You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar

Author:Virgie Tovar
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781936932320
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2017-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

• Men and boys are allowed to teach women and girls about compliance with social expectations of desirability without our consent.

• Men and boys are allowed to use systems of sexual and emotional approval and disapproval to confirm masculine superiority and ideologies of control—offering sexual and romantic attention to women and girls whose bodies conform to social standards of beauty while socially isolating or punishing those whose bodies do not. Both behaviors are based on dehumanization.

These behaviors create an intense sense of dependency on masculine approval, which is gauged exclusively through sexual and romantic interest. This leads to the low self-worth that facilitates things like disordered eating and rape culture.

Misogyny works in tandem with white supremacy to build a population of women that is pliant and easily manipulated in order to carry out the oppressive needs of the culture and the state as they currently exist.

It’s important to recognize that the desire to be thin is actually part of a drive to be compliant with current Western expectations of feminine submission and second-class citizenship. This model of feminine submission is deeply informed by whiteness. As Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks have all pointed out, white femininity has historically played a colluding role in the maintenance of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, acting as a sort of wedge or intermediary third party that solidifies the power brokered between white men of influence and everyone else. This agreement has cost white women full citizenship, but it is through the promise of second-class citizenship that they are invested in maintaining the current gender/race paradigm.

I want to end this section with a sobering observation. When I work with women who want to stop dieting, we will often make a lot of emotional progress until we get to romance. The women who envision spending their lives with men or who are partnered with a fat-negative person are much more likely to return to dieting. The women who either have a fat-positive partner or who are queer are less likely. This is not to say that there are no straight women with incredible fat-positive partners, or that there are no queers who experience fatphobia in their relationships. This observation is anecdotal, but it’s telling.

No single feminist can fix the legacy of misogyny that continues to cycle through and destroy our lives. What I can tell you is that you are not alone in your stultifying disappointment or (occasional? constant?) sense of hopelessness, and that you don’t have to acquiesce to the sexist forces that seek to make you small—both metaphorically and literally.

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