The Wide Angle

I wish that there were other ways of talking about fat in public: a media that embraced truthfully the complexity of what it is to be fat in a culture that would rather fat people didn't exist

Feature by Charlotte Cooper | 13 Sep 2006

Today I opened a magazine and read a rather nasty television preview about a rather mean-sounding documentary about Britain's Fattest Teenagerâ„¢. Then I went online to look at the news and read about some egg-headed boffins who are trying to invent an anti-obesity vaccine. After that I saw a headline in my local paper which explained that women in their 40s are developing eating disorders because they hate the way they look. And all this before I looked at the gaypers which, as you know, are home to ads for gyms, weight loss supplements and pictures of muscle marys.

Today is not an unusual day: our media would be even flimsier without the moral panic around fat to provide it with useless stories, so it's not surprising that there's so much talk about weight and bodies. I'm glad that I'm not a media studies student trying to make sense of how the press reflects our own bodies back at us - let alone any po-mo investigation into The Queer Body - there's just so much chaff in the papers and on the telly that I'd never know where to begin.

I don't know about you but I'm really sick of the way that fat is talked about and understood in the media. It bears no resemblance to the way that I live my life as a fat person, and as a fat dyke.

Homosexuals still complain about the way that we are portrayed in the media but I have to say that the representation of gay life is light years ahead when you compare it to fat. And fat and queer? You're joking, right? My very own subset of the Venn Diagram of Humanity is more or less invisible. If you want to see your reality spelled out in clichés - uncritical programmes about the wonders of weight loss surgery; the skinny journalists traipsing the streets in fat suits just to show the rest of the world how bad it really is to be fat; diet evangelists selling their latest scam; stupid, sorry, pathetic and damaged fat folk who are made to represent us all; Millie Tant stereotypes - that's well and good. But I don't.

I can't stand to see another headless fat body on a television screen. Headless? I'm not talking blood and guts, it's a different kind of headless which you'll know when you see: it's when well-meaning but ignorant television production people shoot footage of anonymous fat people on the street - probably without their consent and without paying them - and keep their head out of the camera frame. Add to this a Brass Eye style commentary about the horrors of obesity and they've got themselves a news story. Like every other fat person in the land I'm waiting for the day in which I turn up on my very own screen as one of those headless horrors and, when it happens, let me tell you, there will be lawyers involved.

I wish that there were other ways of talking about fat in public: a media that embraced truthfully the complexity of what it is to be fat in a culture that would rather fat people didn't exist; ways of working out how fat intersects with other aspects of ourselves, with gay, lesbian, bi and trans identity; places where fat people could express the reality of our lives without censure; opportunities to say really radical, and dangerous things about fat, you know, maybe something completely incendiary and revolutionary like: "Just as I think it's fine to be out and proud about my sexuality, I also think it's okay to be fat."

Readers, I hope this corner of The Skinny can be that space.

Charlotte Cooper is a writer and fat activist.

http://www.charlottecooper.net