Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. Sofie Hagen
if you at least are trying to lose weight.
It may seem like there has been a lot of progress recently, but it isn’t fair to say that the progress has been made for fat people. We may have more adverts on TV featuring what they call ‘real women’ (yawn) but at the same time, clothing brands are removing their plus-size collections from their physical stores and the world seems to want us to exist less and less. For example, only as recently as March 2018, Thai Airways banned fat people from using business class.1
Fortunately, due to social media, we can control a lot of what we see. In the back of the book, I have a list of some fat role models and fat activists who are all making a big difference. But when you look at popular media – your average TV commercial or women’s magazine, or when you look at the news, the very best we can hope for is a fat person struggling to lose weight or a thin person in a fat-suit. And maybe a message from some beauty brand saying ‘buy this lotion for real women’ which then features a few cis women who are all a size 10–12. Maybe one of them has short hair so the brand looks super diverse. That’s body positivity.
This is all so far away from what the original Fat Liberation movement stood for. By using the word ‘body’ instead of ‘fat’, we easily lose sight of what the core of the body image issue is: the hatred of fatness and fat people. By allowing the focus to rest on the ‘body positivity’ movement, we are allowing wealthy companies to cash in on a fight that has been fought by fat activists since the 1960s. Fat activism is very rarely about the individual’s struggle with their self-esteem or feelings about their stretch marks. It is about changing the anti-fat bias, particularly the way it affects fat people politically. For example, it is still legal to discriminate against a person based on their weight in the UK,2 49 states in the US (the only state that has made it illegal is Michigan)3 and a majority of countries all over the world. We are not a protected group. Fat people are, on average, paid less and have a harder time getting employed.4 So where there is definitely a reason for also talking about the individual’s self-esteem (I go fully at it in the chapter ‘How to love your body’, for example), it is so utterly important that we remember and understand where this whole thing started. The incredible people who fought for us and before us.
The fat-activism movement started in the US in 1967. Five hundred fat people had a ‘Fat-In’ in Central Park in New York, where they ate ice cream and burned diet books.fn6
The ‘National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance’ was founded in America in 1969, by a guy called Bill Fabrey in response to discrimination against his wife.fn7 Today NAAFA is seen more as a politically motivated group, but during the sixties they were much more of a social club for fat people. The San Francisco chapter of NAAFA were a bunch of wild and awesome lesbians and queer women, many of whom were Jewish, who started becoming vigilant about fat hatred in the scientific community and wanted to fix that. NAAFA considered this to be a bit too dramatic, so the San Francisco chapter splintered off and, in 1972, became the Fat Underground. They coined phrases such as, ‘A diet is a cure that doesn’t work, for a disease that doesn’t exist.’5
In 1983, the Fat Underground and the New Haven Fat Liberation Front released the book Shadow on a Tightrope, a collection of poems, articles and essays by and about fat women and their lives and in the UK, The London Fat Women’s Group was started in 1985. The terms used around this time were Fat Liberation, Fat Pride and Fat Power. The Fat Liberation movement, alongside the Fat Pride and Fat Power movement, was not too bothered with how the individual felt about their body. It was a critique and a fight directed against the structural oppression, the discrimination and the inherent fatphobia (the hatred of fat bodies) in society. The focus was not on how much you should ‘love your curves’; they just wanted to be free. In 1973, two fat activists, Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, released the Fat Liberation Manifesto, which you can read at the back of this book, and it’s still as relevant today as it was back then.
Around the same time, a lot of Fat Liberation and body-revolution politics were also being discussed by black feminists and black womanists.fn8 Fat black women have had to fight sexism, racism and fatphobia, attacks on the colour of their skin, their perceived gender and the size of their bodies. In a 1972 edition of the American feminist magazine Ms., Johnnie Tillman wrote: ‘I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic.’ In 1984, Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols released the book The Fat Black Woman’s Poems.
It is worth noting that the movement that has now been overtaken by corporations was started by women who were primarily fat, Jewish, black and queer. None of whom would be likely to feature in the adverts for lotions by these ‘body positive’ companies, or would be able to buy clothes in a shop using ‘curvy’ models to ‘promote body positivity’. They took the ‘fat’ and replaced it with ‘body’ to erase the very existence of fat people and make it more palatable and sexy to consumers. They then took the searing and urgent call to arms that is the word ‘liberation’ and changed it to ‘positivity’, almost as if to say: ‘Shh, sit down, don’t make a fuss. Smile. Smile and be still-quite-thin.’
And we all know how women love to be told to smile.
A good thing about the body-positivity movement is that it is most likely what led you to my book. I am very much a spreader of ‘love yourself’ rhetorics. I use hashtags such as #HappyFat and I have a chapter in this book called ‘How to love your body’. I have been featured in many ‘Body-Positive Babes You Must Follow on Instagram!’ articles. And I would love for you to love your body, because it’s a wonderful feeling. But don’t get me wrong – I need you to love your body, so you can join me in the revolution. So one day you’ll join me in a park for ice cream and diet-book burning like those who came before us.
But let’s not focus on the far-away future right now. This is just the introduction, where I wrap you in a blanket, introduce myself and the topic of fat, and prepare you for what you are about to read. We can plan the revolution when you have finished the book.
When I set out to write this book, I wanted, first and foremost, to put into words what being fat has been like for me. In doing small, intimate readings of the initial draft to an audience, I learned that I am very much not alone with these feelings. It made me feel less alone and I sincerely hope you will feel the same way when reading this book. As I mentioned, you will find a whole chapter full of advice on how to love your body. What a grandiose statement. I will debunk all the damaging myths about fatness and health like many others have done before me and like so many others will have to do in years to come. I will reach out to you non-fats reading this book – you get your very own chapter. I wanted you to know how you can be a better friend to fat people. Oh, also, I wanted to refer to myself as the ‘Bang Lord’ at least once. And drag a lot of people who wronged me because I am vengeful, I never forget and I latch onto grudges like I am my brother twenty years after I convinced him to sell his shares in Google because it would never take off. #YahooForever. There are also lovely illustrations sprinkled all over the book by the amazing fat illustrator, Mollie Cronin.
Before you start the book, I want you to do something that I often have had to do throughout writing it. Put your hands on your stomach – or your thighs, your upper arms, your double chin or whatever area on your body that you have struggled with the most – and close your eyes. Give yourself a nice little cuddle. Whisper, ‘We are going to be okay. I love you.’ Because chances are, you will have said a lot of crap to your body in your life and we are about to dig into some of that. I’d love for your body to come with you. If this is all too cutesy-wootsy and wishy-washy and it makes you roll your eyes at me, fine. I can all-too-well respect that. I am making myself a little bit sick by writing it. But just consider trying it a few times throughout the book, and maybe wonder why the very basic action of physically showing yourself and your body affection makes us cringe. We have a long way to go.
So