Fatness and Feminism

Where size acceptance is concerned, it isn't enough to be a paid-up feminist. You have to be a feminist who recognises injustice in all its forms. It's no good thinking that feminists will provide a haven for the fat though because left-wing feminists can be just as venomous as right-wing men. Or right-wing women.

Sadly, personal experience has shown me that, when it comes to weight, women are women's worst enemies. It is never men who suggest that I would look or feel 'so much better' if I lost weight. It is never men who say 'Should you be eating that?' It is women who feel the need to comment about another woman's weight before they comment on anything else about her. I find myself in total agreement with food writer Nigella Lawson, who wrote that 'the feminist perspective is a vexed one, for this is so pointedly a tyranny of the sisterhood. It's not men that women diet for, but the unforgiving gaze of other women.

Germaine Greer, for example, looked up to by so many feminists as an icon with almost regal status, seems to have a problem with fat women. In an otherwise thoughtful and thought-provoking Guardian piece about eating disorders, food abuse and marketing pressures, she hones her pen for the attack. She writes about watching a 'hugely obese' German woman 'snatch up the chocolate ice lollies her children had abandoned and literally push them one by one into her face. Under the table her vast thighs were moving spasmodically in a grotesque version of orgasm.'

What Greer is doing here is holding up a portrait of a woman who possibly has an eating disorder (though not necessarily) but she has painted the portrait in a way that will make the reader say 'Ugh.' The article is full of good information about anorexia,

bulimia, dieting and the consumption of junk food but only when she refers to the obese do her personal prejudices show themselves. Again, this is about use of language, but because she is not as blatant as the Telegraph writer - not once does she actually say that she finds the fat German woman disgusting - her portrayal of the woman without overt insults conveys even more powerfully her distaste for fat people. Like many other fat-haters she couches her prejudice in a spurious concern for those with eating disorders. She also, perhaps surprisingly for one who is capable of showing great intelligence, resorts to the tired old stereotype about fat people stuffing their faces. Obese people, she claims, 'feed themselves junk on demand when no one they know can observe their obscene pleasure.'

In a similar, though much more moderate piece, feminist writer Joan Smith looks at the polarisation between the 'fat is good' faction of the size-acceptance movement and the thorough condemnation of obesity by health professionals. She quotes from a recently published interview with Andrea Dworkin, which refers to the latter's collapse and subsequent hospitalisation with bronchitis, pneumonia and blood clots. According to Smith this 'graphically revealed the risks that she and other fat people are running'. On whose authority does she assert this? Anyone can get bronchitis, pneumonia and thromboses. The fact that thrombosis is claimed to be more common in fat people does not ipso fiicto mean that Andrea Dworkin's was caused by her size, but this kind of assumption is always made, usually without a shred of evidence.

While Smith is right to be alarmed at the fast - growing incidence of obesity in the'western world, she too reveals her prejudices by the use of emotive language. She describes an aeroplane flight in which a man 'waddled up an aircraft aisle and subsided into the seat next to me. Rolls of flesh overflowed the armrest and I wondered how either of us would get out in an emergency.' Later Smith says we are constantly reminded of our insecurity by spiteful attacks in the media. Pots and kettles spring to mind, though Smith makes it clear that the 'we' refers to women. Are spiteful attacks on men okay then?

The trouble is that we expect feminists to be tolerant of those women who are perceived by society as deviant, and when they reveal the same prejudices as the rest we feel betrayed. When the likes of Germaine Greer and Joan Smith show their distaste for fatness it is somehow worse than Lynda Lee-Potter's full-on attacks in the Daily Mail. Fat women assume they can depend on feminists for support and validation but it is not so. The feminist movement has not embraced size acceptance any more than the rest of society, and we have to get used to that fact.

Eat, Eat, Eat - But Don't Get Fat

It is not the eating behaviour that is being condemned, even though people speak with disgust about those who stuff their faces with cream cakes or never stop eating. All those things would be excusable if they did not result in fatness. You can, if you wish, throw up your food (in private) without being considered a social pariah. In fact you will be pitied; bulimia is a condition recognised as being deserving of therapeutic treatment laced with compassion. It is also, as more than one eating disorders expert has pronounced, a 'fascinating' condition. Apparently.

