In the same breath that commenters were telling me I was overreacting, I was delusional, I was lying—a man couldn’t possibly have been hostile to me on an airplane—they were also chiming in with and commiserating over their own anecdotes about the horrors of flying near disgusting, smelly, presumptuous fat people. So which is it? Are fat people treated just fine on planes or is flying with fat people such a torment that it warrants a public crusade?
Part of writing is choosing which details to include and which to discard. Part of reading is deciding whether or not you can trust your narrator. The Internet made it very clear, very quickly, once my post went up, that trusting me was not on the table. I didn’t bother to mention, for instance, that the dude was sitting with his legs splayed wide in classic “MAN’S STEAMING BALLS COMING THROUGH” fashion, with his foot in the middle footwell (my footwell) where I’d stowed my backpack. (If I had, I would have been accused of feminist hysteria, the way women who call out subway “manspreading” have been.) I didn’t waste words on the fact that when they closed the cabin doors and it became clear that our window seat was going to be unoccupied, I moved my backpack to the window seat, where I’d already been sitting. So, yeah, I jostled the guy’s foot when I moved my bag, because the guy’s foot was blocking my bag. The guy didn’t even wake up. I thought it was tedious and unnecessary exposition (and, if you’re still awake at this point in this boring-ass paragraph, you’ll see that I was right). I assumed that Jezebel readers would trust that I am as I have always presented myself—a kind, pragmatic, nonviolent, reasonable human being—and read my story with a modicum of empathy, or at least the benefit of the doubt.
Within hours of my post cycling through the Internet sausage factory, I was barraged with bizarre fictions on Twitter: I had stumbled onto the plane drunk, delayed takeoff as I screamed at the guy to move, sat on him, viciously kicked him with my wide-calf boot, brutally beaten him with my backpack, continued to harass and mock him for the duration of the flight as he quivered in terror and pretended to sleep, then eagerly libeled him on the Internet. One particularly putrid community of misogynists threatened to “report me to the FBI” for “assault and battery in a federal airspace.” (LOL, go for it, sluggers.) They also coordinated a (temporarily successful) effort to Google bomb my name so that their “article”—“Fat Feminist Lindy West Goes Berserk Because She No Longer Fits in Airplane Seats”—came up on the first page of search results.
Here’s an excerpt from that totally reasonable and not-at-all-bigoted-because-fatphobia-isn’t-a-real-thing reaction to my article ([sic] throughout):
Is this who we want having influence in our country? Society must realize there are consequences to fat feminist beliefs. They range from the concrete (not fitting on airplanes) to creating a class of perennial female victims-seekers who have no notion of personality responsibility. Instead of focusing on self-improvement, they seek to blame everyone else for their problems, even innocent men on airplanes who have their property damaged from the canckled legs of deranged women.
On a different site, a commenter wrote: “Man FUCK HER. I wouldn’t want to stoop to feminist levels and wish bodily harm—castration/acid burning her face, etc.—on her, but if I did, then I’d say I wish that Buffalo Bill taught her a lesson or two.”
And another: “My god, what a putrid and deluded fucking cunt. I’m so glad that her health decisions that are none of my business will see her in an early grave. I’m sure when she loses her legs from diabetes or has a heart attack at forty due to lard clogged arteries that will be the patriarchy’s fault too. Bitch.”
Very astute, boys. I was probably just imagining the whole thing. I’m certainly not an adult human being who’s been successfully reading social cues for thirty years. And we certainly don’t have any evidence of general animosity toward fat people, particularly fat people on planes.
Before the day I didn’t fit, this conversation was largely an abstraction for me. My stance was the same as it is now (if people pay for a service, it’s the seller’s obligation to accommodate those people and provide the service they paid for), but I didn’t understand what that panicky, uncertain walk down the aisle actually felt like. How inhumane it is.
I’m telling you this not to garner sympathy or pity, or even to change your opinion about how airplanes should accommodate larger passengers. I’m just telling you, human to human, that life is complicated and fat people are trying to live. Same as you. Reasons I have had to fly within the past five years: For work (often). To see beloved friends get married. To speak to college students about rape culture and body image. To hold my father’s hand while he died. I’m sorry, but I’m not constraining and rearranging my life just because no one cares enough to make flying accessible to all bodies.
Airlines have no incentive to fix this problem until we, collectively, as a society, demand it. We don’t insist on a solution because it’s still culturally acceptable to be cruel to fat people. When even pointing out the problem—saying, “my body does not fit in these seats that I pay for”—returns nothing but abuse and scorn, how can we ever expect that problem to be addressed? The real issue here isn’t money, it’s bigotry. We don’t care about fat people because it is okay not to care about them, and we don’t take care of them because we think they don’t deserve care.
It’s the same lack of care that sees fat people dying from substandard medical attention, being hired at lower rates and convicted at higher ones, and being accused of child abuse for feeding their children as best they can.
You can’t fix a problem by targeting its victims. Even if you hate fat people with all your heart, if you actually want to get us out of “your” armrest space, defending our humanity is the only pragmatic solution. Because no matter how magnificently you resent them, you cannot turn a fat person into a thin person in time for the final boarding call (nor a full bladder into an empty one, nor a crying baby into a baked potato). The only answer is to decide we’re worth helping.
Chuckletown, USA, Population: Jokes
For my junior year English requirement in high school, I took a class called “Autobiography,” because it was taught by my favorite teacher. I didn’t have anything remotely noteworthy to say about myself (Today after Basketball I Tried Red Powerade Instead of Blue Powerade but I Think I’ll Switch Back Tomorrow, I Don’t Know, I Am Also Considering Mandarin Blast: A Life, by Lindy West), nor was I particularly interested, at the time, in reading the memoirs of others (I Read This Entire Book about Florence Griffith Joyner and It Did Not Contain a Single Gryphon, Chimera, or Riddling Sphinx, BOOOOOOOO: A Life, by Lindy West). My friends and I signed up for all of Ms. Harper’s classes religiously, though, so “Autobiography” it was.