Sizing up the arguments 1

This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 37, Summer 1998.

Books about the politics of size tend to fall into two categories. One tradition aims to promote positive images of fat women. Another concerns itself with eating disorders and is not about fat politics as such. Fat & Proud is one of the few books to tackle the fundamental issue of fat oppression. In her review of Charlotte Cooper’s new book, Debbie Cameron argues the case for a more robust and militant fat politics.

Fat is famously supposed to be a feminist issue, but there are not many feminist books with anything sensible, let alone radical, to say on the subject. Instead we have a whole history of feminist writing about size which manages to avoid the central issue of how fat women are treated; the authors claim to politicise fat, but end up just pathologising it.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fat!

The classic case of this tendency is Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, whose argument boils down to the idea that we wouldn’t be fat if patriarchy didn’t alienate us from our bodies and so cause us to eat for reasons other than hunger. More recent discus­sions, like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, implicitly address themselves to women who are not fat but who are obsessed and, at the extreme, incapacitated by the fear of being fat. Really, the main subject of these books is eating disorders — a serious issue, unquestionably, but one which has a different relationship to the politics of size and appearance. (Susie Orbach followed her own logic where it led by defining fatness as an eating disorder.)

I think of these texts as the ‘lo-fat’ tradition, the political equivalent of products like ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!’. They say they’re about fat, but their fat content is tiny: they are not written by fat women, nor for us, nor about us. Their assumptions about fat remind me of the orthodox marxist position on everything undesirable, from wife-beating to flatulence, which fails to fit the model: since it is only a morbid symptom of patriarchal pathology (cf ‘capitalist decadence’ for marxists), after the revolution it will simply vanish. In feminist utopia no one will have to be fat, and certainly no one will want to be. Prejudice and self-loathing will melt away because fat itself will have melted away!

Laying out the issues

This, of course, is total nonsense, and Charlotte Cooper treats it with the contempt it deserves. In Fat and Proud she is more interested in documenting what kinds of oppression are faced by fat women and how some of them are fighting back. She also critiques the spurious ‘scientific’ arguments which so often legitimate sizeist oppression.

As Charlotte Cooper points out, size can’t just be lumped in with all the other issues around ‘beauty’ because of the strong connect­ion it has with ideas and practices purporting to be about ‘health’ — the ‘we don’t care how you look, we just don’t want you to die young’ approach. If the first task of any writer on this subject is to spell out the everyday consequences of sizeism (the denial of jobs to fat women, the street harassment, the humiliation and some­times abuse handed out by the medical pro­fession, the exploitation by the diet and pharmaceutical industries), the second task is to disentangle the ‘health’ and ‘beauty’ discourses around fat — or rather, to show that they are inextricably tangled though they pretend to be quite separate. Both are also connected with another, ‘moral’ discourse. The reason why it’s OK to have a go at fat people whereas those who are ‘unattractive’ for other reasons deserve pity, is that fatness connotes such moral failings as greed and sloth and lack of self-control.

Fat and Proud does a pretty good job of laying out these issues. It’s divided into three main sections, the first of which is called ‘Fat Lives’ and presents material from interviews with 13 fat women, while the second, ‘Health’, explores the shortcomings of scientific theory and medical practice around fatness. I didn’t learn much from this that I didn’t know already, though I did find it an accessible survey.

I was more gripped by the third section, ‘The Fat Rights Movement’ which gives a thought-provoking historical account of organ­ised size politics from its origins to the present day. Most interesting of all is the last chapter, ‘All together now?’, which takes issue with some of the assumptions and practices of the fat rights movement itself. This excellent chapter (whose contents I will return to) could easily have been developed into a book in its own right, and from where I stand as a radical feminist it would have been a better book than the one we actually got. As I read it I started to wonder if there were two Charlotte Coopers, one a lot sharper and more radically feminist than the other. The conclusion I came to, however, is that actually there are two tendencies in fat politics, one which focuses on self-help and ‘positive images’ while the other is more critical and more militant. The early part of Fat and Proud mostly reflects a feminist take on the first tendency, and for me that did present some problems.

The politics of ‘pride’

Although I am fat myself, I have never been involved in organised fat politics. This is not because I am ‘self-hating’ or ‘in denial’ about being fat; it’s because so much of what I have read about fat politics uses terms like ‘self-hating’ and ‘in denial’. It is pervaded by ideologies of self-help and by therapy-speak. There’s an obsession with the problem of ‘low self-esteem’ and the need for fat women to learn to love ourselves as we are. ‘Big is beautiful’, ‘fat and proud’…bleeuurgh!

