Fat and Virtuous Enough
Size and virtue do not correlate. My size is not reflective of my will power, my lovingkindness, my self-care, my care of others, or my care for this planet. I am fat and I am virtuous enough. It is possible to be fat and be a good person. But this might be hard to believe in a society so obsessed with shaming fatness and fat people.
I was looking at furniture the other day, imagining furniture that was comfortable for my body and the bodies of so many other people. I remain perplexed how anyone could rate as comfortable and well-built for “heavy people” a kitchen counter chair that has a back hugging in to the front of the seat, creating not just an arm, but a wall of chair back that is going to mold many large bodies, pressing in quite harshly. It was a little like picking up a shirt supposedly in my size from a certain company and noticing that it would be hard pressed to cover anyone I know who is thin. I am irritated by companies not building manual wheelchair frames for people my size and larger, on the assumption we’re not strong enough to push a chair around and therefore, once again, setting up enoughness and virtue as the same thing.
You are enough whether or not you meet society’s expectations or demands for productivity and other virtues. You are enough regardless of your size. And when I say “enough” I don’t mean overly full. I mean the enoughness of comfortableness, of belonging.
I am a fat person and why that is does not matter, no more than it matters why someone else might be a thin person. There is pressure to prove my virtue as a fat person: how much I exercise, how little I eat, how many hours of therapy I have put in. Each time after I exported electronic diaries and logs of exercise and food consumption and still was condemned, I have grown a bit more tired of all this virtue signaling. Now when someone wants to know these things, I want to know why, and how much they think will be enough if I am still fat today, tomorrow, and next year. Do you or anyone else realize how much energy can be freed to have a more amazing life and work for equity and justice and nurture the earth and laugh generously and live joyfully if we stop this shaming and judging about size.
Size is not a good judging point for someone’s health, sexiness, strength, flexibility, fitness, joy, well-being, or whether they’re a good person.
August is Fat Liberation Month. What does that mean? It means liberating ourselves and our communities from shame and stigma associated with a person’s size. It means ending the associations of fatness with slovenliness, laziness, or lack of willpower. It means freeing all of us up from the truly inordinate and enormous amount of time, energy, and money demanded and devoted and sacrificed to the error of equating thinness with virtue. Fat Liberation is about freeing us from hatred based on our looks (lookism), assumptions about our health, longevity, and what’s healthy (healthism), and beliefs about how impairment and disability functions (medical and personal instead of socially created).
If we care about justice, equity, compassion, the worthiness of persons, fairness, generosity, graciousness, love or any of the other virtues, we might want to consider who benefits and how when we accept, promote, and reinforce the social connections between virtue and thinness.
When we decouple virtue and size, our bodies are no longer flags for whether we are good (and enough) people. When we decouple virtue and size, we move a little more toward what is true and real.
Size is not a virtue. Size is not proof of being good or good enough. I can be fat and virtuous. You can be fat and virtuous. Fatness or thinness has nothing to do with whether we are good or good enough. Size is the wrong assessment tool for inquiring about virtue.