Virgie Tovar

I’m a fat brown girl from an immigrant family. I grew up learning that no one would ever love me because I’m fat. I was taught that I have to work twice as hard to get half as much. If someone looks at me weird or says something rude to me, I always see it or hear it and I have a massive (exhausting) anxiety/adrenaline rush/aggro response/comedown cycle. I feel like I have to fight to maintain dignity and humanity every, single day.

You deserve someone who loves your body, who makes you feel safe, who makes you feel sexy. Never date someone who doesn’t love your belly!

Fat people often get so little attention that feels positive. When someone offers exploitative attention or exploits fat people it can feel really good.

Weight gain is — in my anecdotal experience — quite common once you stop attempting to control your weight. My story is not everyone’s story.

*Spoiler alert: some character-specific plot point reveals for the films

A cake related fatphobic incident is that moment when it's time to eat cake, and an otherwise joyous experience gets ruined by a moralizing impulse.

Even children experience fatphobia. Children deserve to be treated with care and responsibility, free from the stigma we grew up knowing.

I arrive at the airport and I see the chubby, bespectacled face of my friend, Andrea. This was the beginning of my adventure with Chile's fat mafia!

Though there was useful commentary, deeply personal stories, and some incisive observations, my problem with the episode is that it ultimately repeats a harmful framework:
Fat people (nearly all women) were on trial and up for observation (their privacy already considered non-existent) — not the fatphobic bias that had so clearly shaped their lives.

I hadn't been to a club like this one — the kind full of straight men who are probably homophobic and at least a little coercive, who smell like Old Spice deodorant and have enough disposable income to keep an open tab (the kind of men I'd been taught were "a catch") — for a very, very long time. I tried to remember exactly how long. A decade? More?