Butts by Heather Radke

Author:Heather Radke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

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Burgard had also come to the Bay Area by way of Cambridge. She had earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1980, and taken part in consciousness-raising groups and feminist organizations that focused their activist work on women’s bodies, an interest that stemmed from her childhood in the suburbs of St. Louis.

There, she had grown up in a relatively traditional 1960s white, middle-class family: her father was a doctor and her mother was a schoolteacher. Like so many other women at the time, Burgard’s mother tried numerous diet fads in order to make her body look like Twiggy’s or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s. Her father was also preoccupied with his physical health and appearance.

Burgard describes herself as a chunky little kid but explains that she was powerfully built. She was strong and athletic, and often teased for it. “I was your worst nightmare for Red Rover,” she recalls. She also loved to dance. Her father taught her to jitterbug as a child, and when her parents threw parties, Burgard would sneak downstairs after her bedtime and dance in her pajamas in the middle of the room in front of all the adults, who found her antics hilarious and charming.

Despite her love of physical movement, Burgard’s parents worried about her weight. By the time she was thirteen, her mother had already taken her to a Weight Watchers meeting. Throughout her teenage years, she dieted repeatedly, losing weight and then putting it back on. Between her freshman and sophomore years of college, she lost thirty pounds. It was a goal she’d been working toward for years, but when she finally achieved it, Burgard realized that losing the weight had come at a huge cost. For the first time since she was a child, when she touched her hips, she could feel the bones protruding, a sign of the physique she’d long coveted. But she also felt dissociated from her body after months of eating too little. “I started thinking to myself: What the fuck are you doing? Why are you doing this?” Burgard recalls. She realized how privileged she was: she was studying at Harvard and had meaningful friendships and relationships. Any success she achieved and power she felt would be because of those things, not what the scale read. “It was a huge thing. I realized: I’m not going to win this game and I want to play a game I can win.”

In 1983, Burgard moved to the Bay Area with the mission of helping fat women find a way to feel as good as she had when she was dancing in her parents’ living room. Along with several other women in the region, she began offering aerobics classes to fat women, a revolutionary idea that not only expanded the possibilities of who could participate in aerobics but fundamentally reimagined the purpose of it as a whole.

The principles of her class were simple: “You don’t have any obligation to do exercise if you’re a fat or higher-weight person. You don’t have to exercise at all.

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