As Shelley Bovey put it in the title of an earlier book, ‘Being fat is not a sin’; but if I ever come to consider it a major accomplishment I will know I have started to suffer from low self-esteem, not to mention brain-rot.

In the first section particularly, Charlotte Cooper uses the discourse I am taking exception to routinely and uncritically. She also illustrates what I have long believed to be a general principle: that when self-help/therapy is appropriated for feminist purposes, it usually incorporates the worst excesses of identity politics.

Consider, for instance, a paragraph like the following (p.2):

Today I feel lucky to be fat. The difference my fat connotes has been and continues to be one of the most challenging and enriching areas of my life. I am very proud of my difference, I feel like a survivor, and I think my perspective as a fat person is a benefaction that has made me special.

This comes from a place in feminism which values ‘difference’ in and for itself, and which never asks whether there are different kinds of difference. The idea that being fat makes you ‘lucky’ and ‘special’ rings no bells with me. I’d say my own ‘specialness’ consists mainly in providing a large target for anyone on earth who feels like dissing me. I have found this a challenging experience, certainly, but rarely an enriching one. For that reason I would not want to make an identity out of being fat. It is, inevitably, one part of who I am, but as I see it, being fat — as opposed to being, say, Black or working class — is not an area of experience rich and complex enough to provide a basis for primary self-definition. There is no ‘fat culture’ or ‘fat history’ comparable to the heritage of an ethnic or social group.

‘Identifying as fat’

One of the problems with using the language of identity politics in the context of body size is that it tends to give hostages to the lo-fat tradition of Susie Orbach et al. As I noted earlier, this tradition makes no distinction between the (material and institutionalised) oppression of fat women and the feelings of anxiety and unhappi­ness around size from which many or most western women suffer. It thus suggests that the only real problem is women’s endless, patri­archally conditioned dissatisfaction with their own bodies, whatever size those bodies happen to be.

I agree that this is at the root of the problem, but it doesn’t mean everyone suffers in exactly the same way. Where do women get the idea that being fat is about the worst catastrophe that could ever befall them? Partly, by looking at how actual fat women are treated: we function as scapegoats, Awful Warnings to other women. It is problematic to conflate the consequences of being fat with those of feeling or fearing fat, since this deflects attention from actual fat oppression, and from the part women them­selves often play in dishing it out.

The framework of identity politics makes the persistence of this problem almost inevi­table, by inviting women to become involved with fat politics on the basis that they ‘identify as fat’. Predictably, many women who are apparently not fat, but who ‘identify as fat’, turn up to conferences or groups for fat women, where the effect can be to marginalise the concerns of their objectively fatter sisters.

In feminist politics, it’s true that member­ship of many identity categories has been largely self-defined: women identify as ‘lesbian’ or ‘working class’ and nobody checks their credentials. But fatness arguably presents unique problems in this respect, inasmuch as saying ‘you’re fat if you identify as fat’ will net you half the female population. This has led to a proliferation of categories (e.g. ‘supersize’ as opposed to ‘smaller’ and ‘medium’ fat women). Some groups have apparently been plagued, or even split, by festering resentments among different-sized fat women.

Coming out

Even stranger than the notion of ‘identifying as fat’ is the idea of ‘coming out as fat’, which Charlotte Cooper at one point introduces. As with the ‘survivor’ comparison quoted earlier, she analogises one oppressed group’s liberation struggle with another’s; in this case the analogy is with gay men and lesbians, who ‘come out’ in order to make their difference visible. But most analogies of this kind are ultimately unsatis­factory, and this one is no exception. Fat people are already visible: indeed, we suffer from an excess of visibility. If we accept the lesbian/gay analogy then merely by going about our every­day business we are making a political state­ment. ‘Here I am, fat as ever!’

To be fair, what people who ‘come out as fat’ intend is something more like the Queer Nation ‘in your face’ approach — sort of, ‘We’re here, we’re fat, get used to it’. This more aggressive attitude seems to have found a niche in the new ‘cyberpunk’ media of websites and zines (self-published underground maga­zines or comics). I must admit that personally I do prefer it to the coy, cutesy language of the New Age/therapy crowd (the Sisters of Size, the Women of Width, the publications with excruciating titles like Radiance: A Magazine for Large Women…). Still, there’s a sense in which only the language is different: one lot talks about loving yourself while the other lot publishes zines called things like i’m so fucking beautiful. I’m sure you are, sister, but i’m just so fucking tired of all this talk about how we look and how we feel about ourselves.

Pissed off by the fat police

What I would like to hear is something more along the lines of, ‘we’re so fucking pissed off’—a collective statement of anger that might underpin political action. It isn’t as if there’s nothing to do: policing of people’s ‘lifestyles’ under the banner of public health is getting more intrusive all the time, and being fat is increasingly defined as irresponsible and unacceptable behaviour.

