The Geek Feminist Revolution, page 13
When people come to me about fears of public speaking while fat, about heckling, about online harassment, I feel it necessary to remind people that I got the same amount of harassment for being “fat” at 220 as I do for being “fat” at 290. As a woman, you are always going to be fat. People are always going to trot that one out to try to insult you, like taking up more space in the world, as a woman, is the absolute worst thing you can do.
Which I, of course, find hilarious.
And yet, I get it. I do. I feel it.
As internet bandwidth has increased, we’ve entered the age of the quick video, the vlogger, the YouTube sensation, the Skype session. I’ve felt an increased pressure, as a writer, to not only go out in public but to widely share my public image in ways that are often beyond my control.
I’ve been asked more and more to complete video projects, not just for fiction endeavors—acceptance speeches, video blogs, Google hangouts, taped panels, and the like—but also for job interviews. Yes, really. I realized, with increasing unease, that being both female and fat were two huge strikes against me in any video medium, no matter what I thought of myself. I was going to have to be twenty times as brilliant with a waggling chin than my male counterparts. Because as much as I didn’t hate myself, and was happy to toss a couple years’ worth of body project hours into actual, tangible accomplishments the way a dude would, it wasn’t my immediate accomplishments I was going to get judged on by casual observers. I’d be judged on whether or not I had the “discipline” to take up less space in the world.
Immediately. On sight. Snap judgment.
There’s a reason I keep photos off all my books. I’ve been well aware since birth that, as a woman, if your appearance does nothing to advance your cause, best not to flaunt it.
When I was in high school, there was a brief period where I flirted with the idea of giving up writing to pursue acting full-time, because I was pretty decent at it. I still pull on my theater training to accomplish extroverted events. But I quickly understood that if you’re heavier or taller than the male lead, your chances of being chosen to star across from him are incredibly small, no matter how rockin’ your talent. Only severe illness and near-death got me to a “normal” weight in Chicago. To get within ten pounds of that in Alaska, I spent three hours a day at the gym, six days a week, and lived on eggs, rice, mixed veggies, and string cheese. For a college kid who found school very easy, giving over this much time and headspace to a body project was a chore, sure, but not impossible. I could look more or less “normal” by dedicating my entire life, from waking to sleeping, to acting supremely abnormally.
Obsessing over a body project left me less time for real work. For writing. For speaking. For activism.
As, I suspect, is intended by this societal obsession, spending time dedicated to the body meant less time dedicated to being an actual politically powerful member of said society.
I was talking to a feminist writer/reviewer at a science fiction convention who said she was actually reading my blog back in the early days when it was called Brutal Women, and she’d found it via the guest posts I did at Big Fat Blog, which I participated in very, very early in my online life. I have always considered fear and hatred of taking up space as a feminist issue, as it’s so often used to shame women, no matter what their actual size.
Having gained and lost the same eighty pounds three times in the last fifteen years, I can honestly say I’m familiar with that cycle of fear and shame. The only time I’ve ever been praised for my weight repeatedly was when I was dying. I’ll never forget my mother on the phone with my dad, having just gotten me out of the ICU, telling him how great I looked because I was so thin, and, you know … something broke in me after that comment. When I pulled on my size 12 pants and they were loose, something I’d not experienced since fifth grade, all the feels washed over me—how fake this all was, how our success was measured in the width of our asses, how my worth went up only as I lay dying.
I vowed from that moment on, crying in my too-big pants, that I would never, ever beat myself up or hate myself for being fat ever again.
And I haven’t.
But it doesn’t mean I don’t think about it sometimes, and it doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally feel anxiety about public events, and I don’t occasionally wince at pictures and feel a moment of dissonance—after all, we’re not used to seeing fat people represented positively in media, and my brain wants to rebel. But that fear and hate, that internalized fat shaming and body hatred I had growing up—I’ve learned to reject that outright as bad programming.
Doing this—fucking the programming—is really freeing. It means I can stand up at a reading and give a performance in a loud, snarky voice. It means I can sit on and moderate panels without fear. Because I know how fat shaming works. I know that if somebody wanted to try to shame me using the “fat” callout, the same person would say that no matter what my weight.
I can change all I want, trying to contort my body in all sorts of ways, but those people, our society, will stay the same. They will always, always try to burn you down with some half-baked call of “cunt” or “fat” or “insert female-gendered slur here.” And just like the fact that I have a cunt is not likely to change, the fact that I take up a lot of space in the world—no matter the range on that massive sliding scale—is not going to change either, unless I’m dying. And I’m sorry, my friends, but I have no intention of dying so people can sit around saying how “good” I look. Fuck you.
So for folks who fear having a large voice, especially those of us who’ve grown up with bad programming, I can say this: just like with everything else, yes, you will have to be smarter, and work harder. But don’t let societal bullshit keep you down. It’s made to stop you from speaking. It’s made to get you to shut up, and stay home, and take up less space in spaces men consider “theirs.”
