Fat activism makes me feel sexy.

Being a fat girl in a short dress while walking around the Marina with an enormous whoopie pie filled with vanilla buttercream (thanks, Susie Cakes!) - as was the case on Tuesday - is an act of political resistance. Because fatties have so thoroughly been pushed into the margins of society and because food and fat have been so successfully demonized the potential to perform radical acts of fat love reside within all kinds of otherwise commonplace things. My short skirt, my whoopie pie are symbols of my refusal to capitulate.  

So, when I got an email last Thursday from some fellow fatties about a direct action flash mob (coordinated by Marilyn Wann, author of Fat?So!) to protest the Obesity Treatment and Prevention Conference at the Hyatt in SF, I was all about it. An aside about the word obesity: it's a medical pathology, not a politically correct neutral word. I don't...

Is it just me or was Miss Piggy a fag hagging fat high femme top before anyone else was?

In reading Miss Piggy's Guide to Life (a highly, highly recommended text), I was reminded of how Miss Piggy was a hero of mine when I was just a little fat brown girl. I looked through this book, written in the year of my birth (1982), and Miss Piggy is wearing outfits that I wear only on my big girl bravest days. An orchid, veiled mini bowler, fur, and animal print in the same outfit? It reminds me of that time I went to a Prince-themed queer femme clothing swap last weekend.

And can't some frogs change gender.. ergo, could Kermit be a drag king or a trans man? Highly likely if you ask me.

Miss Piggy is a total queer icon. She's an affront to paradigmatic femininity (and Kermie, an affront to paradigmatic masculinity). She's a feminist and a body anarchist. In her Guide to Life she gives advice on how to stay fat and dispenses food philosophy: Sure, ice cream has lotsa calories, but it doesn't have as many calories as a lobster, a block of cheese *and* an ice cream!

I love that I watched her as a child. The reclamation of Miss P. is an exciting project. 

I spent a year of my life dieting, telling my students I loved my body, telling my housemates it was for my health- gleefully watching my body disappear in a mirror, celebrating each night I went to bed with stomach pains, knowing I would wake up and be rewarded for my denial by another pound lost on the scale.  The scale- my own personal numeric demon as I obsessively weighed myself after a night of indulging on a slice of pizza…no weight gain!  As I excitedly weighed after a day of eating nothing but salad…I gained a pound?!  Weighing became a ritual…take clothes off…use the restroom so there is nothing left in your body…

3,000 dollars…30 pounds.

It has been four months and I finally gathered the courage to throw the diet food, and the evil scale, out!

It is a typical story.  One I hear repeated constantly by women I meet everyday.  I know the statistics on weight and dieting.  Almost 90 percent of women are effectively on a permanent diet.  My size 2 students who spend every day running nowhere on a treadmill and counting calories attest to this.  The women I work with in community theater who share experiences of thirty to forty years of dieting…one who cheerfully admits she would have snorted cheetos if she could have gotten them into her body fast enough are reminders of a diet and body obsessed culture.  I spent five years secure in my decision to...

I am thinking about fucking.

how fucking has become a political word…how I, who have never been fucked, use this word.Every day when I leave my house with my breasts out and my clothes tight…I say fuck you to this fat phobic culture.  When I demand to be heard I say fuck you to those who silence me because I am fat, female, poor.

Fuck is political like Obama…divorced from an actual body, so much larger than an individual….a movement.

Lilly allen wrote a song about it…fuck you….not about fucking at all….about giving the finger to politicians against gay marriage.

I talk about how fucked up the world is daily…but I rarely talk about fucking people.Perhaps these words are incompatible in my fat existence.  In my work as a fat activist I constantly hear about size discrimination, hatred…I experience hatred on a daily basis because of my body.  Putting on my fuck you armor is work.  It is a daily process of hardening myself…reminding myself my body is fabulous and the world around me is miserable and, most likely, starving after a breakfast of jogging and Starbucks.  In fighting to be treated as human I often lose sight of my sexuality.  My life becomes me against the world.  Us fatties against the skinny bitches.  A fat phobic world against fat me. 

I love my body.  I won’t stand for...