Where Fat Meets Butch

I've always hated shopping for clothes. Even now that I really enjoy dressing up and looking all hot and shit, finding clothes that fit me, particularly button-down shirts, the staple for all my biz casual and dressy wardrobe needs, is elusive and irksome. The experience of finding a great shirt at a vintage store, a western style collar shirt, in worn cotton with mother-of-pearl buttons, say, is more often than not completely demoralizing, as I slide into the sleeves, noticing that the fit of the shoulders and collar and tits are perfect, but the lower two buttons, the ones situated over my distended belly, will not, no matter how I strain, fasten or stay closed. This happens over and over and over again.

My hatred of shopping is perhaps more deeply rooted in my gender nonconformity than it is in my fatness. When my mom and I went to the department store together, I loathed every moment of getting into the changing room with her to try on blouses and dresses and cute little girly shorts with matching flowery tank tops. "Butch" is a shorthand, and not a label I strongly identify with, but it gives you an idea. I've always been a tomboy, ever since before I can remember. I rode bikes on the creek path, played with Star Wars action figures, dug in the dirt, eschewed Barbie and make up and all things pink and purple. My favorite article of clothing when I was a kid was my precious Zoom shirt. A handsomely androgynous striped rugby, I wore it practically every day of my fourth and fifth years. At right, I am receiving the Zoom shirt on my fourth birthday. The eyes in the photo say it all: "I can't wait to get outta this cutsie sundress and into that shirt!"

My mom had a theory about why I didn't like to wear pretty clothes, which she didn't hesitate to share with me during my adolescence. She said she thought I would like wearing dresses if I lost weight. I told her to shove it, but politely. The theory doesn't wash, considering I was a tomboy before I became fat, but it fits nicely into my mom's ideas about my sexuality, and into her self-hating narrative about her own fatness. So much precious life could be lived if fat women could love their bodies instead of being eaten alive by self-hatred.

But being fat certainly contributes to my dread about shopping, my anger that "plus-sized" clothing for women is usually feminine, and often so fucking ugly besides. And the problem with shopping in the men's department is that the cuts are not tailored for womanly curves, not to mention the big ol' belly. There is a fucking gold mine awaiting the clothing designer who will create an inexpensive butch clothing line, with ample size options, and there are rumblings about this online, but scarce proof of anything out there yet. The cutest plus-sized clothes I've seen online are from Torrid, but the products are still overwhelmingly girlie. I have no problem shopping in the men's department, and feel pretty safe and unharassed about it since I live in the Bay Area. But the belly conspires to keep me wearing stretchy polyester for the long haul.

Overheard at the gym

Two thin women were talking at the gym about how they need to lose weight, and one of them was lamenting that she can't buy ice cream anymore, because she'll eat the whole carton if it's there. I was doing stretches nearby and trying to focus on my routine; I couldn't help but listen and muse about their conversation a bit.

It made me tap into the pain of being a fat woman at the gym, the incarnation of the "unsightly" fat body these women are avoiding like the Plague. And while I'm sure they're working out because they want to be "healthy," on another level, they're working out because they don't want to look like me. Hell, I'm working out 'cause I don't wanna look like me, if we're in the business of being honest here. My goal is not to be skinny - that's just not my body type. But I do want to lose some weight, and it's for health reasons, sure, and it's so I can continue to be more effective and physically active, yes, but it's also so that I can squeeze my tummy into cute shirts I wanna wear, so that it doesn't droop downward so very much, so that I may be able to possess one chin instead of the multitude I've lived with for years. I, too, am a product of a fatphobic culture. And even though I love my body at times, and have lovers who love my body, and wouldn't change who I am internally, I do want to weigh less.

It is so fucked up that almost every day, I hear people casually bemoaning their weight, making derisive comments about fat people, and equating fatness with poor health and ugliness. My asshole psychopharmacology professor once said in class that extra weight around the stomach was both unhealthy and "unattractive." The assumption that fat people aren't healthy, and aren't sexy, and conversely, that a thin person is naturally in better health and obviously better looking, is just plain unfounded and subjective. Thin people get heart disease and diabetes too. Thin people can be ugly motherfuckers. I've got normal blood pressure, I've never smoked cigarettes, and I exercise regularly. How many fucking thin people do you know who've got three strikes on those counts?

Fuck you and your fucking carton of ice cream. You don't know what it's like to have entire You Tube channels devoted to making fun of you for being fat.