I used to try to be cool. I said things that I didn’t believe about other people, and celebrities, and myself; I wrote mean jokes for cheap, “edgy” laughs; I neglected good friendships for shallow ones; I insisted I wasn’t a feminist; I nodded along with casual misogyny in hopes that shitty dudes would like me.
I thought I was immune to its woo-woo power, but if it hadn’t been for menses tent, how long would it have taken me to understand that I get to choose what kind of person to be? Open or closed? Generous or cruel? Spirit jaguar or clinging ghost? A lazy writer (it’s easy to hate things) or a versatile one? I don’t believe in an afterlife. We live and then we stop living. We exist and then we stop existing. That means I only get one chance to do a good job. I want to do a good job.
Hello, I Am Fat
In 2009, I’d been at the Stranger about five years (four as a freelancer, one on staff), and was casually dating a dude who refused to kiss me on the mouth. He’s a good person; he was good to me in other ways. They all were, really—even Sasquatch garage door guy—but, you know, we were all raised in the same fucking septic tank. No one teaches young men how to take care of fat girls.
The Stranger is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I got to learn how to write and run a newspaper from geniuses (David Schmader, Charles Mudede, Eli Sanders) I’d been obsessed with since I was a teen—we took chances, changed elections, ran our sections with nearly unfettered editorial freedom, and struck a balance between ethics and irreverence that I was always proud of. By the time I got on staff full-time, Dan Savage was already medium-famous and had orchestrated a more-power/less-responsibility promotion from editor in chief to editorial director, so he wasn’t in the office so much. Nonetheless, the culture of the place was all Dan, and even mostly in absentia he did the hell out of that job.
Dan would run a meeting every few weeks, always our most productive and most boisterous; be gone traveling for months and then show up at a candidate interview to grill local politicians with the acuity of a day-to-day city hall reporter; emerge from his office like a groundhog to drop an infuriatingly brilliant mandate about precisely how to tweak whatever delicate story was stumping us; and send insistent e-mails the morning after every office party to ensure surplus sheet cake was placed, uncovered, on his desk. (Dan has a thing about stale cake.) I was taught a mantra, my first week, to manage my expectations about Dan as an editor: “Silence is praise.” As long as you don’t know he exists, you’re killing it. I remember two editors improvising an extensive, Dan-themed Gilbert and Sullivan musical number over their cubicle walls: “I will laugh at you when you cry!” Dan, the great and terrible.
If his management approach is unique, Dan’s editorial sense—for clear-headed satire and gleeful, pointed disobedience, for where to aim and from what angle to drop the hammer—is unparalleled in my decade of writing experience. Dan knows how to land a point better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. That preternatural ability is what has made him famous (he is a magnificent pundit), and it’s also what gets him into trouble.
Like all of us, Dan fucks up. Like all of us, he is sometimes slow to find the right side of an issue. And when he has an opinion on something, he expresses it in vivid, uncompromising prose to a rapt audience of millions—over and over and over again, because he is as prolific as he is stubborn. He also, like all of us, can be intractable and defensive when criticized, and because he is very funny and very smart, he can also be very snide, and when such a person does actually happen to be wrong, but mistakes totally warranted criticism for petty sniping, and responds not with openness but with sneering acidity to a critic who is just trying to advocate for their own humanity, it can be a very bad look.
This is the great curse of popularity and the great luxury of obscurity: People only care about your mistakes when they can hear you. Only failures can afford to be cavalier and careless.
Unfortunately for my personal emotional cankers, in the mid-to-late aughts Dan was on something of an “obesity epidemic” kick. He wasn’t alone. At the same time that I was tentatively opening to the idea that my humanity was not hostage to my BMI, the rest of the nation had declared a “war on obesity.” They’d whipped up a host of reasons why it was right and good to hate fat people: our repulsive, unsexy bodies, of course (the classic!), but also our drain on the healthcare system, our hogging of plane armrests, our impact on “the children,” our pathetic inability and/or monstrous refusal to swap austerity for gluttony (like thin people, who, as you know, are moderate and virtuous in all ways). Oh, and our “health.” Because they care. They abuse us for our own good. (Do you know what is actually not a good way to help a group of people, it turns out? Advocating for their eradication.)
Dan was on that train, and I don’t blame him—it was a very popular (and, I imagine, gratifying) ticket at the time, and, even more so than today, it was considered very roguish to “tell it like it is” about fat people (as though that wasn’t the status quo, as though we hadn’t gotten the message). I understand; I had only recently snapped out of some of the same thought patterns myself. I had to learn how to look at pictures of fat people, and I am one.
The problem is, fat people are an extremely suboptimal bogeyman, the roots of America’s “obesity epidemic” lying largely in systemic poverty and agribusiness, not in those exploited thereby; the problems with America’s fucked-up healthcare system stemming entirely from America’s preposterous healthcare system, not from the people attempting to survive within it (and use a service they pay tremendous amounts of money for); new research finding that it’s a sedentary lifestyle, not size, that correlates with increased health risks; and fat people turning out to be people whose lives are impossibly complex snarls of external and internal forces and who do not, in fact, owe you shit. As Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby wrote in their book Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere, health is not a moral imperative.
However, it is easier to mock and deride individual fat people than to fix food deserts, school lunches, corn subsidies, inadequate or nonexistent public transportation, unsafe sidewalks and parks, healthcare, mental healthcare, the minimum wage, and your own insecurities. So, “personal responsibility” was de rigueur, and my boss was on board.
It was the same bunk you were hearing everywhere around that time—imperious declarations about fat people’s delusions and gluttony, soaked in plausible deniability about “health.” Dan’s main sticking point seemed to be fat people (like me) who insisted we weren’t imminently dying—he fiercely and persistently defended his “refusal to take the self-esteem-boosting/public-health-shredding position that you can be obese and healthy.”
In one 2004 column, the root of a whole pantload of his fatphobia accusations, Dan got grumpy about women, “particularly obese people,” wearing low-rise jeans, and dismissed the impact that stigmatizing language has on young women:
“It’s an article of faith that we can’t talk about how much crap we’re eating—or how awful we look in low-rise jeans—without inducing eating disorders in millions of silly and suggestible young women… Our obsession with anorexia… not only covers up America’s true eating disorder (we eat too much and we’re too fat!), but it also hamstrings efforts to combat obesity, a condition that kills almost as many people every year as smoking does. Eating disorders, by way of comparison, lead to only a handful of deaths every year. If you’re truly concerned about the health and well-being of young women… worry more about the skyrocketing rates of obesity-related diseases in young people—like type 2 diabetes—and less about the imaginary link between anorexia and my low opinion of low-rise jeans.”
Okay, man. We get it. You are not into those pants.
More than anything, though, this passage from his 2005 book The Commitment sums up the overall tone of his stance, at the time, on fatties: