Two days later, in a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I came to a couple of realizations: First, anyone who denies the existence of the obesity epidemic in the United States hasn’t been to a water park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (The owners of water parks in the U.S. must be saving a fortune on water and chlorine bills; floating in the deep end of the wave pool with D.J., Terry observed that there was an awful lot of water being displaced. If the South Dakotans floating around us all got out of the pool at the same time, the water level would most likely have dropped six feet.)
We are horrible to look at, we are in the way, we are a joke.
I could probably have dealt with that—after all, it really was coming from all sides—but in an unanticipated side effect, a few perspicacious trolls made the connection between my fat body and Dan’s fatphobia. (Comments sections on any post about fatness were their own kind of horror—having my workplace host sentiments such as “I wouldn’t fuck with these people. They might sit on you and crush you to death. If they can catch you, of course. Best bet: run uphill, you’ll induce a heart attack, and the pursuer might even roll back downhill, taking out the other members of the fat mob” didn’t exactly make me feel supported.)
I started to get comments here and there, asking how it felt to know that my boss hated me because of my body. I knew Dan didn’t hate me—we had always gotten along, he made me a writer, and sometimes I even earned the vocal kind of praise!—but if that was true, why didn’t he give this thing a rest? Why didn’t he see that when he wrote about fat people, he was writing about me, Lindy West, his colleague and friend? Why should I, as an employee, have to swallow that kind of treatment at my job—in the same newspaper I was sweating blood into for $36k a year? What’s more, what about our fat readers? I knew there were people reading the blog, clocking the fact that I wasn’t sticking up for them—as though I was tacitly okay with what Dan was arguing. It implied complicity and self-hatred. Did I want to be the kind of person who didn’t fight?
Crop tops, short shorts, no kissing on the mouth, the whirrrrrrrrrrrrr of the garage door, Beth’s flowers, my perfect bloodwork, the trolls, a year in a basement talking about fucking Sasquatch (“I don’t know why they don’t just find out what it eats and then go to where that is!”), all of it, a lifetime of it, finally foamed up and spilled over. Something lurched awake inside of me. They talk to you this way until you “come out” as fat. They talk to you this way until you make them stop.
I e-mailed Dan, privately, in November of 2009. In my memory, I asked him to please, please consider his words more carefully before writing about fat people—to remember that we are human beings with complex lives, not disease vectors or animals. I begged him to extend some compassion to the fat people on his staff, and to imagine what it might feel like to read your boss parroting the same cruel words and snide insinuations that have been used to hurt you and hold you back your whole life. I was timid, pleading.
Or, at least, that’s how I remember it.
While writing this chapter, I looked up the original exchange, and it turns out that my memory sucks. Here’s the actual e-mail that I sent to my actual boss:
To: Dan Savage
Subject: “Hello! Could you lay off the fat people shit?”
Just curious: Who are these hordes of fat people chasing you around insisting that eating pot pies all day is awesome and good for your health? Because, um, I don’t believe you. That sounds like a straw man, and I know “some of your best friends are fat” or whatever, but you sound like a bigot. Also, your (super fucking obvious and regressive) point has been made—everyone in the world already thinks fat people are lazy and gross! WE GET IT. YOU ARE NOT BREAKING NEW GROUND HERE.
And just so you know, on top of the trolls who call me a fat cunty virgin every day of my life, now I also get trolls asking me, “How does it feel to know your boss thinks you’re a disgusting cow?” Being fat is its own punishment. I don’t give a shit if you think I lie on the couch all day under the Dorito funnel—I’d just rather not be abused on the Internet from inside my own workplace. Just a thought.
Love,
Lindy
Ohhhhh, past self. You are completely nanners. (I mean, let’s be honest. I was really popular. I knew they wouldn’t fire me.)
Dan’s reply was nine words long. He asked, simply, if I’d ever detected any animus from him personally.
“Nope, not at all,” I wrote. “Not my point at all, either.”
He said he heard me, but I was accusing him of being a bigot—a serious charge against someone exhibiting, by my admission, no animus.
It was a dodge. He was deliberately missing the point.
SO THEN I REALLY WENT FOR IT:
Sorry I hurt your feelings?
My points again: Being fat is its own punishment. Every day. Fat people know they’re fat and that the rest of the world thinks they’re disgusting. Have you experienced pop culture recently? You are crusading for a stereotype that is already the majority opinion. Why bother? Why is that interesting? There is no army of fat acceptance warriors poised to overthrow the earth and force-feed you gravy. Don’t worry—all the stereotypes about fat people are solidly intact.
I’m being sincere here. I don’t really think you’re a bigot—I just think you’re acting like one. This is a really painful thing that I wake up with every morning and go to sleep with every night, AND I’M NOT EVEN THAT FAT.
Dan never wrote back. We never talked about it in the office.
He couldn’t really be mad, could he? The whole ethos of the Stranger—an ethos that Dan built—was editorial freedom, thoughtful provocation, and fearless transparency. Dan taught me to be bold and uncompromising, to confront bullshit head-on, to cultivate a powerful voice and use it to effect meaningful change. I learned it from watching you, Dan. I learned it from watching you.
For the next year, he went back to posting semi-regularly about the horrors of the obesity epidemic with no discernible interruption, and I went back to ignoring him. Then, a whole lot happened in the same week. I dumped no-kissing-on-the-mouth guy. I kissed (on the mouth!) the man who, four years later, would become my husband. Then, Dan wrote a Slog post entitled, “Ban Fat Marriage,” using the supposed health risks of fatness as leverage to skewer some GOP dodo’s argument that gay marriage should be illegal because gay people supposedly die younger:
“Even if it were true—even if gay people had lower life expectancies (which we do not)—and if that ‘fact’ all by itself was a justification for banning same-sex marriage, why stop with gay people? Iowa should ban fat marriage. There are, according to the state of Iowa, more than 1.4 million obese people living in Iowa. That’s nearly 30% of the state’s population, and those numbers just keep rising. The social costs of Iowa’s obesity epidemic are pretty staggering—and those costs include premature death and lower average life expectancies for Iowans.”
I get the point. I understand that, in context, Dan presents “ban fat marriage” as an instructive absurdity. This post is still dehumanizing. It still oversimplifies the connections between size and health, and, unfortunately, some anti-fat bigots actually have suggested that fat people shouldn’t be allowed to have families (because of “the children”). Mainly, though, if you have a track record of treating my struggle with persistent disrespect and dismissal, then my struggle is not yours to use as a flippant thought experiment.
I threw up a quick Slog post:
Re: Ban Fat Marriage
Hey, Dan—so now that you’re equating the stigmatization of fat people with the stigmatization of gay people, does that mean you’re going to stop stigmatizing fat people on this blog?