What's Wrong With Fat? (11 page)

ASDAH is most associated with a HAES approach and now possesses the official Health at Every Size trademark. Founded in 2003, ASDAH is, according to their official website, “an international professional organization composed of individual members who are committed to the principles of Health at Every Size (HAES(sm)).” 102 These principles are, in turn, defined as:

1. Accepting and respecting the diversity of body shapes and sizes.

2. Recognizing that health and well-being are multidimensional and that they include physical, social, spiritual, occupational, emotional, and intellectual aspects.

3. Promoting all aspects of health and well-being for people of all sizes.

4. Promoting eating in a manner which [
sic.
] balances individual nutritional needs, hunger, satiety, appetite, and pleasure.

5. Promoting individually appropriate, enjoyable, life-enhancing physical activity, rather than exercise that is focused on a goal of weight loss. 103

The Association for the Health Enrichment of Large Persons (AHELP) was a 1990s precursor to ASDAH. 104 The
Healthy Weight Journal
(which was called the
Health at Every Size Journal
for the last two years of its existence) was founded in 1986 and terminated in Fall 2006 and provided a venue for research articles adopting a HAES perspective. 105

NAAFA is another key supporter of a health at every size frame. NAAFA, which is the oldest and largest nationwide fat acceptance organization with approximately 2,000 to 3,000 members, included a link to HAES on its 2009 website and featured keynote addresses by authors of books advocating a health at every size perspective at its 2001, 2003, and 2009 NAAFA conventions. 106 Fat activists routinely share stories about how doctors assume, without doing proper exams, that any health problem that a fat patient suffers, from infertility to blood clots to a sore throat, must be due to their obesity. They report how fears about being “harangued about their weight” make them and other fat women reluctant to seek preventive medical care, thus leading to health problems that could have been prevented with early screening. They cite scientific research that corroborates their personal experience, for instance, documenting widespread anti-fat bias among medical professionals. 107 In contrast with proponents of the other frames discussed so far, HAES advocates are overwhelmingly female. As we have already discussed, compared to organizations like the IOTF or CDC, these associations have considerable less economic and cultural capital with which to advance this frame.

However, in June 2004, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a food- and beverage-industry lobbying group, produced a report entitled “An Epidemic of Obesity Myths” and a companion advertisement that publicized some critiques of claims about the “obesity epidemic.” Quoting researchers including Glenn Gaesser, Paul Ernsberger, Jon Robison, and many others, it specifically challenged the statistic that obesity (and overweight) kills 400,000 Americans each year, the idea that one cannot be overweight and healthy, that overeating is the main cause of obesity, and that obesity costs the U.S. economy $117 billion annually. 108 The CCF publicly criticized a 2004 study by CDC researchers estimating that 400,000 excess deaths were associated with overweight and obesity in the year 2000, calling for it to be retracted in a February 2005 op–ed. 109 In 2005, the CCF publicized a new CDC study that revised down the estimate of deaths associated with obesity and overweight in the year 2000 to less than 26,000 in a book (downloadable for free on their website) and an advertisement campaign, evoking “obesity hype.” 110 While the financial resources of the CCF allowed it to reach a wider audience, its association with the food industry was discrediting in the eyes of many. Indeed, it seems to have discredited obesity skeptics more generally who are often presumed to be tools of the food industry even when they are not. 111

FAT AS BEAUTY FRAME

According to the fat as beauty frame, fat itself is not a problem. Rather, the problem is that people have a narrow understanding of beauty that excludes fat people. A fat as beauty frame affirms fat as a positive aesthetic. For instance, the English rock band Queen praises “fat bottomed girls” in their 1978 hit song “Fat Bottomed Girls”: “Are you gonna take me home tonight? Ah down beside that red firelight, Are you gonna let it all hang out? Fat bottom girls, You make the rockin’ world go round!” In his hit song “Baby Got Back,” contemporary U.S. rap singer Sir Mix-A-Lot affirms that “average black men” prefer women with curves, and specifically large buttocks: “I like big butts and I cannot lie... I’m tired of magazines sayin’ flat butts are the thing. Take the average black man and ask him that.” While rejecting white mainstream ideals of extreme slenderness
,
he nonetheless praises an hourglass figure: “
Cosmo
says you’re fat, but I’m not down with that, cuz your waist is small and your curves are kickin’.”

Social scientific research lends support to the claim that African American men (and women) are more likely than American whites to find fatter or “thicker” women more attractive than very thin women. For instance, anthropologist Mimi Nichter found that African American high school girls are more likely than their white counterparts to say that the most beautiful women are fat “in the right places,” that is, have large buttocks and breasts and smaller—but not completely flat—stomachs. 112 Sir Mix-A-Lot is one of several rap singers who rhyme about their attraction for curvier women. And yet, ironically, as anthropologist Joan Gross has pointed out, the women who perform with them tend to be quite slender (albeit curvy) and considerably thinner than the men beside them. 113 Other research suggests that it is specifically African Americans of lower socialeconomic status that have a preference for the fatter female form and that upwardly mobile and middle-class African Americans, like middle-class whites, tend to value slenderness. 114

Among middle-class, white men, affirming a desire for fat women can be stigmatizing. While some men repress or hide this sexual preference, others vocally defend it. Bill Fabrey, the founder of the NAAFA, falls into the second camp. He speaks passionately about being “a man who admires the larger woman” and how being a fat admirer, or FA, represents a “minority sexual preference.” Growing up in a white, middle-class household, he says he was about 12 years old when he realized that he “had always felt that way, just couldn’t verbalize it.” He says that his mother was shocked when he told her of his “taste”; she insisted that he was “going through a phase.”
Fabrey says it took his parents twenty years to accept his “taste, with any respect and recognition,” even though he describes them as “very supportive parents in all other areas.” He says they had a very low opinion of fat people because they had never met a fat person who “had high self-esteem or dressed nicely or talked like an intelligent person.” Fabrey blames that on the detrimental effects of the prejudice and mistreatment fat people face in the contemporary United States.