There is a perverse kind of approval accorded to those who can eat a lot and not put on weight, as though somehow the large amount of food consumed and the lack of weight gain is a kind of personal achievement. This suggests even more strongly that eating behaviour is really of no consequence as long as you don't get fat. As Llewellyn Louderback says in his brilliant book Fat Power, 'It's one of those psychological, fool-the - eye things. A fat person munching on a single stalk of celery looks gluttonous, while a skinny person wolfing down a twelve-course meal simply looks hungry.' It's about perception, and about what people see when they look at a fat person. What they think they see is someone out of control, someone who is not ashamed of excess, and this frightens them as body weight is the only thing people feel is left to them to control in this fragmented society.

As Helena Fishlock-Lomax demonstrates in her letter, it is those who are perceived as 'fat through their own fault' who must be punished. Being fat is a crime, a sin, in the eyes of the majority. The kind of acceptance accorded to other minority groups is not available for the fat. This is why the size - acceptance movement is more important than ever because not only is the situation not improving, it is getting worse.

Where It All Began

I am old enough to remember the fifties, when a curvaceous size 14 was considered a desirable shape by men and women alike and the androgynous female body was not something to yearn for. In fact so worried were women that they might be too thin that there was an over-the-counter product called Wate-On. I remember my mother buying it. The fact that it has not existed for many years has little to do with trading standards legislation, though I see it is still going strong in Africa, where pharmacies do a roaring trade selling it to prospective brides trying to become fat. The oft -quoted fact that Marilyn Monroe was a size 16 and the icon of her day serves as a benchmark for enviable body image of that time.

Then came Twiggy. The impact she made was because of her beauty: her huge eyes, perfect face and tiny, childlike body. We had not seen anything like it before and she set a new standard in modelling. She was young, she was vulnerable, and a great many people realised that they stood to make a lot of money from her. What is not mentioned is that Twiggy did nothing to achieve or maintain her size. 'I appear to be the epitome of the first skinny teenager,' she says in her autobiography Twiggy in Black and White. 'But that is exactly what I was. A naturally skinny teenager.'

She describes the frenzy that followed the discovery that she actually ate like a normal human being. When the media found out that she had porridge for breakfast they even wanted pictures of her eating it. 'What I should have told them was that I really liked it with condensed milk,' she says.

Twiggy's memories of childhood revolve around food. Her mother was a wonderful cook with her own catering business. 'Mum's speciality was puddings: syrup sponge with custard, spotted dick. Just the thought of them makes me drool even now. Though nothing seemed to put on any weight.' Her mother would always come home from functions she'd catered loaded down with bags of goodies for her children.

Twiggy's unrestrained eating, though, earned admiration because she remained thin. 'I have never had to diet in my life,' she says. 'It's a question of metabolism. Until I had [my daughter] I ate anything and everything. I'm glad I'm thinner rather than fatter. But it's not a question of choice. It's genetic. You only have to look at my sisters. We're like three peas in a pod. Thankfully I'm now about twenty-five pounds heavier than I was in 1965 when my bust (if you can call it that) was thirty - and - a - half inches and my hips thirty-two... The lumps on my chest only became breasts After I'd had Carly.'

Even though Twiggy was so tiny, the ultra-thin body as we know it today did not catch on in the sixties. By then the ideal was a size 12, and though the hourglass curves of the fifties were not so fashionable, neither was excessive thinness.

It was the eighties that brought about the biggest change. Along with Thatcherism, greed, excesses of every sort, conspicuous consumption and the emphasis on acquistion all formed the prevailing ethos. Appetites of all kinds were running wild; spirituality was defunct. Body control entered the arena as part of a new faux-religious ethic. Interviews with female celebrities were not complete without reference to body size. Women otherwise perceived as intelligent confessed to yearnings to be childsize. TV presenter Anne Robinson smoked to remain a size 10: 'I wouldn't smoke if I thought that when I stopped I wouldn't put on weight. I desperately battle to be a size 10 and I'm a natural size 12', and the actress Patricia Hodge bemoaned the iron control necessary to maintain her size 8 figure. Why? Why did these mature women, acceptably slim by any standard, yearn and fight to be less than a 'normal' size?

A study has shown that winners of the Miss America contest have been getting thinner over the years. Since Miss America began in the 1920s, the winners have become 12 per cent thinner and 2 per cent taller. By the eighties, their BMI had dropped below 18.5, which is the World Health Organisation's cut-off point for unhealthy undernourishment.

At the beginning of the eighties, people were just beginning to hear about a strange disease called anorexia. Bulimia put in an appearance a little later. By the end of the decade, both diseases were rampant and the effect of anorexia on teenage girls was a cause for national concern. The death rate was becoming alarming. If ever a time was right for size acceptance to gain a foothold, that time was then.