What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Author:Aubrey Gordon [Gordon, Aubrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about power.

This slogan, it struck me weeks after this experience, was the provenance of straight-size feminists. I hadn’t been raped, certainly, but I had been coerced and threatened. It felt luxurious, insisting that sexual assault and harassment was only about power and never about desire. But as a fat woman, in that moment, it had felt so multifaceted. His actions and threats were enabled by power, of course, but they were more multidimensional than that.

What drew him to me was that I appeared to be an easy mark, and I was. What drew him to me was that I wouldn’t be believed, so I wouldn’t say anything—and I didn’t. What drew him to me was the endless stream of sayings about fat women, the symphony of sexualized whispers that prepared him for this crescendo of a moment. Better blow jobs and they’ll do whatever you want and try so hard and so grateful in bed all softened the ground for what came next. He knew that I was queer and that I had dated straight men, which meant that anything he wanted was something I could enjoy or feign enjoying. What drew him to me was the certainty that I would be sexually pliable both in partners and acts, a living doll who would never resist. What drew him to me was that my body made me too untrustworthy to be believed, so I would never speak up.

It was about sex and it was about power. It was also about desirability, beauty, privilege, and manipulation. From our disparate positions, both of us were well acquainted with a machine that silences fat survivors even before we speak. That machine is fueled by every joke, every comment, every deeply held belief that fat people cannot be wanted by anyone who isn’t settling or somehow pathological in their desire. It is oiled by every media caricature of fat people as desperate, lonely, sexually voracious, driven crazy by unfulfilled desire.

And that machine is protected by the well-intentioned friends and family members who cannot quite bring themselves to grapple with the harsh reality, depth, and pervasiveness of fat hate. It is protected by a vicious instinct that can arise within even our closest loved ones: a predatory instinct that blames its prey for its own demise.

This machine is fueled, too, by my beloved feminist peers. Often, feminist discourse stays focused on sexual harassment and assault that don’t reflect the fullness of fat women’s experiences—nor do they reliably reflect the experiences of trans women, immigrant women, older women, poor women. There is a violence that comes with catcalling and sexual violence targeted at people who are culturally and sexually defined by their lack of desirability. Fatness has long been used as an attack on feminist movements. During the US movement for white women’s suffrage, those opposed to women’s civic engagement frequently depicted suffragettes as fat, unattractive, shrill, and demanding. In 1910, one humor magazine took aim at these fat, demanding, unreasonable

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.