. But I look at the things we make, the things we can accomplish. I’m not going to lie to you about my heart: I am amazed at what we can do. It is sappy and earnest and rather desperately childlike, I suspect, but there it is. Humanity is a wonder to me, even as it breaks me. (It is entirely possible that I internalized far too much of the philosophy of the original series of Star Trek, about overcoming difference without erasing it, respect, exploration without colonization, and that sort of idealism.)

The foundation of my optimism is very simple; the foundation of my optimism is hope.

Hope is, at its most basic, the belief in good outcomes. There’s a Biblical definition of faith that has always struck me as being a bit backwards: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I think hope is actually the faith in things not seen, the substance of belief in something good. It certainly doesn’t take any sort of relationship with organized religion to feel hope (I identify with vague unease as an agnostic – I suspect I am cheating by taking that label). And at this stage of the game I am far more comfortable with my hope than I am with any sort of statement regarding divinity. Hope for the best, plan for the worst – it’s clichéd because it’s true.

Into this mental arena steps my viewing of Huge. While Lesley and I have been podcasting (there are several Hugeisodes up now) about the show, I haven’t done very much writing about it. Sometimes it takes me a little while to unpack why I feel a certain way about something and that’s what happened here.

From the beginning, I was skeptical. I trust Lesley’s opinion but I was still resolved not to watch; perhaps, I thought, perhaps I would watch the whole thing once it was over, as long as someone could assure me beforehand that it wasn’t a train wreck. The self-protective maneuvering was automatic, didn’t even take conscious thought. I started watching it against my better judgment and was surprised – surprised and then pleased and then in love with the show.

But it was secret love. The kind of love you mull over and feel guilty about – and if there’s anything over which a person ought not to feel guilt, it is love. I looked forward to the show as much as I dreaded it.

I did dread it. Because I don’t watch tv, we don’t have cable or anything approximating it. I’ve been buying episodes on iTunes (I can’t deal with the commercials in Hulu), every Tuesday morning like clockwork but it was only the pressure of recording that kept me watching them. I still haven’t seen one of the episodes because I’m just too… I still worry, after everything, that it will be painful. I’m not very skilled at handling embarrassment from characters with whom I sympathize and/or identify. So I watched but I was ready, ready to cringe and wince and there were some scenes I had to watch while braced for some sort of blow.

This is ridiculous. It’s a television show. That it would have so much power to wound me is, in and of itself, kind of incredible. But that it would have so much power to wound me in the context of my optimistic nature and fundamentally hopeful worldview is especially hard for me to fathom and I’m analyzing my own reactions – one would think I would have the proverbial inside track on understanding these things, after all.

This is the thing, the crux of the matter, the hinge on which I find the door swinging: oppression is, at the innermost kernel of itself, the limitation of hope.

Systems of oppression exist to keep “less desirable” (or explicitly “undesirable”) populations in their place. Systems of oppression train us in how we must act to gain any semblance of acceptability, in how we must police ourselves, and in how we must make our apologies for ourselves. Systems of oppression tell us what we’re allowed and what we are not allowed. Systems of oppression set out the borders of that which we are allowed to imagine as possible for ourselves and for those who are somehow like us.

Systems of oppression put a leash on our capacity to hope, to dream, to aspire.

This is, I think, the most pernicious way that systems of oppression perpetuate themselves. It’s logical, in the worst and most cruel way, that if we cannot imagine a better world for ourselves and for others, that the current orders of power will never be threatened. Cultural construction, the idea that we are in large part products of internalized cultural mores and values that we do not consciously embrace, installs our ideas of “normal” and tells us when we deviate from it. Cultural construction tells us, for example, that fat is bad – it is simply an accepted and unexamined truth in our society.

I cannot unambiguously hope when I am watching Huge because I am too conditioned to expect the sucker punch, the renewed assertion that fat is bad, the message that I am deviant and incorrect and simply not acceptable.

Huge is, in my opinion, a watershed moment. Not simply in television, but in our culture as a whole. That a mainstream, popular channel has chosen to air a narrative that a) deals with the complexity of fat experience and b) does not simplify – does not even appear to address and/or question – the myriad reasons why people might be fat… It’s amazing. It’s the kind of baffling that makes me stare at my computer screen in wonder that we did this, people made this show and other people are watching it.

It’s one small thing. It’s not perfect. But I don’t hope for perfection – I’m not really sure I’m even capable of hoping for something perfect at this point, even with my vast stores of optimism. But it’s something new, and it’s worth unlearning that automatic flinch for me to experience it, for me to have the chance to marvel at a camp full of fat bodies in swim suits running around as thought it’s the most normal thing in the world. The power of visibility – we’ve discussed it before – is transformative that way. It grabs me by the throat and chokes me up and says, yes, actually, there are other bodies like yours and there is no shame in that. And that is what keeps me coming back to it, with every downloaded episode.

Strunk and White (that is E.B. White of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little fame) in their Elements of Style provide a prescriptive case for “cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English” (as White put it). In his introduction, White talks about how his teacher Strunk regarded language and writing as a rope that you, the writer, throw to a drowning man in a swamp. The same can be said – should be said – for social justice activism.

Fat acceptance (and anti-racism work and feminism and so on) is a rope, thrown to a drowning man – a drowning person – a way out of the swamp of our own cultural construction, a chance to find dry ground and realize the boundaries that have been placed on our ability to hope for things which we cannot yet see. A better world, in the local and in the broader sense; not just for ourselves but for those around us and those that come after us.

