Virgie Tovar

How does a weight loss company sell weight loss products to people who don’t want to be fat but also don’t want to say they don’t want to be fat or identify as being on a diet? This question lives at the heart of what I’m going to call “BoPo-washing.” BoPo-washing is the new paradigm of companies using weight-neutral or body positive language in order to peddle products.

This is a love song for those who showed me there was a thing called freedom, and it wasn’t closed-legged, and it wasn’t passable, that it was expensive and gaudy, and I wanted it, and I didn’t want it.

One of my favorite ways to help people conceptualize patriarchy is by asking them to imagine a Chuck E. Cheese.

The 3 Levels of Fatphobia are intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional. Yes, everyone is affected by fatphobia. But the follow-up question is: How?

For the past two weeks, I’ve met up with my friend Caya in the Mission for acupuncture and pupusas/pizza/both. #HighlyRecommend 

So as you can see, “polite” bigotry is just bigotry. It's manipulative. It's aggressive. And it hurts people. Speak up against polite fatphobia!

There is not a single path to self-love, and so you must become an engineer of that process. We have to feel lots of uncomfortable things.

The politics of food are the politics of class, and the subtlety of those politics creates a kind of deniability that makes it hard to discern the rules of engagement. One’s success in ascending the ladder is marked by fluency with these invisible boundaries.

[CN: fatphobia] I tell her I have an idea. She loves my ideas, my schemes, our witchcraft. We talk about feeling crazy, because that’s what the culture does to women who really want something, anything...

I just spent the weekend at adult fat camp — admittedly, a very different kind of fat camp than I used to dream about all those years ago.