Virgie Tovar

The point is: no matter how wonderfully delicious a man (or anyone) is, once you’ve seen him sneeze, fall, eat peanut butter or chew loudly, if there’s nothing else (or mostly nothing else), then he will ultimately make your skin crawl. So, there’s no point after all, right? In doing things the way we know how to do them?

Every inch of skin that can experience a breeze is urgently needed in Jamaica. This makes choosing the tank top and short shorts so much easier. It takes the thinking out of wearing very little clothes for me, and being scantily clad is still an exercise in vulnerability.

The wound of codependency leaves a haunting question in its wake: Do I actually matter? Diet culture’s answer to fat people is: no.

Fat girl trauma, brown girl trauma, sexist trauma, class trauma. It’s time to start seeing our gifts, or handout an invoice for fat girl emotional labor

Hi, my name is Virgie and I’m a fat girl who loves food. During my years of restricting I thought about food more than I thought about most things.

Fatphobia morphs into a conversation about looks because fatphobia targets women. The bigotry is masked through this gendered decoy.

A lot of people don’t know this, but fat activism has been around in the United States since the 1960s. Yes, it’s true!

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.

Truthfully, I really want to be able to walk into every new interaction with the hope — the expectation — that everyone knows how to treat everyone else with full humanity. But the culture’s gonna have to do a lot better before I emotionally disarm. Until then, it’s probably a good idea to expect pursed lips and side eye from me.

I know that not everyone has the same appetite for The Vent, but when it comes to doing work around diet culture and fatphobia, venting is a powerful tool. For people who are in the process of healing from diet culture, we are often wading through an enormous ocean of misinformation, gas lighting and dirty ol’ lies. Without access to venting, our emotions and thoughts occur in sort of a vacuum where we can easily talk ourselves out of what may well be very astute analysis.