She has gained weight and lamented that failure. In 1988, when her talk show was at the height of its popularity, she lost nearly seventy pounds on a liquid diet. She dragged a bright red Radio Flyer wagon filled with animal fat onto the stage of her show. She was resplendent, hair teased high, black turtleneck, tight jeans, as she performed her disgust at the spectacle of such fat, straining to try and lift the bag from the wagon. She was performing penance for the sin of having been fat.
This is the woman who brought us the idea of living our best life, of becoming our most authentic selves. And yet. In 2015, Winfrey bought a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers, an investment of $40 million. In one of her many commercials for the brand, she says, “Let’s make this the year of our best body.” The implication is, of course, that our current bodies are not our best bodies, not by a long shot. It is startling to realize that even Oprah, a woman in her early sixties, a billionaire and one of the most famous women in the world, isn’t happy with herself, her body. That is how pervasive damaging cultural messages about unruly bodies are—that even as we age, no matter what material successes we achieve, we cannot be satisfied or happy unless we are also thin.
There is the commercial where Oprah glows as she tells us she has eaten bread every day in 2016, and still the world continues to turn. Or the commercial where she shouts, “I love chips!” There is the commercial where she is cooking and crowing about all the pasta she gets to eat. By the grace of Weight Watchers, she is able to control her body and enjoy carbohydrates. There is the inspirational commercial where she boasts of having lost forty pounds, which, I imagine, means that finally she is living her best life.
In yet another commercial, Oprah somberly says, “Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be.” This is a popular notion, the idea that the fat among us are carrying a thin woman inside. Each time I see this particular commercial, I think, I ate that thin woman and she was delicious but unsatisfying. And then I think about how fucked up it is to promote this idea that our truest selves are thin women hiding in our fat bodies like imposters, usurpers, illegitimates.
In this same commercial, Oprah goes on to talk about how weight problems are never just weight problems, that there is often more to the story. This is often indeed true, but self-actualization, the catharsis of confronting demons is not what Oprah is truly selling. Instead, she is telling us that our ultimate goal is this better (th)inner woman we’re supposed to diet toward. We will have our better body, and her empire will continue to grow.
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Gossip magazines keep us constantly abreast of what’s happening to the bodies of famous women, the better to keep the rest
of us in line. The weight fluctuations of famous women are tracked like stocks because their bodies are, in their line of
work, their personal stock, the physical embodiment of market value. When a celebrity loses weight she is often billed as
“flaunting” her new body, which is, in fact, the only body she has ever had, but at a size more acceptable to the tabloids.
When celebrity women have babies, their bodies are intensely monitored during and after—from baby bumps to post-baby bodies.
After a celebrity has a baby, her size is assiduously tracked and documented until she once again resembles the extraordinarily
thin woman we once knew.
Celebrity bodies provide the unachievable standard toward which we must nonetheless strive. They are thinspiration—thin inspiration—a constant reminder of the distance between our bodies and what our bodies could be with the proper discipline.
Celebrities understand the economy of thinness, and most of them are willing to participate in that economy, taking to social
media, where they pose for selfies with their cheeks sucked in to make themselves appear even gaunter. The less space they
take up, the more they matter.
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There is a taxonomy for the unruly, overweight human body, and that taxonomy becomes even more specific for the unruly overweight woman’s body. As a fat woman, I have become intimately familiar with this taxonomy because this is the vernacular with which far too many people discuss my body and its parts.
In the culture at large, fat women can be many things in polite company—BBW (a big beautiful woman) or a SSBBW (super-sized big beautiful woman). She can be round, curvy, chubby, rotund, pleasantly plump, “healthy,” heavy, heavyset, stout, husky, or thick. In impolite company a fat woman can be a pig, fat pig, cow, snow cow, fatty, blimp, blob, lard ass, tub of lard, fat ass, hog, beast, fatso, buffalo, whale, elephant, two tons of fun, and a slew of names I don’t have the heart to share.
When it comes to our clothing, we have plus-sized clothing or extended sizes or queen sizes or “women’s” wear.
Specific body parts, “problem areas,” also get labels—fupa, gunt, cankles, thunder thighs, Hi Susans, wings, cottage cheese thighs, hail damage, muffin tops, side boob, back fat, love handles, saddlebags, spare tires, double chins, gocks, man boobs, beer bellies.
These terms—the clinical, the casual, the slang, the insulting—are all designed to remind fat people that our bodies are not normal. Our bodies are so problematic as to have specific designations. It’s a hell of a thing to have our bodies so ruthlessly, publicly dissected, defined, and denigrated.
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Part of disciplining the body is denial. We want but we dare not have. We deny ourselves certain foods. We deny ourselves rest by working out. We deny ourselves peace of mind by remaining ever vigilant over our bodies. We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal.
My body is wildly undisciplined, and yet I deny myself nearly everything I desire. I deny myself the right to space when I am in public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even though it is, in fact, grandly visible. I deny myself the right to a shared armrest because how dare I impose? I deny myself entry into certain spaces I have deemed inappropriate for a body like mine—most spaces inhabited by other people, public transportation, anywhere I could be seen or where I might be in the way, really. I deny myself bright colors in my daily clothing choices, sticking to a uniform of denim and dark shirts even though I have a far more diverse wardrobe. I deny myself certain trappings of femininity as if I do not have the right to such expression when my body does not follow society’s dictates for what a woman’s body should look like. I deny myself gentler kinds of affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve. Punishment is, in fact, one of the few things I allow myself. I deny myself my attractions. I have them, oh I do, but dare not express them, because how dare I want. How dare I confess my want? How dare I try to act on that want? I deny myself so much, and still there is so much desire throbbing beneath my surfaces.