This legitimates public expressions of intolerance which would not be respectable in relation to, for instance, disability or mental illness. Sizeism is one prejudice you can still hold without ruining your liberal credentials: when the issue is (allegedly) ‘health’, even the genteel classes feel justified in throwing ‘manners’ or ‘good taste’ out of the window. The mere fact that someone is fat can nowadays be seen as a perfectly good reason for chucking them out of Harrods, or refusing to consider them as a suitable adoptive parent. A celebrity feminist (who I will not name, since my own manners are impeccable!) once idly remarked to a group which included me: ‘fat people are disgusting. I hate it when you have to watch them eating in restaurants’.

This kind of thing leaves you somewhere between rage and tears; but as ever, the really damaging consequences of size prejudice are felt in the sphere of medicine. Hysteria about fat licenses scientists and doctors to become more cavalier than ever about subjecting fat people to treatment which is usually ineffectual, often degrading and sometimes downright dangerous.

In the degrading category, a couple of years ago in Britain a doctor suggested in all serious­ness that underwear for people whose waist size exceeded a certain limit should only be avail­able on prescription. Fat people would be forced to go to their GPs and, presumably, bargain with them: ‘if I agree to have treatment, can I have a new pair of knickers?’.

Mercifully, this ludicrous proposal came to nothing (perhaps Marks & Spencer lobbied against it, or perhaps the police feared that drug barons would move into outsize underwear as a black market developed). The ideas that do come to something may be less obviously absurd, but they are often far more potentially harmful. Even since Fat and Proud was written, one of the weight-loss ‘wonder drugs’ it discusses, which was ‘fast-tracked’ in the US (i.e. not properly tested) because of the alleged gravity of the nation’s ‘obesity problem’, has had to be withdrawn because of the health risks it turned out to pose.

These are the sorts of issues that call for urgent and militant action, and I’m convinced taking such action would do as much as anything, and maybe more, to make those involved feel better about themselves. This brings me back to the last part of Fat and Proud, which describes — and in some cases questions — what organised fat politics has actually been about in its 30 years of existence.

The flab fights back: fat politics, then and now

Before reading this book I had no idea that the first size rights organisation (NAAFA, which originally stood for ‘National Association to Aid Fat Americans’ though it now means ‘National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance’) was founded in the US as early as 1969. In line with the political preoccupations of the time, it placed size issues in the framework of civil rights, and campaigned against unjust discrimi­nation. It also had a social function, organising fashion shows and parties; and it ran a kind of dating agency.

Even in the early years there were women who found this kind of thing objectionable. In 1974 two disillusioned radical lesbian feminists, Aldebaran and Judy Freespirit, split from NAAFA to form an organisation called the Fat Underground. Reading about its activities is a salutary reminder that ‘self-help’ did not always mean the kind of therapised mush it so often denotes now. The Fat Underground encouraged its members to read for themselves the research ‘proving’ fat people must diet or die. The conclusions they drew from the science they read (that dieting did not work, and was more of a health threat than being fat) became the basis for most subsequent radical arguments on the subject. It was also within the Fat Underground that the issue of size was given an explicitly feminist analysis (some of the writings of the women involved were later collected in the volume Shadow on a Tightrope).

In Britain, feminist fat activism had its peak years in the late 1980s with a London Fat Women’s Group forming in 1987 and a national conference in 1989 (these developments were covered in T&S; see references below). The account given here suggests, however, that the acrimonious identity-politics of the time and place eventually destroyed the movement’s cohesion and split it into fragments. Charlotte Cooper herself restarted the Fat Women’s Group in 1992 but has since left. She says that the group, like most other fat women’s groups in existence, is now more about providing support and promoting positive images than about political campaigning (though a new campaign­ing group called SIZE was started in 1997).

Taking issue: the sexual politics of fat rights

Meanwhile, the most established fat rights organisations continue to engage in some rather dubious activities. In her final chapter, ‘All Together Now?’, Charlotte Cooper brings to light a number of issues of concern to radical feminists, which have evidently been the subject of internal discussion, but are rarely aired outside the fat rights movement.

The most worrying of the issues she raises is the position in the movement of men who ‘admire’, that is, eroticise fat women. Known as FAs (fat admirers) or in vulgar parlance ‘chubby chasers’, these men often hold positions of leadership in organisations like NAAFA, and their motives are, for obvious reasons, distrusted by feminist fat activists. As one feminist, Karen W Stimson, observes (quoted p.185):

The fact that FAs have a different agenda from those they ‘admire’, the high (perceived) ratio of available fat women to male FAs and the power of patriarchy in general…combines to make abuse inevitable when we give thin male FAs the power to determine or represent fat women’s best interests.

