one seat

Like many women in downtown Chicago, I seek gynecological care in a building that houses the Playboy offices. The sight of so many pregnant women tottering back and forth beneath the shiny chrome PLAYBOY sign in the lobby always cracks me up. There is a pretty constant stream of women, usually slender women (this is a swanky part of the city) with pregnancy-related deviations from the thin woman profile--a belt tied higher than normal over a swelling belly--on their way to the banks of elevators under its benediction. It's a busy place.

I walked into a doctor's waiting room in that building recently and suddenly remembered--oh, right. This room. I am not in that waiting room very often anymore, and I had forgotten that it was one where I had lobbied for years for more accommodating seating.

The room has maybe 30 unusually narrow wooden chairs, with arms, placed closely together, the same ones there have always been. But there is also now a love seat, upholstered in some mid-90s hotel pattern, the result (I was told) of all the comment cards I filled out, over and over, full of underlinings and exclamation points, pointing out the lack of seating for people of size.

At the point in my life in which I was in that waiting room a lot I had back problems and terrible mobility. Standing was even harder than walking, and it was horrible to know that after I had struggled painfully down the hall to the office there would be more urgent distress instead of relief. None of the narrow chairs fit me. It was a frantic feeling to be in so much pain while people around me were nominally relaxed. It was humiliating. I often felt like I wouldn't make it.

I am a resourceful, wide-hipped fatty, willing to advocate for myself with regard to seating as necessary, without too much apology or defensive anger most (not all) of the time, but the message implicit in that room--unintended, but very clear--got me down sometimes. Sometimes it got me down a lot. I was not welcome. I know my doctor didn't mean to say that to me, but she did. Her waiting room did.

I would "stand" by the receptionist, sweating with pain, holding myself up by leaning gracelessly against the wall, hard, making (I'm sure) weird facial expressions to deal with the effort, feeling conspicuous and angry and embarrassed. I was in an office attending to the demands of the human body, but when you got down to it, there was nowhere for mine in it. Without being in a wheelchair, which was a line I guess I wasn't willing to cross, I had no way to make do. They had even gotten rid of the stool-like end tables that I would sometimes commandeer for myself, startled patients watching me sweep the brochures off them as I plopped down as discreetly as I could.

So I grit my teeth and sweated, and I wrote and I wrote my frustrations on comment cards and told the nurses and the doctors about the problem every time I was there. I was really mad about the big issue here. I mentioned all the other people besides me who could use better seating, talking about the demands of pregnant women and the elderly and feeling frustrated that in my ears that sometimes sounded more convincing than my own needs. Eventually the fugly love seat arrived. Eventually I regained my mobility too, after a lot of rehab and work. Eventually I wasn't in that doctor's office as much.

When I entered the waiting room this time there was a couple sitting on the love seat, their limbs tangled casually together, texting on their cellphones and looking very comfortable. They were the opposite of the image of a nervous couple waiting for the doctor. There was nobody else in the waiting room, just rows of empty chairs.

After checking in and hanging up my coat I went to stand in a somewhat out of the way spot in the waiting room. The one seat that could fit me was filled, and well-used, I thought, by this couple able to relax together on the seat a little and feel comfortable before a doctor's visit, and not by somebody who, for instance, just wanted a cushy seat for her purse, whom I might ask to give me her space. So that was that. The seat was theirs. I would be standing for the duration.

Social behaviors in a doctor's waiting room are very narrowly defined. You are a patient, companion of patient, or medical professional. That's it. You're either waiting, going in, or leaving. You are required to look like you're waiting when you are, so staff knows what to make of you while doing their constant head counts--so other patients know how to categorize you. It's a kind of nervous place.

Standing looks weird in a waiting room. I was no longer fighting the humiliation of physical pain while I did it, but it was born in upon me as I stood there that it didn't matter, that I was exactly as out of place as I had been five years ago, just a little less sweaty. The new seat--the seat I had agitated for--hadn't really changed anything. I wondered if I looked like a nerdy soldier afraid to be at ease, or maybe a neurotic afraid of chair germs. Or maybe it looked like I had to stand for a bad back. The couple glanced at me in confusion a few times but basically ignored me. I was willing to stand, but I wondered as they looked away--why did they think I would want to? The math was really clear--you look at me, you look at the wooden chairs--

I could feel the familiar anger and upset swelling in me, whether I wanted it to or not, including that deep-down frustration that nobody but me knew what was happening. Didn't I have a right to sit down? Didn't I have a right to sit down without having to make a big fuss about it and inconvenience other people? I didn't want to have to ask, I didn't want to have to bug these people. I didn't want to involve them in my needs at all. I didn't want to take anything away from them. But I would have to if I needed to sit. I could feel my adrenaline rise as I imagined interacting with them. It was all really close to the surface.

