Virgie Tovar

Last week I was sitting anywhere between nineteen and thirty-seven feet from Kevin Bacon.

This week in Babecamp we were talking about Sarai Walker’s novel Dietland.

To him, perhaps, my fat feminine body was acceptable to sexualize. I can’t say I learned a foolproof way of avoiding going on a date with a clean eater.

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.

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.

I have come to learn that most of the things I hate are things I can manage (if not eradicate) with boundaries, introspection, a sense of my needs as valuable, and the language to articulate what is happening.

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.

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?

I’d like to enter the term “thinspreading” into the running for 2017's new word of the year. Fat people are expected to take up as little space as possible.