Karen adds, ‘I don’t personally know any non-fat FAs who don’t exploit or abuse fat women’.

Missing links

I would put things a bit more bluntly than this; it seems to me that FAs are by definition abusive to fat women, and their presence in the move­ment is by definition a problem. Charlotte’s discussion suggests to me, however, that there is some confusion about the nature of the problem. Even when it has some analysis of gender, fat politics often seems to lack a clear analysis connecting the oppression of fat women to the workings of compulsory heterosexuality.

This is how I would analyse the FAs/abuse issue. NAAFA, like many other mixed fat rights organisations, has always seen one of its functions as being to ‘help’ fat people acquire (hetero)sexual partners, given that in the mainstream they are often viewed as sexually ineligible. While this was (and is) presented as an equal opportunity activity, it is likely, in a context of overall male dominance, that the main agenda was (and is) to secure for fat men a form of ‘normal’ male privilege which they felt they were denied, i.e. sexual access to women. With this set-up in place, and no restrictions on non-fat people joining, some non-fat men might well be struck by the possibilities of NAAFA as a place to prey on women.

I would not necessarily assume that all these so-called FAs are fat fetishists: it seems possible that what some of them eroticise is the idea of women who will be pathetically grateful for any kind of sexual attention. The basic problem as I see it is the assumption that fat women’s interests ‘naturally’ include an interest in becoming sexual objects for men, either fat or thin. FAs become an issue because their interest in fat women is felt to be somehow ‘abnormal’ (fetishistic) and demeaning, but the connection with more ‘ordinary’ forms of sexual exploit­ation (of women by men in all size combina­tions) goes unnoticed.

Charlotte Cooper’s interview data suggests that some heterosexual fat women are grateful for male sexual interest. Though her informants all have pretty high levels of political aware­ness, around gender as well as size, a number of the straight women cite meeting a sympathetic or admiring man as the most important source of positive change in their self-perceptions. This need for validation through male approval, it seems to me, is one of the things which keeps a lot of women’s fat politics from being truly radical.

Then again, it is my experience that lesbian feminist circles are not immune from fat prejudice and stereotyping; they cannot always be relied on to provide the support women need if they are to reject dubious and reactionary forms of fat ‘acceptance’. This is an issue which would bear more discussion, though Charlotte Cooper has little to say about it.

Playing for laughs

Another potentially interesting topic which is briefly raised but not pursued very far is the position of fat women in the culture and entertainment industries. In most sectors of these industries, fat women (and indeed men) are generally unacceptable, but in a few sectors they are highly visible. Blues singing is one case in point; another one is comedy.

The whole question of size and humour has been much discussed in fat activist circles, and some campaigns have focused specifically on attacking offensive fat jokes in, for instance, Hallmark cards. The issue becomes more complex when fat people themselves makes a career out of being laughed at, and matters are complicated still further when sexism is combined with sizeism by a female performer. In this connection Charlotte mentions Jo Brand and Dawn French (she could also have men­tioned Roseanne Barr); and she notes that fat activists have sometimes disagreed about whether the audience laughs with them or at them.

I found this interesting, because although I think these women are talented, I rarely find them funny. Is it because they use their size as a source of humour? On reflection, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It has more to do with the links they make or don’t make to their (hetero)­sexuality.

Jo Brand’s persona, for example, which I am very uncomfortable with, is that of a woman who apparently hates men but would go to bed with one like a shot if only she were asked. She wears her size defiantly, but at the same time it appears as the source of her ambivalence and bitterness towards men (they reject her because she is unattractive, and thus prove how worth­less they are). So the message is very mixed, and in terms of sexuality it is thoroughly conventional.

Dawn French, on the other hand, very rarely presents herself in heterosexual terms at all; the humour more often centres on the contrast between her and a much thinner woman, like her colleague Jennifer Saunders. The size joke I most clearly remember her doing — I remember it because I actually found it funny — was a sequence in which she danced with the ballerina Darcey Bussell, behaving all the while as if she were the prima donna while the professional dancer was a graceless novice. Although the intention was to make herself as a fat woman look ridiculous, the reason I found it funny was that I felt Darcey Bussell looked just as stupid; it became a parody of ballet itself, and the effect was to point up the intrinsic idiocy of ballerinas as icons of femininity.

I can’t say if Dawn French meant me to interpret it like this, or if any other viewer did so. But whatever the joke was supposed to be, at least it didn’t depend on a fat woman being humiliated by a man, or fantasising about one who will not humiliate her, or taking revenge on men for past humiliations. With Jo Brand it always does depend on one or other of those things, and that’s why I find her unwatchable.