As I grew more agitated inside, I also grew increasingly aware in a very familiar way that my claim on the chair, if I got it, would be temporary. Under siege. Even though I needed the seat more than these people at the moment, there could easily be somebody else who needed the seat more than I. A nursing woman with a child. An older person unable to maneuver the wooden chairs with the sharp corners. A person with a broken leg who needed to put their leg up. Somebody bigger than I. Where were we going to all sit?  Whose seat was it? I needed that seat. What if somebody who Didn't Need It came in and sat in it before I had to chance to? What if someone determined I didn't need it and asked me for it? What if somebody yelled at me that the seat was for two people, not one? The less I wanted to obsess about the seat, the more I did. I was in a relationship with it other people couldn't see. Other patients came into the waiting room and sat in the wooden chairs, giving me quick looks as I stood there like an idiot, protecting myself nonetheless. I tried hard to not feel anger at the relaxed happiness of the couple, but that was eroding too.

After about 15-20 minutes they were called in by the nurse for their appointment, and I quickly sat on the couch in their place, wishing I could feel less desperate about it. Unlike the years when I could barely stand, it wasn't the end of physical agony, but that didn't really matter. It was still too important.

I rolled my eyes at the departing couple's backs (yes, I did this), even though they'd done nothing wrong other than maybe not wonder why a woman was standing in a room full of chairs. I was pissed by the ignominious "fight" in my head for what was in the end just a chair. It all felt dumb. And it suddenly felt odd, as it always does, to have been a big deal, once I was in a seat that fit me. A seat that fits--that's not so weird, is it?

There is unintended meaning everywhere in this man-made, physical world as a fat person. There are lines and limits drawn everywhere other people don't see, of which we are excruciatingly aware. There are limits for a lot of people in this world, to which I can speak with less (or no) personal experience. Whether differently abled, or large, or short, or deaf, or one of innumerable things that aren't taken into account--this world isn't built for all of us. ADA rules have changed some things (for fat people too), but not everything. A lot of times the world feels pretty blithely unconcerned with accessibility. Years of serious mobility issues will never let me take that for granted again. Being large won't let me either.

I am more and more interested as I get older in the ways in which spaces make decisions for us--millions of decisions, good and bad, deep in people's lives--especially for those of us whose accessibility needs are our "own fault" and therefore looked at less straight-on, by designers and by ourselves, but exist regardless. What about fat people who won't even try engaging with public spaces--won't try to fly, won't risk new environments, won't try public transportation? Spaces make decisions for people. A lot of other things do too, but we underestimate how much our relationship with the edges of the spaces we occupy affect us. That waiting room is not the only place, not by a long shot, where I have nowhere to sit.

Or, I should say--where I have just one place to sit. I am really glad there is a love seat in my doctor's office. There are a lot of people who really need that seat. But there needs to be more than one. I don't think we should should have to fight over it. The world, which is designed and built by us and for us (all of us), should fit us.

Yes, there is a closet.

Gawker recently posted a blind item from Buzzfoto in their gossip column:

This actor, known mostly for his great hair and good looks over his acting ability, might surround himself with stick thin supermodels at times, but we're told he has a 'big girl fetish.' He scours the internet for listings and photos of lovely, big, and curvaceous women and hooks up with them whenever possible!

There are a lot of closets to find fascinating in the weird world in which we live, but this one--the men-who-like-big-girls closet--is my favorite. Well, it's not my favorite; it's not fun--it's hurtful and depressing--but it sure is chronically fascinating. It is a real thing, filled with a wild mix of people. I find it especially interesting because most people don't know it's there, as is often the way with closets. (Why would you even need that closet--nobody likes fat women anyhow, right? You might get saddled with a fat woman as you age and make the best of it, but nobody chooses them from the outset, yes?)

I saw the blind item in a blog entry by Tami Winfrey Harris, whose writing I like, in which she said:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how sick we are about weight in America.

I am accustomed to blind gossip items being the domain of cheating spouses, drug addictions, five-finger discounts and other bad celebrity behavior. Apparently, loving a little junk in the trunk and meat on the bones is a) a fetish (Curious that a love of underweight models is never deemed a "fetish.") and b) a moral sin comparable to crack addiction.

I'll alert my husband to beware the vice squad.