Fabrey talks about deciding to form NAAFA after
The New York Times
declined to print a photo of his fiancée on their wedding announcements page in 1963. He noted that he and his fiancée had “comparable connections” to other people whose announcements were published and surmised that the only reason they declined the photo was because his fiancée weighed 350 pounds. He says he eventually reached a point where he said:
“How dare they tell me what I should find attractive?” He says that, unlike fat kids, he was always reminded “what a good kids [he] was” and that he “could do anything [he] wanted to do.” So, he says, he “started a movement.”
While his “taste” for fat women was stigmatized, his social location as an average-sized, white, middle-class, and highly educated straight man gave him confidence as well as cultural capital to wage this battle.

His original aspiration was to use NAAFA to mobilize for political change, but he quickly learned that potential constituents were more interested in finding a social and romantic outlet, and, in response, he developed a dating service and local NAAFA social activities. As Fabrey puts it, “the search for a partner, sexual or otherwise, is a huge, extremely pressing need. And it’s almost like people have to get it out of the way before they can proceed with other stuff.” The annual NAAFA convention, which features a fashion show, a dance, and many late-night parties, continues to provide a social venue for fat women and fat admirers to meet.
There are also a growing number of purely social venues that host “BBW (Big Beautiful Women)” events. When I attended my first NAAFA convention in August of 2001 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, I discovered that few of the attendees were especially involved in fat rights politics.
Instead, they had come to buy flattering clothes in their size from the vendors, walk down the catwalk at the NAAFA fashion show, and/or meet a nice guy at the NAAFA dance.

Many, if not most, of the proponents of a fat beauty frame, especially as it relates to women, have been men. Yet, feminist lesbian-, bisexual-, and queer-identified fat women have also actively promoted an aesthetic and erotic appreciation for fat women through performance, via groups concentrated in San Francisco, including the Fat Lip Readers Theater, Big Burlesque, Bod Squad, Big Moves, the Phat Fly Girls, the Padded Lilies, and The Fat Women’s Swim. 115 From 1994 to 1997, a collective in San Francisco produced the zine (self-published magazine)
Fat Girl: A zine for fat dkyes
and the women who want them
.

While those who idealize the fat female form represent a minority in the contemporary United States, their preference was, until quite recently, the norm. For instance, the famous Venus of Willendorf, a small figurine carved in 24,000 to 22,000 b.c.e. and representing a woman with bulging breasts, stomach, and buttocks, is an ancient representation of fat women as the epitome of beauty ( see image 2.1 ). More recently, seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Rubens’s painting “The Three Graces” illustrates female beauty via three nude women who would be considered moderately obese by current standards ( see image 2.2 ). According to one estimate, more than 80 percent of human societies on record have preferred women who would be overweight or mildly obese by current medical standards. 116 As late 1895, upper-class U.S. women were padding their clothing to look more substantial than they were, and actress Lillian Russell, described as having “nothing wraithlike” about her, was the embodiment of beauty and grace. 117
Fat admirers and fat acceptance groups refer to these famous examples to legitimize their claims that fat women are beautiful. 118

Image 2.1:
Venus of Willendorf, 24,000 b.c.e.–22,000 b.c.e.

Image 2.2:
“The Three Graces” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)

FAs emphasize how fat accentuates women’s femininity. For instance, white, middle-class sociologist and fat admirer Erich Goode describes his attraction for very fat women as related to “the way that women’s bodies are different than men’s.” Specifically, according to him, “Ideally, men are tall, women are short; men are hard, women are soft; men are angular, women are round; men have flat stomachs, women have a belly; women have big rear ends, men’s are small; men don’t have much body fat, women have a lot.” 119

Similarly, one self-identified FA writes in an online essay, entitled “F.A. Confidential: True Confessions of a Fat Admirer,” that FAs are “more in tune with natural human sexual impulses than non-F.A.’s” because they appreciate that “the human female of reproductive age is genetically designed to be rounded with layers of fat, definitely not skin and bones like the typical fashion model. Those wonderful fat deposits in the breast, hips, thighs and buttocks are what create the distinctive body shape that distinguishes women from men, and the fat equips women for the physical rigors of childbearing.” 120 Based on 15 in-depth interviews with an ethnically diverse group of FAs, sociologist Michaela Null argues that FAs often consider fat women to be more genuinely feminine than thin or muscular women. One of her respondents described very fat women as “more womanly” since they have more “of the feminine features; larger hips, larger breasts larger butt, larger arms, and all softer as well.” 121 They consider thin women to be underdeveloped or masculine.