This week I attended a powerful and just-plain-cool event called “Fat Politics and Sexuality in the Face of Hate.” The panelists where a who’s who of awesome:

Substantia Jones
founder and photographer of The Adipositivity Project
Lesley Kinzel
blogger of fatshionista.com
Kathleen LeBesco, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication Arts
and Distinguished Chair, Marymount Manhattan College; contributor to The Fat Studies Reader
Zoe Meleo-Erwin
PhD Candidate and NOLOSE board member
Marilyn Wann
author of FAT!SO?

I could kick myself for ALMOST not going. And it wasn’t just the women on the panel who are awesome, it was the whole damn crowd. A smarter, lovelier, more bad-ass roomful of chicks you’d be hard pressed to find (there were some men folk, but we outnumbered them 10 to 1). Golda was there, but we didn’t get to sit together because it was standing-room only, and I had arrived early enough to get a spot on a bench.

Fashion and children were two subjects that particularly sparked my interest. As I told the better-than-two-cakes Lesley after the talk, finding her blog was a major revelation. First, she dresses like me! She does a better job (and is much more resourceful), but we share an aesthetic. It’s a weird aesthetic. And finding someone like that in the world was great. And it gave me a lot of confidence to buy cool clothes for myself now. I didn’t have to be smaller to dress better. Deb Malkin was at the talk too, and she stood up and said smart and profound things about fashion and her store. Clothes matter. And Re/Dress is a miracle because it’s one of very very few stores in the universe that a fat girl can walk in to and know that she’ll find kick-ass clothes. In fact, she’ll find too many clothes and have to eat ramen for a week to make up for it. 

Children and “the obesity epidemic”—that was something else that sparked my interest because it’s getting crazy out there for kids, and it was already pretty bad. Let me give you a personal anecdote as an example. When I was a tween, I read loads of awful romance novels where the teen heroine has a major illness. I reread the books over and over and over. In one of my favorites the protaganist had cancer. And she lost a lot of weight because she had cancer. Do you see where this is going? Yes, at the age of eleven I secretly hoped that I would get cancer because it would help me lose weight. I’ve never admitted that to anyone because it’s so awful, and I’m ashamed to have ever thought something so vile. But really, I’m just so sad for my little self. I was a smart kid and I had nice parents and had lots of friends and I was self-assured—except for the fact that I hoped I would get a potentially lethal disease so I could be thin. 

Now kids have the First Lady yelling at them for being fat. The worst bit? There isn’t an epidemic. There’s lots of science to back that up. Yes, kids are eating too much processed food (ALL kids) and spending too much time on the internets instead of climbing up trees and fishing down by the creek. But why oh why do we just need to single out the fat kids! It’s something that’s true of ALL kids. Some of them are fat. Some of them look thin but have Oreo Cakesters coursing through their veins. It’s all this negative, targeted rhetoric that’s bullshit—of course, it’s a much sexier news story that way. It’s not as sexy to reach out to kids and have them try different fresh foods and see what they like. Or to teach them fun and sociable and creative ways they can play without using a joystick. But that kind of sensible thinking isn’t flashy enough to get the First Lady one-on-one time with Katie Couric, right?