What I hate is that gulf of misunderstanding between fat women and not-fat women.
I was telling a friend about how I didn’t like running in public because I was fat enough to get cow-called.
She had to ask if it was an “in my head” thing or something that actually happened. She didn’t say it like that. I paraphrase because we were both drunk at the time.
But the thing is, is that calling myself fat, even though I mean it as a physical descriptor and even though I am unmistakably fat, still reads as having low self-esteem, as putting myself down.
So I can understand why she would have some confusion.
As a woman who has never been fat, or had enough extra weight on her to be read as fat by the world, she’s never had strangers yell at her from cars, or been publicly insulted because of her weight.
It’s like she lives on another planet.
I think it’s fucked up that the word “fat” has been so co-opted by so many other meanings, things it was never meant to mean (lazy, smelly, unhealthy, ugly, etc.), things that it doesn’t mean, that, to some people, unemotionally, matter-of-factly describing myself as fat makes them question my reading of reality and my judgement.
I think the only thing I can do is to keep using the word “fat” to describe myself.
I am a revolutionary.
You are.