Questioning feminist myths

Another admirable thing about the last chapter of Fat and Proud is that in it Charlotte Cooper questions a number of beliefs which have acquired the status of sacred myths in many feminist discussions of the politics of size.

For instance, it is taken as an article of faith that the current equation of beauty with thinness is a recent aberration of western European cultures. In other cultures, and at earlier periods in this one, fat women were/are admired rather than reviled.

This idea often depends on questionable interpretations of the evidence. Charlotte points out that Rubens (the most commonly-cited ‘fat admirer’ in the history of western art) was not a social realist painting individual women he considered attractive, his paintings had a strongly allegorical component. Even more obviously allegorical are the rotund female fertility symbols sometimes cited as ‘proof’ that the cultures of antiquity celebrated fat women. Deducing from these representations that fat women in earlier times had a better deal than now is like deducing from the picture of the Queen’s head on coins that Britain in the second half of the twentieth century was a society dominated by women.

Charlotte also sets out to debunk the stereotype of African or Pacific cultures as fat-accepting. She quotes fat Black women who have never experienced their communities’ supposed delight in abundant flesh, and points out that a great deal of what we ‘know’ about attitudes to body size in nonwestern societies has been filtered through the perceptions of European travellers and anthropologists, many of whom projected all kinds of ‘primitive’ beliefs onto their ‘exotic’ subjects. We cannot dismiss some of these projections as racist nonsense while retaining others — like the idea of fat women being honoured as symbols of fertility and plenty — because they happen to suit our politics or fuel our fantasies.

Perhaps the most important thing Charlotte says about the idea that fat women were preferred to thin ones in other cultures/periods is: ‘so what if they were’? Even if it exists, the reasons most often given for such a preference (e.g. fat symbolises fertility, or it displays the ability of a woman’s male ‘owner’ to provide abundant food) are, from a feminist viewpoint, repulsive. Practices like force-feeding pubescent girls to make them fat, attested in parts of Africa, can hardly be seen as less abusive than encouraging young women in the west to emulate Kate Moss’s shape by going on starvation diets. From a feminist perspective these are variations on one theme. Practices which coerce women to be fat, thin or whatever, and social values which define and judge us on the basis of size, are invariably linked to the workings of patriarchy in general and the heterosexual market in particular.

Moving the movement on

Charlotte Cooper makes the telling observation that

[Fat activists] have relied heavily on pre-existing frameworks, such as the social model of disability, New Age spirituality, sexual politics, or medicine, and these are as diverse as our identities as fat people (p.147).

This sums up a lot of what bothers me about some of the analyses presented in Fat and Proud. It’s as if you can throw anything into the mix, and if that makes your overall position unclear or contradictory you just reach for a platitude like ‘as diverse as our identities as fat people’. Because we are ‘diverse’, and our differences must be respected, it is seemingly taboo to voice such obvious objections as, ‘but medicine and New Age ideas entail diametric­ally opposite assumptions’, let alone make judgements on the frameworks themselves (for me, for instance, the framework of New Age spirituality applied to anything at all has the considerable drawback of being unrelieved nonsense).

I understand why it’s important to affirm that fat people are not an undifferentiated homogenised mass, but the problem about justifying your position with reference to your unique ‘identity as a fat person’ is that it brings political argument, and thus the development of collective analyses and priorities, to a virtual standstill. You can’t argue with someone’s ‘identity’. You can only take issue — and as Charlotte herself demonstrates in her final chapter, this need not be done in a disrespectful way — with the accuracy, coherence or logic of their position. If people are unwilling to engage in this kind of exchange, if they view any kind of challenge as an attack on the very essence of their being, their thinking will never move on from where it is.

Fat and Proud is undoubtedly a useful sourcebook, but it is most interesting and most challenging when it has the courage of some kind of consistent political conviction. I hope that many women will read the book, but I also hope their responses to the best and most politically courageous parts of it will help to move the movement on.

Charlotte Cooper Fat And Proud: The Politics of Size (The Women’s Press, 1998)

References

Shelley Bovey Being Fat Is Not A Sin (Pandora, 1989)

Tina Jenkins and Margot Farnham ‘As I am’, T&S 13, Spring 1988

Susie Orbach Fat is a Feminist Issue (Arrow, 1978)

L. Schoenfielder and B. Wieser Shadow on a Tightrope (Aunt Lute Press, 1989)

Heather Smith ‘Creating a politics of appearance’, T&S 16, Summer 1989.

Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth (Chatto, 1990)