When you view it that way, when you see it for what it is, it becomes a bit easier to step up and step out, because you realize that in some small way, you going out into the world when it wants to shut you up is, itself, an act of resistance.
Many women-identified people worry about heckling, about people pointing and shouting, “You’re fat! You’re not a real woman! You’re stupid! You talk too much!” and I get that the pain and fear and sorrow over that can be too much. But being in these spaces, and being heard in them, is vitally important to changing these conversations, to challenging the narratives about our worth and what we say and what we think that have been created by others.
Go forth into the world, retreat when it is too much, but know that when you stand up to be heard and be counted, you’re doing your own part to change the narrative, and in doing so, to change the world. I promise I’ll be standing there next to you.
They’ll Come for You … Whether You Speak Up or Not
During times of great social upheaval, it can often seem safer to say nothing. You get noticed less. You piss off fewer people. You just make sure the trains run on time. You make your dollars and go home and stuff them in the mattress and keep your head down and hope they don’t come for you.
It’s a silly position, really, because they always come for you.
I think it’s easier to remain neutral on stuff like politics when you think that specific policies won’t affect you. If you aren’t a woman, or nonwhite, or gay, or disabled, or poor, or chronically ill, it’s really easy to just keep your head down and shut up. “It’s not my concern,” you say, while totally forgetting that we live in a world where our own quality of life is directly impacted by the quality of life of others (vaccinations are a really easy one to point to; so’s universal health care). We forget that our way of life—access to life-saving drugs, clean water, abundance of food—is wholly contingent on the skills and abilities of many millions of others who support the systems that care for us. We also forget that for many of us, being a part of some of these groups harshly affected by social policies is just one accident or “bad luck” incident away. Poverty, chronic illness, and disability can happen gradually or suddenly, often when you’re paying the least attention.
I say all this as somebody who grew up upholding ’80s action-movie masculinity as the pinnacle of cool. I always liked the idea that strong people were loners who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, who had witty lines and impeccable health and virility and nobody messed with them. This was more about who I wanted to be than who I wanted to date, mind, and it really influenced how I viewed other people. Life sucks? Do something about it. Stop whining. Nobody keeps you down but yourself.
I’m still gung-ho about assertiveness, negotiating for yourself, standing up to injustice, and the like, but I’m far less likely to tell people that all they should be doing is looking out for themselves, and fuck everybody else. When you look at the way we’ve constructed our entire society, very few of us would thrive in a place where we had to be totally self-sufficient. Illness would kill a great many of us, and childbirth, accidents, starvation … We rely on other people to help us succeed, however invisible those millions of hands are as we pick up that orange at the grocery store or pop a pill to help prevent heart disease or drive a gas-powered car forty miles to work across a publicly funded road.
I didn’t have a real appreciation for just how much we rely on other people until my pancreas blew out when I was twenty-six. Immune disorder, they told me. Sorry. Now you have to take five to six shots a day just to survive. The only reason I live is because there are people creating synthetic insulin in a lab.
That whole independent ’80s apocalypse hero I’d hoped to style myself after kind of imploded along with my pancreas, because even if I raided every pharmacy from here to the ocean after the End Times, it’s all got a one-year expiration date. If modern society implodes, I do too, no matter how tough, smart, and savvy I am.
It gives you a lot of perspective, being at the edge of death all the time. I’ve gotten really touchy with doctors, health insurance providers, and pharmacies. I scream and yell at them a lot, because when you need something to survive, it makes you a tad nutty if it looks like you may not be able to get it.
It has humbled me a lot, and given me a great deal of empathy.
Being a woman certainly also has disadvantages in our society, but for much of my life, until I really entered the workforce, I could pretend I was a guy, you know, a “real person” and not one of those femmy women that everyone made fun of like they were useless. It wasn’t until I went out into the real world, among strangers far removed from my cozy hometown, that I realized there were people who looked at me as prey just for being a woman, and people who assumed I cared about things, or did things, or wanted things completely based on my gender instead of what I could do. I got passed up for a raise at the movie theater I worked at because managers had to learn to run the projection booth, and the reels were seventy pounds. Nobody ever asked me if I could lift seventy pounds (of course I can). They just assumed I couldn’t. So I wasn’t even considered. (I learned this later. Things changed, and some women marshaled through by being overly insistent, but it never occurred to me that I’d have to fight for something I was obviously qualified for. I still thought I was a white guy, after all.)
That was the first time I realized that I was going to be at a disadvantage in the workplace, and that I was going to have to work just a little bit harder than everybody else to get noticed just as much. I had a lot of advantages, too, but I learned early that I had to telegraph them.
I’ll never forget the time my parents went to a swanky restaurant with us kids and received terrible service. We weren’t exactly dressed like royalty, and my mom told me that we’d likely been dissed because we looked poor, and the server assumed we’d leave a bad tip. Knowing that we would return the next night and it was likely we’d get the same server, my parents left a huge tip. I thought this bit of reverse psychology was a roiling pile of shit. But the next night, lo and behold, we got the same server, and boy whoa howdy was he nice to us. “As long as people think you have money,” my parents told me, “they will treat you really well.”