She is quite right that it's all ridiculous, that "fetish" is the wrong word here, and that model beauty is a very weird norm, but I also think she might be missing something by pointing a finger at the gossip writer and not at the facts (can you even use that term about a blind item?). She, in a way, would also seem to be saying: why do you even need that closet?, although for opposite reasons than those I described above--she's saying it shouldn't be weird to like big women (it shouldn't). But the truth either way is that the FA closet (I am going to use the sometimes divisive industry standard term here: "FA" stands for fat admirer) is a really deep one and isn't just a media construct.

If a young actor "known mostly for his great hair and good looks over his acting ability" likes somewhat acceptably chubby or unacceptably fat women, wherever you're drawing the line, and on whatever side of it he falls, then he is in the closet. Either way. Other than women who generally top out in the size 12/14 range, such as Pierce Brosnan's wife Keely Shayle Smith and Freddy Rodriguez's wife Elsie, name one contemporary high-profile entertainer who walks the red carpet with a more-or-less-consistently-fat girl on his arm. (Women like Mo'Nique, Gabourey Sidibe, and Dawn French, who are the celebrities in those cases, are separate from the issue I'm addressing, although maybe Lenny Henry could be our exception here--I can't say.)

Think about it. You can name a flurry of people who say positive things about size, or sing songs about fat girls, or paint fat women, or maybe once admitted [nsfw] to sleeping with a fat girl, and most everyone either used to or still does obsess about their weight, or "struggles" with it, so that the issue of size becomes relevant to everybody (I think just drawing breath in 2011 makes that happen)--but that's different. I'm talking about celebrities who choose to date or marry actual fat women and are actually seen doing so. It's pretty difficult to point to any images of it happening. I'm not saying people who say positive things about size but have thin partners are by definition in the closet, I'm just saying--when do you ever see the fat partners? Nor am I trying to sneer at size 12/14 types to say they're "not fat enough," I'm saying: that isn't actually the absolute end of the fat girl size rainbow--more like the beginning. Nor is whom you love a test of anything but whom you love, but (to say it again), when do you see a guy, whatever his size, with a big woman?

People probably assume you don't see fat girlfriends with celebrities because celebrities have earned the right to choose thatwhichismostdesirable (thin partners). And there's no getting around male celebrities' ability to re-up with new young wives as part of the equation. The fact, though, is that some men like fat women. They just do. (Usual thinking is 5-10% of the population--who knows).

Whoever thinks that the pressure to date thin people isn't real isn't really looking at the fanatical disgust with which fat is generally treated in our lives. If fat is disgusting, what does that make someone who is often, or even exclusively, attracted to fat people? Physically attracted? Someone perfectly capable of loving the whole person, but likes when it is a whole big person? The drone of Fat=Unhealthy, which has created a real "reason" and a million new ways to hate fat people, makes it all more tenacious too, because now not only do FAs' families and friends get to disapprove, they get to "justify" it, because how could you love somebody who is killing themselves with fat? We just want to help you honey.

Men who like large women: don't see in the media (especially in the white world) images of men, whatever size, with large women; can be ridiculed for liking them ("you must have been really drunk when you took that one home"); can be penalized professionally for being married to them. I know men married to large wives who have been told when their partner leaves the room that they have somebody in mind for them when they're ready to do better. I know men who lost friends and family for coming out of the FA closet.

Not every man is ready to risk that kind of criticism for themselves or is ready to risk subjecting someone they love to it. Not every man is ready to risk loving someone he's attracted to who doesn't fit the mold. Not every man is ready to risk facing the "guilt" of being attracted to an aspect of someone they love that will make them die young (or so the messages go). Not every man is ready to defend a sexual predilection or call it important, whatever their inclination toward divulging personal information.

Everybody's horny, though. Some FAs will not risk going public, but as ever, the horny will out--sort of. At least into the closet. Some closet cases park there for the rest of their life, surfing fat porn, buying sex, dating and sleeping with fat women on the DL. Many of them embody all the fat-hate and fat-lust within themselves, saying without any sense of disconnect, "Of course I wouldn't date her" about somebody they'll go to great lengths to spend time with. Closet cases can do a lot of damage to a population that can be pretty damaged already by the messages the world sends about how nobody will ever want you if you're fat.

You run into these guys as just a regular fat girl in the dating world: married men with trophy wives they're not attracted to and a never-ending extramarital career of dating fatties; the guy who claims he's attracted to all sorts of women although it gradually becomes clear he dates the thin ones in public and fucks the fat ones in private; men with two Facebook pages; the guys who want to come over to your house on your first date and won't be seen in public; the ambitious young academic who told me straight to my face he would never marry a woman my size but would always be most attracted to women who looked like me. They're out there.

