Sit Your Butt Down (If You Can)

This article, part of a series on being fat in college, got me thinking about seating and seating options in all kinds of venues. I had similar experiences that the people interviewed for the article did. My whole college experience was squeezing into a series of attached chairs and desks, or worse, lecture halls with desk surfaces that swung up on an arm. I went to an institution that was started in the late 19th century. Many of the buildings dated back to the 1960s and 70s, and all had similar accommodations. Only the few newer buildings on campus had any kind of variety of seating option. Also, I went to college just before having laptops in class became a regular thing, so desk surfaces did not need to be adequate for a computer. A notebook was enough.

It never occurred to me then, almost 15 years ago, to complain about the size of the desks or chairs. I just squeezed and made do. Like the article’s author, I blamed my own body instead of the inadequate desks for my discomfort. It’s just the way it was. I struggled all through high school, too. Why should college be any different?

Adequate seating for fat bodies is a perpetual topic. For me, personally, there is always a calculation about where to sit everywhere I go, including other people’s homes. Is that couch too low for me to get up from unassisted? Maybe it’d be better if I sat on the dining room chair instead?

But what this article and my recent trip to Broadway made me think about was venue seating specifically, if you can consider a classroom a venue. In this case, I mean any place that seating has been mass purchased and is generally uniform for everyone.

My experience has been that the older the venue, the more uncomfortable I am in my seat.

I go to a lot of live theater, as much as I can possibly afford, most of the time with the full knowledge that I am going to be squished into an uncomfortable seat for the duration of the show. The last time I saw Hamilton on Broadway (one of my favorite shows, by the way), I was in tears both because the show always makes me cry AND because the back of the seat in front of me was digging painfully into my knees. I left the theater bruised on my hips and knees and limping from the pain. The Richard Rodgers theater was built in 1925.

Contrast that with Circle in the Square Theater, originally built in the 1970s and reopened in its current incarnation in the late ‘90s. It has wider, much more comfortable seats similar to ones that you might find in a movie theater (that doesn’t have reclining seats). There’s enough leg room for a person of above-average height to be able to shift position without having another seat digging into their legs.

Historical buildings and institutions are unlikely to have seating that accommodates fat or tall bodies, much less both. The best bet at getting a seat that won’t injure you in these settings is an accessible seat, which limits you severely on your seating choices, usually down front and off to the side somewhere. Or if there are stairs in the venue, in the rows at the back, closest to the doors.

The seats in the Jacobs Theater, where I recently saw Betrayal, weren’t the worst I’d ever been in. It helped we had paid a premium to sit in the orchestra, rather than the balcony. I had about an inch or two of leg room, but my hips were squished badly and there was nowhere to put my arms. I have had people in similar venues be very angry about having to sit next to my fat body, to the point where they actually left the show and didn’t return.

It’d be great to think that as we move ever forward into this century that these historical buildings and institutions—like colleges, universities, stadiums, and theaters all up and down the East Coast—would invest in overhauling their seating to accommodate the maximum number of different types of bodies possible. But we know that won’t happen.

I went to the baseball stadium in Philadelphia, Citizens Bank Park, not too long ago. It was built in 2004, replacing the much older Veteran’s Stadium, and has a capacity of ~43,000 people. And the seats are barely large enough for me. I am still squished uncomfortably in the seat, the seat in front of me digging into my legs, my knees dangerously close to the head and shoulders of the person in front of me.

The problem, like with airplanes, is capacity and how much can be charged to put a butt in that seat. It doesn’t matter to the person collecting the fee if your butt can actually fit or not. Is it any wonder that fat people feel marginalized, when popular entertainment, even the oldest kind of popular entertainment in the world, doesn’t feel welcoming?