“Having money” or clout or any other type of invisible advantage will always be invisible in your first interaction unless you like to go everywhere dressed like a celebrity. So, like my parents did, you have to telegraph it quickly in every new interaction. People will see you first as a woman, or nonwhite, or a poor person, or if you go there holding hands with a same-sex date, as a gay person, and you’ll have to fight for every inch of respect you get from them.
I could pretend that legislation regarding women’s reproductive choices, or health care in general, don’t affect me. I could pretend that it doesn’t matter whether or not we think nonwhite people or queer people are, you know, actual people. When it comes to being queer, I’m invisible, being married to a guy, and when it comes to being nonwhite, well, I’m white, so who cares, right? But all I have to do is think about what it’s like when people make assumptions about me based on shitty movies and crap TV shows and outrageous, ingrained cultural assumptions about women, or queer people, or people with a chronic illness, and then I realize I’m fucked. I’m one of the ones they’re coming for.
When people talk about why we shouldn’t have universal health care because poor people don’t deserve to be alive, I remind myself that the people who say that are just one health catastrophe away from changing their minds. But it helps if some of us remind them of that.
It takes a good many people to keep me alive. I recognize that I need to take steps to support them, too, because we’re nothing without each other. That’s a position I could shut up about, or tuck under a rug, for fear of, I don’t know, angry emails or lost book sales, but let’s be honest here—the people who think women and nonwhite people aren’t human are probably the least likely to pick up a book with first lines like mine anyway.
I spent a great deal of my life trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was miserable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me. It made me even easier to dismiss, to overlook, to assume I was just somebody else everybody could roll over and spout off ridiculously sexist, racist crap to without dissent.
But nodding and smiling gets old. It makes it easier for people to box you up and ship you off. I’m only really alive when I’m pissing people off anyway.
The Horror Novel You’ll Never Have to Live: Surviving Without Health Insurance
There was a time before the Affordable Care Act. Before health insurance was subsidized by the government, and before we were all guaranteed coverage no matter our medical conditions. I grew up in that time, and it nearly destroyed me.
In 2005, I was a robust twenty-five-year-old living in Chicago and working as a project assistant for an architectural and engineering firm. In the fall of 2005, I started to lose weight.
This was a good thing, I figured. I worked out a lot. I ate right. It’s just that losing weight got … easier. It was nice. After so many years of working out relentlessly just to stay at a reasonable size, I didn’t have to think about my weight anymore. As the months passed, I experienced other problems, though. I started to get recurring yeast infections—infections that could only be cured with prescription medications, not the usual over-the-counter stuff. My gums bled when I brushed my teeth. Not just a little blood, but bloody spitfuls of the stuff. I was thirsty all the time, to the point where I could barely survive a forty-five-minute plane ride to Indianapolis without having at least one tea or juice on hand. I honest to God thought I was going to die if I couldn’t have a large drink every hour. And when I got ingrown hairs, they would form huge pustules on my body that had to be lanced and drained. As the months passed, the symptoms got worse. My sinus infections dragged on and on. When I went to various urgent care doctors and explained that I was exhausted all the time and getting weird infections, they said I must just be stressed out.
I was so tired, in fact, that I couldn’t get out of bed on time for work. I started to get confused, and had trouble concentrating. My boss had to call me in twice for making data entry errors that I hadn’t had problems with before. I dragged my ass into work an hour late sometimes. An hour late! But I was so exhausted and frazzled I didn’t care; nothing seemed to really matter except sleeping and drinking juice. I also became increasingly hungry in addition to thirsty. I had to eat an extra meal between breakfast and lunch. I was chowing down on burgers and ice cream for lunch … and continuing to lose weight.
I remember lying in the bathtub and rolling up into a sitting position and feeling the bones of my spine against the tub. It hurt. I didn’t have the usual padding there to protect me from the hard tub. It was like being inside someone else’s body. I had a “catastrophic” health insurance plan through my employer, so when I went to the doctor with these complaints, it was always to somewhere cheap like the twenty-four-hour urgent care or Planned Parenthood. I had a $2500 deductible, so everything was out of pocket. I was twenty-five years old, making $40,000 a year living in Chicago; after rent and paying my student loans, it didn’t occur to me to spend a bunch of money on tests. I was twenty-five! Surely there wasn’t anything wrong with me but stress. I never went to the same doctor, so there was nobody to connect the dots related to my various symptoms.
My body finally gave out one Friday after coming home from Indianapolis for a work-related trip. I stepped off the train and got myself a hot dog because I was so hungry. But it gave me such bad heartburn I had to stop eating it. I trundled home via the bus. I could barely walk up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. I was so goddamn tired. I came home and drank and drank and drank—water and juice and Gatorade. And I peed and peed and peed. It was all I could do to stumble from my bed to the bathroom. I had to grab hold of the couch for balance.