I actually have sympathy for closet cases--to a degree. Nobody has a right to treat other people badly, but I understand where closeted thinking, at least, comes from. I know how easy it is to be a closeted fat person, to desperately try to not take up all of your needed space, to try to hide. I know how hard it must be to date people who often don't like the way they look, who find you in turn disgusting for liking something they hate about themselves. I know all the shitty cultural thinking about fat can skew things into the forbidden so strongly and at such a young age that it's pretty hard to put it straight.

For that reason I think closet cases need to be encouraged to come out, to work through their mixed, sometimes disgusted feelings and apprehensions, so that they can, you know--nut up and COME THE FUCK OUT. That would be the point there. As fat people always say when talking about this: I can't ultimately hide being fat, but you have the luxury of hiding. Who has it worse? Plus it's just sad. Life is short. You like what you like--why deny yourself it? Why hurt others, but why hurt yourself?

You have to wonder if a really high-profile celebrity FA came out what it would do to all this. I can't help thinking that it would do a lot of good if a famous man who was proud of his 350-lb wife just (wait for it)...went somewhere with her and was photographed while doing it (omgnoway!). More than once (noWAY!). Made it clear he was dating a fat woman. Held a fat woman's hand, escorted her with pride somewhere, let somebody take a photo and publish it. Whatever. Everyday stuff. The idea of such a photo seems startlingly revolutionary, more so even than a photo of just a fat woman, which is the biggest clue I can think of pointing to the closet's existence for people who don't get it. Fat women, when they are pictured, are pictured alone. Right now the only place you ever see an image of a man touching a fat woman is porn, but that's not because it's a fetish, that's because it's Not Okay anywhere else but damn if it doesn't have unstoppable momentum when it comes to our libidos. That is how closets work.

Last year, when rumors were swirling about a famous actor who secretly or not so secretly liked the fatties--please note, this is a favorite parlor game in Fatland; figuring out which celebrities might "really" like big girls from all sorts of clues--and the gossip is good, all the more because this shit comes out, yo--I thought that it might be cool to start doing flashmobs. Fat girl flashmobs, at this particular actor's appearances, or those of others known to be struggling with the closet. We would gather a group of 100 beautifully-dressed fat ladies, scatter ourselves in the crowd, then at an appointed time move forward to the front in a surge, so that as far as the eye can see there were gorgeously put-together fat women circling the celebrity in question, looking up at him like the little green aliens in Toy Story. We would not be shaming him or taunting him or indeed saying anything at all: just looking up and smiling, showing him and world what he likes in one long, long look, then walking away without a word.

Happy Birthday, Extender!

It's been a year since I spun off size-related writing from my regular blog and created The Extender and so--let Bacchus rule! Woo! I know I am a somewhat erratically-updating creature, but I am a sincere one, and hope to keep providing my own take--for what else do you or can you do in a blog--on all things related to size. In aeternum floreant! Sorry for cropping the Rembrandt.

p.s. Bacchus' extender is the kind that clips round the side where you can't see it. He asked for it nicely when he sat on the wine keg.

dreamz

To prove that this is a personal blog and not a news outlet (hah), I am going to relay a dream from last night that cracked me up. I don't know about you, but media experiences seed my dreams the way real life does, so this one is the result yesterday--in part--of watching Keeping up With the Kardashians and America's Test Kitchen (French bistro cooking episode), consuming Alexia Waffle Fries, and reading E!Online. I was at the Kardashians' house for an open house/party and they were debating the fat content in roasted chicken and potatoes. They appealed to me for my opinion and I said it was ridiculous to worry about the fat content in a beautifully cooked bird like that. I kept trying to heat up a handful of potatoes for myself but people kept screwing with them, including mixing them in my drink. The last time I was at the microwave Kris Jenner came up to me and said, "Well, what do you think?" I said the party was fine and why do you ask? She said, "Well, we're putting in a bid to host NAAFA convention next year in SoCal." I was on the brink of telling her, "You know, some people who come will actually be really large," when I woke up. Heh! Amusing. I see that family as a group of people that has basically turned management of the Beauty Ideal into a career, so I think my subconscious was mashing stuff up to make a point. Also to confront the idea that "curves," the word du jour used by celebrities as talisman against too-fat/too-thin talk, is not the same thing as fat.

who you callin fat?

a fat sand rat (hi!)

