On the Precarity of Being Fat and Female
I could so easily have ended up a teen mother—and I would have been miserable.
(Image: Zack Blanton/Shutterstock)
These days, when I look around at my life, I feel so lucky. I have a job I love, teaching philosophy at Cornell, with wonderful students and colleagues. I have a sweet, funny, happy kid, whom my husband and I love to distraction. And my husband and I have a truly happy marriage, of now thirteen years duration.
Yes, we are weary, after the last two and a half years of raising our kid with very little childcare (and none whatsoever until this summer, when we had a fantastic babysitter for a few hours weekly). But when we said “Happy Anniversary!” this morning, upon a routine changing of the parent-on-duty over cheerios, while our daughter climbed all over both of us demanding one more heartfelt rendition of Noni the Pony (one of the few positive representations of fatness in young children’s literature), we meant it. Deeply.
But I’m struck, as I plan my syllabus on diverse forms of embodiment for the Fall semester, just how contingent is all of this. How precarious, moreover—some because good fortune, for anyone, is always touch and go. And some because of the specifics of how I’m embodied in the world, as a fat, female person, and the ways this undermines our equal access to certain vital goods and freedoms.
I was so lucky I didn’t get pregnant at age seventeen, when I started having sex with my high school boyfriend. I remember telling him, in hushed tones, that if I did get pregnant, I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to have an abortion. I felt, and told myself, that I wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt afterward. (Whether or not this would have been true in the event of an unwanted pregnancy is, of course, another story; many people change their minds when faced with similar circumstances.) And, though I didn’t tell him or anyone else this, I also felt my body was too fat to go on birth control and risk the further weight gain. So we used condoms, and prayed they wouldn’t break.
One day the condom broke. Because of course it did. I was so lucky that we had the resources and wherewithal to procure Plan B (or its Australian equivalent at the turn of the millennium) from a local clinic afterward. If my boyfriend hadn’t had a car and a license, maybe we would have just chanced it. (The clinic, the only plausible one we could find in the phone book, was hard to get to.) And this despite having supportive, liberal, secular parents, who made their pro-choice stance clear, and never once policed my sexuality. They were incredibly good. Still, the shame of the prospect of an unwanted teen pregnancy so easily could have resulted in a real one.
How many teens in the US today (cis girls, trans boys, and some non-binary and intersex folks included) post-Dobbs will not be so lucky? Particularly since, for slightly fatter people (over 155lb), Plan B is not reliable, and Ella is only reliable for patients some 40lb heavier (up to 195lb). (Of course, it’s still worth taking these emergency forms of contraception unless the insertion of an IUD, which works well as emergency contraception within five days of intercourse for patients of any weight, is a feasible alternative option.)
Shame not only bows our heads, and isolates us from each other; it stops us from taking action. It can hijack our very agency. It could have stopped me from going to college, at least in the short term, let alone pursuing my dreams of moving to the US for graduate school and ultimately becoming a college professor. I could so easily have ended up with a baby on my hip at eighteen, perhaps stuck in a premature marriage to a sweet but ultimately unsuitable partner, in my small hometown in semi-rural Australia. There’s nothing wrong with early parenthood, of course, for those who want it—and, crucially, can access the material resources and social support to which they are entitled to make this viable. But I would have been miserable, and longed for the freedom both constituted and conferred on me by a liberal arts education.
I was so lucky too that, despite being a somewhat fat teen, I did find a sweet, gentle boyfriend who was never anything but respectful, indeed slightly reverent, toward me. He treated me beautifully throughout our relationship. And though we had little in common—me being the intellectual, bookish type, and him athletic and outdoorsy—our relationship of nearly three years set a valuable template for me of how to be secure and happy and well-treated in a romantic relationship.
Reader, I am ashamed to say I dumped him unceremoniously in my second year of college. (While I don’t regret the decision, I dearly wish I could go back in time and do things differently.) What followed afterward was a series of mistakes and mistreatment, punctuated by a precious few happier interludes, which I write about in my book-in-progress about fatphobia. In a nutshell, I was too afraid of being rejected as a fat young woman to demand better treatment from men for quite some time. But I was lucky to have a certain amount of romantic self-esteem banked to fall back upon eventually. Some years later, I met my husband: a truly good man, with whom I share the deepest imaginable connection and truest partnership. I am so happy to be with him—and so, so lucky.
I am also so lucky that I got to pursue my nascent calling and become what I am now. I am so lucky that, when I did accidentally get pregnant before I was ready to be, at age 33, I was able to access safe, effective abortion care, supported unequivocally by my husband in that decision. And I was so lucky that, when we decided to try for a child some two years later, I was able to get pregnant without medical intervention. For, my BMI at the time (over 40, placing me in the “severely obese” category) meant I very likely wouldn’t have been able to access IVF treatment or other forms of reproductive assistance, for no compelling medical reason. When I imagine us missing out on the experience of being parents—again, when the time was right—I feel shattered. And angry. And grief-struck by my daughter’s imagined absence from our days and lives, which she has filled with such zest and meaning and wonder.
And so I write now of misogyny and fatphobia not only with a general sense of their galling injustice, and a determination to spend the coin of my own privilege fighting them, but also a profound sense of “there but for the grace of brute luck go I” driving me. And I am struck by the ways in which, even for a person who has ostensibly chosen the life of the mind, my body has always made all of this so precarious. I am deeply grateful for what I have. And I can’t, won’t rest until certain vital goods and freedoms—physical, intellectual, reproductive, and even romantic—that I’ve enjoyed are equally accessible to everyone, regardless of the appearance and nature and capacities of their bodies.
Wow, Kate! Once again you have grabbed me with your openness & insight, and your capacity to use your story in ways that compels us to pay attention. I am, as always, grateful to you and so glad we are friends.
Stunning and deeply affecting. I relate is so many ways. Thank you for articulating this issue so beautifully.