“I’m putting my bag in the overhead bin,” I said, anxiety thundering in my ears. “You know, because that’s how planes work?”
“Yeah,” he said, dripping with disdain. “Okay.”
He stood up so I could slide into the middle seat, keeping his gaze fixed on the far bank of windows, avoiding my eye contact. I sat, trying not to touch him. My head felt like a hot-air balloon. I hadn’t said “excuse me” yet because I was still in the process of putting my bag in the overhead bin. The “excuse me” part of the transaction comes when you ask the other person to get up. I hadn’t leaned over him or touched him or dropped anything on him. No éclairs had tumbled out of my cleavage and into his hair. Was a preemptive “sorry” really not enough? Had I violated some custom I was unaware of? Had I fallen through a tesseract and into a dimension where “sorry” means “No offense, but you have a Jon Gosselinesque face and a Kate Gosselinesque personality”? If not, I could not fathom where I’d gone wrong.
The last few passengers boarded and they closed the doors. No one came to claim our window seat, so I slid over, saying, “Looks like there’s no one in the middle seat, so you won’t actually have to sit next to me. Since I apparently bother you so much.”
“Sounds great to me,” he droned, eyes front.
As soon as he fell asleep (with his mouth open like a nerd), I passive-aggressively jarred his foot with my backpack and then said, “Oh, excuse me,” because I am an adult (and he loves to hear “excuse me”!). We ignored each other for the rest of the flight.
It felt alien to be confronted so vocally and so publicly (and for such an arbitrary reason), but it also felt familiar. People say the same kind of thing to me with their eyes on nearly every flight—this guy just chose to say it with his mouth.
This is the subtext of my life: “You’re bigger than I’d like you to be.” “I dread being near you.” “Your body itself is a breach of etiquette.” “You are clearly a fucking fool who thinks that cheesecake is a vegetable.” “I know that you will fart on me.”
Nobody wants to sit next to a fat person on a plane. Don’t think we don’t know.
That’s why—to return to my first-class flight—my foray into “luxury” was so disheartening. It wasn’t a taste of the high life so much as an infuriating illumination of how dismal it is to fly any other way. I realized: Oh. Flying first class wasn’t intrinsically special, but it was the first time in recent memory that I’ve felt like a human being on a plane.
We put up with economy class because most of us have no choice—we need to get from here to there and we want cheaper and cheaper tickets. I can’t blame airlines for trying to stay in business by compressing as many travelers as possible into coach like a Pringles can lined with meat glue. It seems like a straightforward business decision, which is why it’s confusing, as a fat person, to hear so much about how I, personally, have ruined air travel. There are entire blogs devoted to hating fat people on planes—describing their supposed transgressions and physical particulars in grotesque, gleeful detail, posting clandestine photos, and crowing about the verbal abuse that posters claim to have heaped on their bigger neighbors. As though there were a time when 1) there were no fat people, and 2) everyone passionately loved flying.
As a counterpoint, I would like to lodge a gentle reminder that air travel has been terrible for a long time. It’s terrible because a plane is just a flying bus, trapped in an eternal rush hour, with recycled farts and vaporized child sputum instead of air, seats barely wider than the average human pelvis, and a bonus built-in class hierarchy. Barring a brief period in the ’50s and ’60s, when airplanes were reportedly flying, smoke-choked bacchanals staffed by Bond girls wearing baby onesies, air travel has been a study in discomfort giving way to ever more profitable methods of making people uncomfortable. That has nothing to do with fat people’s bodies.
I’m sure some fat people are fat by their own hand, without any underlying medical conditions, but a lot of other fat people are fat because they’re sick or disabled. Unless you’re checking every human being’s bloodwork before they pull up Kayak.com, you do not know which fat people are which. Which means, inevitably, if you think fat people are “the problem” (and not, say, airlines hoping to squeeze out extra revenue, or consumers who want cheap airline tickets without sacrificing amenities), you are penalizing a significant number of human beings emotionally and financially for a disease or disability that already complicates their lives. Ethically, that’s fucked up.
That dude next to me didn’t call me fat to my face. I don’t even know if that’s what was bothering him, although I recognized the way he looked at my body (my body, not my face, not once, not ever). I can’t be sure why that guy was mad at me, but I know why people are usually mad at me on planes. I know that he disliked me instantly, he invented a reason to be a jerk to me, and then he executed it. More importantly, I see other people staring those same daggers at other fat people’s bodies every day, in the sky and on the ground, and congratulating themselves for it, as though they’re doing a righteous public service.
Even less popular than being fat on a plane, I soon discovered, was talking about being fat on a plane with anything but groveling, poo-eating penitence.
Not long after it happened, I wrote about “say excuse me” guy in a little essay for Jezebel, about holiday air travel, not expecting anything beyond the usual “eat less/exercise more” anti-fat backlash. It was a vulnerable story, and a sympathetic one, I thought, about the low-grade hostility that fat people face every day (and about the debilitating self-doubt bred by micro-aggressions—does this person really hate me or am I being oversensitive?), and I told it plainly, as it happened. I assumed that people could connect with me, the person, and potentially break down some of the prejudice that makes fat people such popular pariahs. The actual response caught me off guard, though it shouldn’t have.
Without considering for a moment that I might have interpreted my own experiences accurately—that this very simple and famously common interaction, an airplane passenger feeling resentful about sitting next to a fat person, might be true—readers bent over backwards to construct elaborate alternate narratives in which I was the villain. I was the one being rude, by saying “sorry” instead of “excuse me.” (What rule is that?) I had smothered him with my gut when I reached up to stow my bag. (Ew, as if I like touching people.) I had delayed the flight with my entitled, irresponsible failure to show up on time. (I was there within the boarding window, I just wasn’t early, the way I like to be.) I was the last person on the plane (nope). I was still drunk, looking for a fight, ranting and raving and reeking of booze. (What do I look like—a freshman?)