I’ve been thinking lately – reminiscing is too pleasant of a word – about the way certain people treated me when I was young. It’s funny, I don’t remember thinking of it as being bullied, but of course that’s exactly what it was. I was (brace yourselves) fat, so of course other kids felt the need to point that out to me. Like there was a chance that I wasn’t (hyper) aware that my body was different and unpleasant for people to look at!
Interestingly, the people who picked on me the most were all older guys, from the classes ahead of mine in high school. (If my own classmates said rude things about my body, they must have been doing it out of earshot.) I’m not sure why all the bullying I remember came from boys. It seems these days that girls are each others’ own worst enemy, doesn’t it? But for me, it was always the guys in the two classes ahead of mine, making booming noises as I walked down the hall, acting like the floor was shaking, saying rude things to me, calling me names.
The other fat bullying – if you can call it that – I most acutely remember happened to me in college. Now, I went to a really liberal, artsy, open-minded school (shout out to my fellow Fighting Squirrels!), so I generally felt very accepted on campus. But there were two instances that I keenly remember, nearly twenty years after the fact. The first was the girl who said, “You have really good self-esteem for a fat person.” The other was when a bunch of us were sitting around in a dorm room, talking about random things, when a guy looked me straight in the eye and said, “Why are you so fat?” I’d like to cut him some slack for the fact that he was a foreign student, and maybe he didn’t know his question was rude, but I think he did.
Why do I think that? Because everyone knows “fat” is one of the worst things you can call someone. Sure, actual fat people get called fat all the time, but even thin people are often called fat because it’s one of the worst, meanest things we can think to call each other. Think about how ridiculous that sounds. And yet, in the news right now is a story about how the woman just crowned Miss America purportedly called another pageant contestant “fat.” Of course she isn’t fat, but don’t we just gasp with horror at this story?
Over the weekend I read a heartbreaking article about a rash of pre-teen and teen suicides that can be linked back to bullying. In the profiles of these children, almost every one had reported being bullied for their weight, and most of them were not fat at all. Which just goes to further prove that one of the words that can cut the deepest and do the most damage, no matter what our body size actually is, is that simple, three-letter word. F A T. Being called that word can be so bad, some people don’t want to live anymore.
Since I’ve embraced the body positive movement, I’ve come to self-identify as fat. I am fat, that’s a fact, but calling myself that – instead of plus-size, overweight, or even curvy – is a fairly new thing in my life. And when people first hear me call myself fat, every single one of them has the same reaction. “Gasp! You’re not fat!” Here, let me help you get to your fainting couch. Yes, I am fat. Time for you to get over it.
I’m sorry that we live in a world where being fat (or just even called fat) is just about the worst thing you can be. J.K. Rowling has been quoted as saying:
Is fat really the worst thing a human being can be? Is fat worse than vindictive, jealous, shallow, vain, boring, or cruel? Not to me.
Not to me, either.
We need to strip the power from this word. To make it what it truly is: an adjective, a descriptive word, not fraught with terrible meaning. Not only do we have to fight the stereotypes of what society thinks it means when we have fat on our bodies, but we also have to fight the word itself, and the implication that being fat means we are less, unworthy. If we take the power from this word, maybe we can make someone’s childhood less full of cruelty and pain. Maybe we can save a life.
Starting today, make it a point to stop using the word fat in a derogatory way. Don’t call yourself or anyone else fat when you mean something else – it’s not a substitute for dumb, worthless, lazy, or anything else. It just means you have excess body mass. That’s it. Don’t use it to wound someone (including yourself!). Sticks and stones may break our bones, but this word can’t hurt us if we stop giving it power.
