I’m fat.
I’m fat but this is not about that.
I’m fat and sometimes that’s all I get to be. At a restaurant. On an airplane. At a doctor’s office.
At work. I’m my own
comparative study; for nearly a decade I was a college instructor with a high
courseload; hundreds of students were giving written evaluations of me almost
all of the time. Show me a random
sampling, I can probably pinpoint the year of the evaluation.
I’m fat, but I wasn’t yesterday. Yesterday I was not fat but I was the day
before. I can determine the year of student comments because Yesterday I was "confident, charismatic, passionate."
The day before yesterday I was "overbearing, unsettling, hard
to watch."
I was fortunate at an early age that people treated me as if
I were smart. My particular bundle of
skills suits the classroom and I had parents who valued what I had to say, so
as long as I can recall no matter what other negative thoughts about me existed
in my brain, I always thought I was bright.
And then I got fat. And
then, apparently, dull.
I was on the job market for about six months not that long
ago; I’ll ask you to accept without proof that the most proficient club in my
bag is my in class demeanor. I got very
close to a few tenure track classroom positions that included multiple rounds
of interviews. It did not surprise me
that the job I got hired for was a virtual one, in which the interviews were Skyped from the neck up.
I’m fat. And
sometimes, that’s all I get to be.
This is not about that.
I won some money on a game show about a decade ago; I was on
multiple episodes and appeared prominently in the credits of the program. Included in the winnings was a trip to ESPN
to see how the sausage got made. I
wanted to be a sports analyst since the first time I walked into Candlestick
Park with my grandfather and was never able to make that happen; so to have
succeeded in a game show on that network and to be invited to sit in on a
production of Sportscenter was validating.
I was in the ESPN hallways and passed by a B level
anchor. He “joked” –
“The cafeteria is that way.”
About an hour I ran into him again. He made the same joke. 'Cause, you know, double the funny.
I’m fat. And
sometimes, that’s all I get to be.
This is not about that.
This is about the Oscars.
Celebrities are unsympathetic plaintiffs. Sally Field isn’t a powerful figure in her
industry, not really, but she’s not Norma Rae either. You don’t see them as marginalized, as voiceless.
But they sat there, invited to a ceremony that presumably
matters to them, to acknowledge that they are, at least for a moment, at the
top of their craft, and from the stage they were told that really, all they are
is tits.
Highly compensated tits.
I don’t think the Oscars are a cathedral; it’s a TV show to
celebrate movies. I don’t look for
reverence.
But there’s probably some distance between that and saying “hey,
‘member when Jodie Foster did that rape scene based on a true story in the
Accused? Tits.”
It’s hard to be funny.
If you can find funny, I’m disinclined to tell you to press the delete
key. My taste in funny is “It’s Always
Sunny in Philadelphia” as opposed to “Modern Family”. I don’t think offensive and funny are
inherently incompatible. “Sunny in
Philly” did a fat joke for a full season.
Sometimes I fast forwarded through those scenes. They made me uncomfortable. I think that’s okay. I wasn’t required to watch and they didn’t
invite me to the set.
I’m hawkish on the separation of church and state, particularly
when it comes to public schools, and the main reason is the audience is
captive. If I’m sitting in 9th
grade Biology, hearing that there are “two sides” to the origin of our species,
evolution or the Biblical account of creation in Genesis, the problem isn’t the
message (I mean, the message is that either (1) the manifest weight of the evidence
or (2) the one specific type of magical thinking favored by the teacher is the
full range of discussion about how we got here, so the message is a problem,
and, full disclosure, this isn’t a hypothetical, this was from a Bio class I
took, but not in high school – in college, I absolutely had a college Biology
professor present evolution as if it were a debate, and that was 1990, before
we got dumb) it’s my inability to leave the room. If “I Saw Your Boobs” is on a Family Guy
episode, Charlize Theron can just turn the channel, but at the Oscars she had
better just play along, ‘cause otherwise she’d be called uptight and probably
given an even more unflattering anatomical label.
I don’t know what it means to be a “good man” outside of
what it means to be a good person, but probably acknowledging that you have a
degree of privilege just by the nature of not being a woman is a good place to
start. I’ve spent a good portion of my
adult life discounted because of my weight; had I not lived a life where my
fluctuating size perfectly correlated to the way I was treated, I don’t know
that I’d appreciate that distinction – I don’t know that I’d understand that it
doesn’t matter how many graduate degrees you earn or how well you performed on
a television show, sometimes all you are is fat.
I don’t know what it feels like to not be a man. Good or otherwise.
But I do not know what it feels like to have what you’ve
accomplished and how you perform not matter because of what you are. To be just
a thing like all the other things. And
that’s what happened at the Oscars Sunday.
