Virgie Tovar

My unique capacity to see the vile underbelly of “normal” life made me an important witness to the reality of cultural failure. My inability to pass as a “regular lady” had helped build a road out of the stifling reality that so many of us face — that women’s lives are mapped out of for them before they even embark on their life journey.

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!

When we both moved to San Francisco in our 20s, she moved to a wealthy neighborhood and I moved into a neighborhood where old men had phone sex on the pay phone at the laundromat. Our friendship threatened her world in a way that it didn’t mine. The people I knew had neither wealth to protect nor any desire to play at that game, and so their lives were inspired by a freedom I adored. The kind of freedom that allows you to talk about shitting and fucking over dinner.

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

Fat people, we do not have to acquiesce to our culture's normalization of hierarchy. We do not have to turn the other cheek. Joy does not come at the expense of your dignity, of your humanity.

I think a lot of us are probably walking around with mild PTSD, anxiously calculating risk and making plans about what and who to avoid.... Even though I’m no longer technically walking the halls of junior high, I am living in a fitness-obsessed city that doesn’t feel as safe as it ought to considering almost everyone is over age 13.

You were taught not to invest in yourself. You were taught to invest in the culture, which is bolstered by patriarchy, racism, etc..

We wrote this article while driving from Yachats, Oregon to the northernmost tip of Oregon with a little Airstream named Bambi hitched to Jen’s car. We decided we wanted to share the three biggest lessons we’ve learned from roadtripping together:

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

My favorite thing about this trip was that I spent my time in Vienna with fat feminists by my side every single day.... Occasionally, our bellies bumped into one another and then rebounded for just a second, like balloons. The familiar physics of fatness multiplied by two or three. I felt like we spoke in shorthand, the language of shared experience.