I was enchanted to discover recently that there is an animal called the fat sand rat (pictured above). Fat is part of the species' name, its binomial nomenclature: Psammomys obesus. The animal is in the news because researchers were able to confirm that traditional treatments for SAD had scientific basis; they are diurnal, not nocturnal, as are the usual animals for testing (mice and other rats). Fat sand rats responded well to light exposure and antidepressants, and got out of their little bathrobes earlier in the day and stopped watching so much TV.

a fat puffer

It's fascinating to me that there is a taxonomic way for an animal to be fat. It is such a loaded and extremely subjective descriptor in the human world (reclamation aside), not to mention seen as a voluntary, mutable, and undesirable, state, but it turns out there are at least thirty species besides the fat sand rat who are blithely, officially "fat."

the fat dormouse

There is, for instance, an entire genus of fat puffers, such as the guineafowl puffer (pictured). There are a lot of "fat" fish: fat snooks, fat sleepers, fat mullets; and fat things in shells like fat pocketbooks and fat horsemussels. There is a fat dormouse or edible dormouse, considered a pest in the UK, and the genus of fat mice, which includes the subspecies of the dainty fat mouse and the tiny fat mouse (query: who doesn't want a play village of tiny fat mice?).

the fat mullet

There are also "plump" animals--plump whelks, plump groupers, and plump cyphomae--and two "corpulent" snails--the corpulent rams-horn and corpulent hornsnail. There are three "ponderous" molluscs. There is a portly spider crab, which I think sounds a very dignified thing.

the rotund 
mystery snail

Then there are the "stout" and "rotund" animals. All the "rotund" animals, around ten of them, are molluscs (words to denote swollen size seem very popular in mollusc descriptors), like the rotund disc, the rotund cleftclam and the rotund trophon. There is a genus of stout newts (how Gussie Fink-Nottle), and at least twenty other "stout" species: the stout red shrimp, the stout blacksmelt, the stout longtom (a kind of needlefish).

the chunky fathead

There is, I'm happy to say, a chunky fathead, also known as the Indian driftffish. There are no "chubby" animals (although the marbled murrelet is described as "a very small, chubby, sea bird that seems to lack a neck"), but a few "obese" animals; mostly, again, things in shells: the obese thorn, the obese dipperclam, the obese pondsnail.

the thin shrew

What about the other end of the spectrum? There are at least twenty "thin" animals (no "skinny" or "svelte" ones, though), including the thin shrew, the thin pillar, the thin moonsnail, and the companion to the fat sand rat, the thin sand rat (Psammomys vexillaris), also known as the pale sand rat (as might befit a thin rattie).

a Marmosops
(slender mouse opossum)

There are lots of "slender" animals, including the slender anchovy and slender sole, and several "slender" genii: slender salamanders, slender mongooses, slender loris, and slender mouse opossums (the spectacularly named Marmosops, which should be a kind of fuzzy absorbent towel or perhaps a cute rodent spy game). There is also, oxymoronically enough, a whole genus of slender chubs.

Just for fun, I pulled out words from FHM's list of 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2010 (with its handy "Lady Finder") with which to search the animal world. I found no animals with "plunging," "epic," "petite," "goddess," "chesty," "healthy," "sexy," "hot," or "ass" in their name, but did get:

a tit

• the genus of tits

• a lot of "naked" animals, including a family of naked catfishes, squeakers, and upside-down catfishes and a genus, the famous naked mole-rats

• over twenty "beautiful" animals, including the genus of beautiful squirrels

a beautiful squirrel

• "pretty" animals, including the pretty shiner

• "wild" animals, including the wild turkey

• "erect" animals, including the erect wormsnail

the pretty shiner

• two "massive" species, including the massive urn crab

• the glorious topsnail

• the horny goby

the sad flycatcher

The subjective/adjectival in animal kingdom taxonomy is pretty much endlessly interesting. There is a nervous shark and a sprightly pygmy rice rat. I found at least eighteen "delicate" species. There is a happy wren, and four "sad" animals," including a bivalve called the sad elliptio. Language related to size is just one corner of all the sometimes goofy poetry.

fat rat!

It also turns out the fat sand rat, which is, note, not particularly fat, is a fairly relevant little animal to the human world. They were called fat originally because of the discovery that some of them become diabetic on normal grain-based rodent diets. So not only do researchers use them for studies about SAD, they are very popular for research about diabetes and its effects. Poor little dudes. They better be getting sunlamps for their troubles.