Anti-oppression work is a rope to dry land and it is a map to a new way of navigating the world in which we live. It’s dangerous, because it’s uncertain – knowing all of this, having finally unpacked it does not significantly ease my instinctual dread, my fear of being betrayed by this narrative with which I have become fully invested. But my hope – my hope – is that it will be enough, that the work of fat acceptance will provide enough of a guide for my feet to find a better way of walking, that I’ll better establish the path that others started so that it will be easier for other people after me. I cannot even describe specific things for which I might hope – I recognize that my own perception of the way things are limits me in this. But I can hope that things can and will be better.

It’s an imperfect hope, as imperfect as words, but it’s mine.

* Art (by which I mean music and visual arts and everything else) can also be highly effective at communicating but I think it is less reliable – art is subjective, even more so than language (in this case I think I’ll categorize poetry as art rather than language for the sake of effective communication).

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So, in a move that really truly has surprised me, @lanebryant has apologized for their tweet yesterday. And has made the effort to apologize to each individual involved. Even if that was automated somehow, I’m still kind of impressed.

Heather is the name of the person tweeting for LB. Hi, Heather! Sorry we had to meet you under these circumstances.

An apology, though, is really just the beginning. I don’t expect a radical shift in Lane Bryant’s style or anything – after all, this is really an issue with their marketing department. What I do expect is a greater awareness in their marketing department (and that doesn’t just mean their Twitter feed) of their customer. All of their customers – not just the ones who hate their fat.

Lane Bryant, you have a really diverse customer base. People of various genders, people of color, people of various sizes, shapes, ages, and styles. People who believe in fat acceptance as a radical alternative to self hatred.

People who think it is in incredibly bad taste for a representative of a mega corp to go after an indie artist in the first place, much less a fat activist blogger.

Lane Bryant – Heather: there’s a growing number of people who aren’t afraid of the word fat. Who are working hard to reclaim it and to reclaim the respect and dignity that our culture denies to fat bodies. The fat activist community is, itself, diverse with different factions representing different degrees of radicalism and different stances on key issues.

It’d be great if you want to be part of that, Lane Bryant. Fat positive bloggers are some of the biggest and loudest voices when it comes to talking about your products online. We take our fatshion seriously (some of us) as both a means of expression and a means of politicizing our bodies even more.

And sometimes we just like to talk about pretty clothes.

An apology is the first step. Now @lanebryant has to live up to Heather’s sincere promise to do better. It’s a hackneyed truth that once trust is broken, it’s much harder to earn back than it was to earn in the first place. But I think most of us would be willing to forgive if we saw some genuine effort to connect with the online fat positive community.

What do y’all think, on this totally fance Friday? Where do you stand regarding Lane Bryant now? What do you think of their apology and what would you like to see?

For once, Lane Bryant seems to be paying a little bit of attention to its customers. What do we want to say to them?

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So, Lane Bryant has stepped in a big, stinking pile of fat-shaming shit.

OOPS.

I’ve spent a lot of time defending them in the past, even when I wasn’t digging their fatshion. My nascent fat acceptance really sprouted when I worked for them and I have carried that positive glow with me through the years. They’re a reliable source for things I can’t get elsewhere and I wear the hell out of their Cacique stuff. Heck, they were the first store credit card I ever had. I was looking online at their sale stuff just this morning.

What I haven’t felt so good about was their Twitter feed. I mean, sure it was great for distributing free panty coupons during the Ashley Graham Cacique commercial scandal (I still love that commercial). But there’s a lot of stuff I’d expect to find on the pages of a 1980s Cosmo magazine.

And today they’re ragging on definatalie’s kickin’ tshirt.

This is ragingly problematic for a couple of reasons.

a) When a mega-retailer picks on an indie artist, that’s just some bullshit right there. Way to live up to the evil corporation stereotype there, LB!

b) I get that LB can’t be radically fat pos and still reach a mainstream fat customer. But holy shit, do they need to engage in active shaming? Fat is not a bad word. Acknowledging that we have fat is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a pretty amazingly healthy step for an expanding (heh) number of people.

@lanebryant has stopped responding to tweets at the moment. I suspect they’re trying to figure out what they said wrong. But I think this is actually a really fantastic moment and there’s something that a lot of retailers need to learn:

Don’t fuck with us. Give us options, give us clothes, we will give you our money and our consumer loyalty. But don’t you try to shame us, too.

Clothes, as I tweeted to a twitter friend, are not camouflage – no amount of clothing is going to make me look like a thin person. And, you know, I wouldn’t want it to. I want to wear things that make me joyous, things that make me look like ME, things that kick ass. My idea of flattering probably isn’t the mainstream definition (which is more like: slimming) but COME ON. Are we really still stuck in the days of dressing to hide, to diminish, to disappear?

I damn well refuse to participate in that.

Fat people are not invisible, nor should we aspire to be.

I’m curious to see how Lane Bryant responds – if they respond. But in the meantime, I’m going to point out that I’m in the process of updating my I Give Them My Money page (from which LB is apparently itching to be removed). I’ve added, for example, Lucie Lu. If you shop at any other small/indie fattie retailer and you’re pleased with them, let me know.

And in the meantime, I’m Team Fance all the way.

ETA: “Fance” is fancy, y’all – it’s part of a blog feature called Friday Fance over at definatalie’s blog. @lapocketrocket is, as far as I know, the person who coined the Team Fance hashtag on Twitter.

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My love for Amanda Chronister’s illustration just keeps growing in leaps and bounds.

And whales.

Last night I tweeted that I was wanting to head to the pottery studio so I could start work on making a whale in a bikini. I came home to this:

Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing.

We need a fat art gallery at this point, y/y?

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