In impolite company a fat woman can be a pig, fat pig, cow, snow cow, fatty, blimp, blob, lard ass, tub of lard, fat ass, hog, beast, fatso, buffalo, whale, elephant, two tons of fun, and a slew of names I don’t have the heart to share. She can be round, curvy, chubby, rotund, pleasantly plump, “healthy,” heavy, heavyset, stout, husky, or thick. In the culture at large, fat women can be many things in polite company-BBW (a big beautiful woman) or a SSBBW (super-sized big beautiful woman). As a fat woman, I have become intimately familiar with this taxonomy because this is the vernacular with which far too many people discuss my body and its parts. There is a taxonomy for the unruly, overweight human body, and that taxonomy becomes even more specific for the unruly overweight woman’s body. I will be the girl everyone loves to hate to love as my teeth yellow and my hair falls out but my body finally begins to become more acceptable, until my body withers and then disappears, stops taking up space. I will be the girl carefully purging unnecessary calories from her body with a well-placed finger down the throat. I will be that girl who spends hours at the gym, draped in oversized clothing.
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I tell myself that soon, I am going to be that girl who eats a saltine cracker and says she’s full. I prefer, instead, to obsess over their bodies the way others obsess over mine.
I ignore their thinning hair, rotting teeth, internal organs dissolving into mushy nothing. They have the commitment to do what it takes to have the bodies they want. And still, I am envious because these girls have willpower. The reporter speaks with disdain about the rigorous exercise regimens these girls put themselves through, the starvation, the obsession with their bodies.
I envy the way their clothes hang listlessly from their bodies, as if they aren’t even being worn but, rather, floating-a veritable vestment halo rewarding their thinness. I envy the way their flesh is stretched taut against their brittle bones. I wonder what holds their bodies together. There is something about the gaunt faces and sharply angled bodies of anorexic girls that at once attracts and repulses me. I am morbidly fascinated by such programs and their human subjects. I watch a Nightline special-an exposé on the horrors of eating disorders.
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I am full of longing and I am full of envy and so much of my envy is terrible.