Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. Sofie Hagen
I was mostly just relieved. There was a word for it. There was a word for me stuffing my face with carbs and sugar on a daily basis. Knowing the word didn’t stop me though. It just made me feel less guilty. I continued bingeing and I continued dieting.
Throughout my teens, I was angry but my anger was misplaced. I hated beautiful people. The self-hatred, the hatred of my body and how it existed in the world had turned so strong that I needed to project it elsewhere, or I would suffocate. So I turned my anger towards thin and conventionally beautiful people. I could just about forgive someone for being thin and beautiful – but not unless they were really ashamed of this. Ideally, every thin person at my school should have to walk up to me every morning and apologise for being handed better cards than me. They could at least pity me and acknowledge that I was trying really hard to look like them.
When I was seventeen, for Danish class, we had to analyse Sleeping Beauty. I unleashed all of my fury onto this fairy tale. I wrote about Sleeping Beauty and how she – and all other thin, beauty-privileged, empty skin-vessels – could just go suck on a massive ham and shut up. I wrote something along the lines of, ‘Beautiful people can apparently just be sleeping and still get more attention than ugly people – what have we got to do, learn to juggle?fn4 The end.’
Their pain was nothing, nothing, I tell you. I was punished with an extra assignment to write an essay. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I nearly spat in the teacher’s face when she assigned it.
I was furious. I stomped my feet when I left the classroom. Slammed the door. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I was prepared to write the word ‘NON-EXISTENT’ three thousand times on a piece of paper and hand it in. But if there was anything I hated more than beautiful women, it was getting a poor grade.
I sat down and opened MSN Messenger.fn5 I messaged all the beautiful people I knew. Sandy, who was a model. She was my age and once told me she wanted to be my girlfriend. I had laughed in her face. Great joke, Sandy. Have you not seen how I look next to you? She would be the first of quite a few models I would reject because I felt unworthy of their genitals touching mine.fn6 fn7 I messaged someone I knew from an internet forum. A guy with sturdy cheekbones. A few more.
‘What is the disadvantage of being beautiful?’ I asked all of them. And waited. They were surprisingly reluctant to reply, but none of them claimed not to be beautiful.
‘The worst thing,’ one of the beautiful people on my MSN Messenger chat list wrote to me, ‘is that women never become my friends just to be my friends. They always end up falling in love with me. And then I have to hurt them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s really painful. I just love these women but not like that. And that hurts them.’
I wanted to object, but he had answered with such vulnerability and sincerity that I couldn’t help sympathising with him. Had he burst through my front door with a sign that said ‘pity me’ and had told me the same story, I probably would have wanted to push him out of a window. But I had begged him to share his feelings on the topic. These were not thoughts he ever shared with anyone. He knew how it sounded.
‘People always assume I am unintelligent. I am not taken seriously,’ someone else said.
‘I am never more than my looks.’ Another message popped up on my desktop.
‘I can never make real friends. If I laugh at someone’s boyfriend’s joke, they immediately accuse me of trying to steal him away from them. If I am polite, I am being fake. If I am mean, I am stuck-up. People tell me to my face that they hate me. They feel like they can, like I owe them something. I never chose to look like this,’ wrote another girl.
I assembled it all into an essay which I guiltily handed in the following day. I was left with a feeling of hollowness. I had a whole handful of resentment and nowhere to put it. Surely, someone was to blame for the way I felt. At this point, the best thing that could have happened was being forced by a teacher to write an additional essay on capitalism and beauty standards. But no one opened my eyes to that till years later. And it was hard to shake, this completely irrational and unfair hatred of beautiful people.
Jealousy of beautiful people is understandable. Privilege comes with what society perceives to be beautiful.
Beauty is a tricky one – because you can’t blame someone for being beautiful, but you can blame the culture that created the idea of ‘ideal beauty’. It has been decided that beauty is having a symmetrical face, straight, white teeth and white skin. Your eyes can be too far apart or too far into your head. Your ears can be the wrong angle. This is the Western idea of ‘beauty’. Of course, you must also be thin and nondisabled and definitely feminine if you are perceived to be a woman, and masculine if you are perceived to be a man. There are definitely icky racist, ableist, sexist, queerphobic and fatphobic connotations connected to ideas of what beauty is and what it is not. Class plays a role too: beauty can often be bought. Plastic surgery, teeth whitening, braces, contact lenses, and just a general ability to at least make your life look beautiful on social media. That fancy cup of coffee in that fancy coffee place with just the right filter.
Beauty is so subjective. It is laughable that we have somehow been tricked into thinking we all should find the same thing pretty. But we are frail and easily influenced. So we can’t deny that the lie that says beauty is objective means that some people who do not live up to those standards will be discriminated against. (Maybe this is why we, as a society, tend to love it when beautiful people struggle. We like to laugh at models falling on catwalks or the ‘dumb blonde’ trope in Hollywood films.)
Funnily, very beautiful people and fat people have something in common. Such as people being surprised when we accomplish things. It will stem from very different assumptions. If I ran a marathon, people would look at me with raised eyebrows and open mouths. Wow. For a fatty, she sure can run. I would be praised. If a really beautiful person gets a degree in law, they make movies about it. Wow. But why can she think? She doesn’t need to.
The idea that there is an objective beauty is soul-destroying, and it begins to feel like currency.
There is a scene in the movie Seven where a fat man is used to symbolise gluttony. He is also, surprise surprise, seemingly mentally ill, definitely poor, definitely unhygienic. Four traits that are always mushed together in Hollywood as if they are interchangeable. In another scene, the murderer has disfigured a supermodel and given her a choice: to keep on living, being ‘ugly’ for the rest of her life – or kill herself. Spoiler alert: she kills herself. This is not even that far from the truth. A study conducted by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida in 1991 shows that out of a group of formerly fat people, given the choice between becoming fat again or going completely blind, 89 per cent will choose going blind.3 In another 2006 survey conducted by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, almost half of those asked indicated that they would happily give up a year of their lives if it meant they were not fat.4
I never believed that I could be found attractive. Part of me loathed the boys and girls who liked me, because surely they were either lying or horrible people themselves. Why would they want me, when they could get someone better? Someone thinner?
I remember a desperate boyfriend hissing into my face, ‘If only you could see yourself the way I see you,’ and me rolling my eyes at him saying, ‘You have to say that.’ And I laughed when he eventually cheated on me with a thin woman, because the joy of being proven right was more powerful than the pain of being cheated on.
Another boyfriend joined the military and had to be gone for long periods of time. I was so scared of being alone, of not being validated, that I joined yet another gym and started working out. Within a day, my entire world went back to revolving around weight loss. I started starving myself, counting calories, skipping school, so I could spend upwards of six hours in the gym, weighing myself four times a day and losing weight rapidly. By the time my boyfriend finally came home to see me for a weekend, I was angry at him for interrupting my stride. I blamed him for accepting me as I was, so I stopped feeling the need to exercise. As soon as he came back for