Virgie Tovar

Why do men text me about their dicks all the time? Do thin women get this many texts about penises?

It takes a lot of ongoing effort, labor, and love to fight for justice and to question the culture. People in the “choir” opt out of fitting in or playing nice. We dedicate a lot of time to being conscientious citizens.

We forego doctor visits because we know with near-total certitude that we are going to be told to lose weight. That we don’t need care — we just need to “cut back.”

I thoroughly appreciate that there is a primary focus on self-love, but I also feel the painfully deep silence around the healing power of loving — and dating and sleeping with — other fat people.

As much as I love the idea of family, I actually like not being married, and I actually like not being a mother right now.

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 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.

I understand the connections between the violence that leads to police shootings and the violence that leads people to starve themselves. I know with complete certainty that diet culture is a manifestation of the state’s expectation of assimilation and of social control, both of which are manifestations of institutional violence.

I thought I’d make a list of regular things that become “radical” (in the culture’s eyes) when you’re doing them while also being fat.

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