Sunday, February 29, 2004

Just finished a book I bought in Thailand when I went back for CNY. I bought it immediately after I read the sypnosis. It was about this big size woman, who's ex bf wrote an article about loving a larger woman in a national magazine. This is how the article goes:

I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.
She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder- a palm-sized folio with notations for what she'd eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she'd been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.
I knew that C was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I'd seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits of drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I'd ever dated before.
I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C, I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to leave with.
Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.
But being out with her didn't feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker's build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team's roaster, C couldn't make herself invisible
But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapelss black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn't matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world's voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thin, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.
And I knew it wasn't paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you'll find out how true it is. You'll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You'll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine's Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you'll watch her agonnize, balancing what she wants against what she'll let herself have, what she'll let herself have against what she'll be seen eating in public.
And what she'll let herself say.
I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C, a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who'd been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People Magazine. After her article was printed, C got lots of hate mail, including on letter from a guy who began: "I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you.: And it was that letter-that word- that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true-the "overweight" part-then the "nobody loves you" part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.
Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it's even an act of futility. Because, in loving C, I knew I was loving someone who didn't believe that she herself was worthy of anyone's love.

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A dreamer who often drift off to her own fantasy world. Hopes that the whole world could be fat so that she can look slimmer.

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Kucinta | Stef | Aaron |
Kling | Amelia | Ling | Nana |
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