Let's Talk About "Fat"

Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645819/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-fat-by-aubrey-gordon/

Reading What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat was more than a revelation. I had been a fan of Your Fat Friend for some time, following her on Twitter and reading her essays on Medium. I had always found her work to be well researched and poignant, telling stories from her own life. So when her book came out, and I finally found out that her name is Aubrey Gordon, I knew that I was going to buy it and read it as soon as possible. Chapter after chapter, Gordon lays out what it is to live life in a fat body, how society has been conditioned and manipulated against us, and the myths surrounding our bodies. I found myself not only nodding along as I read but moved to highlight passages that were particularly resonant or hard hitting.

I felt so seen and validated, that my life hadn’t been as strange or as isolated as I had once thought. I was both comforted and horrified to know that I wasn’t the only one who had been tricked into thinking someone cared about me only to have them laughing about me behind my back to their friends or fetishizing my body for their own cheap thrills. Or that time I was on a tiny plane to Memphis for a work conference when the businessman seated on the aisle became visibly uncomfortable and more and more agitated until he finally alerted a flight attendant and was moved to another seat. I was far enough along on my fat acceptance journey to ask the flight attendant myself if he had requested to be moved because he didn’t want to sit next to me, and she confirmed that he had been moved for his own comfort. I nodded and tried to enjoy the new space that I had, but I couldn’t help crying a little. I had never come so close to actually being kicked off a plane, and if there hadn’t been another seat available (and he had decided to continue to raise a stink), I could have been.

Source: https://www.yourfatfriend.com/about

These were real experiences that happened to me, and I was convinced that they were my fault because I had been told my whole life that my body was my fault. And here’s Gordon telling me that it isn’t my fault, that in fact my body is not a problem to be fixed, and that I am not alone in having this happen to me. More importantly, here was Gordon telling everyone that these experiences are REAL and they happen every day. She talks about relating these events to thin friends and not being believed that they happened the way they did or that they happened because she is fat.

Ultimately, this is not just a book for fat people. I want to give this book to every thin person I know and exhort them to read about what my life is like sometimes, to learn that my body is not wrong the way that it is, and that walking around in a fat body is an act of rebellion. What Gordon’s book did for me personally is to kindle the fat liberationist spark in me that wants to fight against the systems and institutions that have made the discrimination against my body legal and acceptable.

I want to do a deeper dive into some of her content later, but I highly recommend that everyone read this book.