March 19th, 2005
In Defense of "Skinny Bitches"
Lately I’ve come across several references by fat women* (or, in the case of a recent poetry slam winner, women who’re just fatter than the women they’re criticizing) to “skinny bitches.” Now perhaps I ought to consider the source here, but I feel compelled to address this. I was reminded of these resentful comments while out walking yesterday, an early spring-like day here in the big city, and for a block or so I ended up behind a petite thin young white woman with a honey-blonde ponytail, who had taken advantage of the (relatively) warm weather to don a pair of those short silky running shorts, navy with white stripes down the sides. I looked down at her legs sticking out of those shorts–they were pale pinkish-white, newly shaven and smooth, faintly reminiscent of raw chicken breast, and perhaps the circumference of my arms. And I didn’t hate her. I wondered if she were cold, without any fat to keep her warm. I worried about her, a little; she looked so weak and vulnerable with her thin little naked legs, the poor thing. But she seemed quite confident and content, bouncing along with the demeanor of someone who might break into a race walk at any moment; she turned right at the corner of 16th Street and I turned left, to wait for the bus, and our moment of cosmic collision passed.
But I thought about her, and women like her, and women who hate women like her, as I waited for that bus. I thought about how I feel around thin women. I feel nervous around thin women. I feel extra big and clumsy and sloppy and asexual. It’s hard to trust them immediately, until I ascertain the likelihood of their making some comment about how fat they are, or how great their latest diet is going. I assume they wouldn’t be interested in making friends with me. In the last few months I’ve been rightly shamed for these preconceptions by making the acquaintance of a very cool thin woman, a woman with a history of athletic competence beyond my wildest imaginings, who gently pursued my friendship while I continued to believe she couldn’t really mean it and so turned down her many invitations–until I finally realized she actually liked me. My friendship with her continues to expose my own fat-hating, thin-supremacist assumptions–for example, that thin people, no matter how athletic, uniformly enjoy physical activity, and that fat people uniformly don’t. S is open about how much she doesn’t like not having a car and “having to walk everywhere.” She likes to get rides. She likes to take cabs, particularly home from the lesbian bar late on Saturday night. While I’m always incredibly relieved to take a cab (I struggle successfully in those moments with my guilt about being middle-class enough to afford it) I am compelled to say, “You have to make that decision, because it can’t be the fat girl who doesn’t want to walk to the subway.” One night we were talking about the public transportation-dependent lifestyle (after she very kindly and completely un-condescendingly offered to stop and let me rest after climbing up a broken subway escalator), and she said, “You know, I don’t do anything to be like this. It’s just the way I am.” Who knew a thin woman would have to remind me of the core of what I believe about body size–that we pretty much have the bodies that we have, and the bodies that we have tell us a whole lot of nothin’ about each other. The other night S reminded me of her dislike of hoofing it, and I thought of another friend, a big tall hefty gorgeous Amazon with great fat politics, who walks five miles a day to and from work, and walks on weekends for fun (or something). And I felt another myth, another preconception, explode inside my head.
So you see, it’s silly and counterproductive to hate thin women. Hate their privilege, if you want; I do. I hate the culture that makes it okay for them to wear skimpy little clothes and go swimming in 90-degree weather without getting verbally abused by strangers; I hate that they are able to ride bikes in the street, and hang out in bars where they get free drinks instead of rebukes and ridicule.
But when I look at them I also see an entire range of experience I’ve been shielded from by living with a socially unacceptable body type. I’ve been hit on by a strange man exactly once in my life (beyond the random “hey baby” in passing). I’ve never had to reject a stranger and then wonder for the rest of the night if he was going to harass me, stalk me, follow me home. Ginmar describes this frightening and apparently common male response to rejection:
…have you ever had some guy just approach you on the street, ask you out or something, and then not take it well? I saw something in Salon recently, where a woman was complaining about guys just approaching her and then getting enraged when she rejected them. The letter writers took her to task for not taking the mercy fuck approach, which is interesting in view of all the discussions we had here recently about rape and consent, about how saying no is useless when people are incapable of hearing it in the first place. A guy who thinks he’s entitled to fuck you is probably not a real good listener.
Sorry, Ginmar, brilliant analysis, and I’ve got your back, sister, but I can’t relate. Likewise, I’ve never had to deal with the reality of being stalked or followed home. I’ve never had to resist pressure from male friends to have sex with them. Now I’m not naive enough to suggest that men’s abuse of women is completely dependent upon looks and size, but I’m also not militant enough to deny that thin women are at greater risk of being targeted for sexual harassment. And I’m not trying to minimize the verbal abuse and ridicule, not to mention the social and sexual rejection, directed at women like me, simply for looking the way we do. That damages us too, believe me. But let’s be clear that bad behavior from men–ridicule and rejection or sexual harassment–is not thin women’s fault.
So characterizing thin women as “skinny bitches”–i.e., dissing women because of their body size–is no way to achieve what we want–i.e., respect for women regardless of body size. We can, and should, call women of all sizes on their unthinking, insensitive, uninformed comments about and to us (see “It’s Not the Fat, It’s the Stupidity“); but as hanging out with S has made clear to me, body size does not dictate attitude. Some, maybe even most, thin women may believe the propaganda that they are small through hard work and self-deprivation, and hence our moral superiors; but others are just doing their best, like us fat women, to get by in a body shaped by genetics and environment and temperament. When we write off thin women based on their size, we’re engaging in the same process we deplore in the culture–making assumptions about people based on how they look–even if our assumptions result only in petty impotent spiteful sour-grapes blog-based venting. When we assume thin women couldn’t possibly understand or empathize with our struggles, nor we with theirs, we run the risk of missing out on wonderful friends and allies.
*(scroll down to sixth paragraph of entry for 3/13/2005)
