Fat and Furious

THE SHAMING STARTED the day she was born. A doctor in Seattle, Washington, held up baby Lindy West and declared the circumference of her head to be ‘off the charts’. The incident became a joke in her family. West laughed it off at first but she says she always knew that she was ‘Abnormally big. Medical-anomaly big. Unchartably big.’ And she tried to become a small person in other ways— turning into a terror-stricken mouse at school, talking (through nudges and whispers) to no one other than her mother. In Shrill—part memoir, part feminist roar—West recounts the first time (at the age of eight) when she was asked to join the ‘above 100 kg’ group at a child’s birthday party, ‘No one was quite sophisticated enough to make a value judgment based on size yet, but we knew it meant something.’

Today, aged 35, West commands a Twitter following of over 75,000 people. She’s been the force behind several social justice campaigns such as #ShoutOutYourAbortion ( which focuses on helping women overcome the shame of aborting). In 2015, her marriage to musician and writer Ahamefule J Oluo went viral as a dream wedding for plus- sized women. West is also a comedian, columnist, editor and freelance writer. Yet, the woman who motivates and encourages so many, admits to having had no early role models of her own. ‘As a kid, I never saw anyone remotely like myself on TV… Fat women were sexless mothers, pathetic punch lines or gruesome villains.’ She did, however, learn from the portrayal of fat women in popular media. Ursula the Sea Witch from Little Mermaid taught her that ‘History is written by victors….Don’t trust some steroidal sea king’s smear campaign against the radical fatty in the next grotto,’ and from The Last Unicorns she came to understand that ‘Fat women’s sexuality isn’t just ludicrous, it’s also suffocating, disgusting, and squelchy’.

For West, it didn’t just get worse before it got better, it got downright nasty. As a popular blogger, the sheer volume of hate aimed at her for posting photos in halter dresses and crop tops was enough to push her to a point where ‘Being harassed on the internet became a normal, common part of life.’ She writes, ‘As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.’

In love, she encountered a different kind of shame. While men would want to have sex with her, they never wanted to go to a restaurant with her, bring her to their office party or open Christmas presents with her. ‘It would have been relatively simple to swallow the idea that I was objectively sexually undesirable, but the truth was more painful: There was something about me that was symbolically shameful. It’s not that men didn’t like me; it’s that they hated themselves for doing so.’

And yet, even as she watched her friends turn into ‘effortless, exquisite things’ and she tried to be more than a ‘stump’, West began to see just how the idea of a perfect body was nothing more than a lie. Coming across campaigns where fat women were presented with dignity instead of scorn (like Leonard Nimoy’s legendary Full Body Project), she realised that learning to own and love herself was, in part, learning to unlearn what society had taught her over the years.

How she unlearned cultural stereotypes and grew to be comfortable in her own skin might be the plot of the book, but West also includes several bits that reflect her deep understanding of her body. In a refreshingly honest description of why she loves being fat, she says, ‘The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows—literal and metaphorical— meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me. My bones feel like iron— heavy, but strong. I used to say that being fat in our culture was like drowning (in hate, in blame, in your own tissue), but lately I think it’s more like burning. After three decades in the fire, my iron bones are steel.’

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