And your mum's fat!

Long post alert.

Brief reflections and a second-hand anecdote brought on by my friend Sunny's desire to put on weight. Or, Rimi Ventures into Self-Righteous Social Commentary.

The story goes that an Italian-Ameican girl, a Sri-Lankan girl, and a Danish boy were great friends at university. The boy went away on an internship for a semester--a particularly gruelling one--and returned to find both women with dark shadows under the eyes, and visibly haggardish. Taking one look, the boy goes, "My god, you've become so thin!". And the Sri-Lankan girl goes, "God, I know. I've barely had time to eat. I'll make up for it", even as the Italian-American lass chirps a happy "Thank you!".

As I was telling Sunny, I was born in the right generation, grew up amongst requisite cultural influences, but can never quite bring myself to care very much about my weight which, unlike Sunny's, is considerable. Some say (esp. after they hear the story above) it's because I'm Indian, and Indians don't care about being slender. Bollocks. Urban Indians, at least, are just as obsessed with a no-frills frame as any other urban group. It's just that the our definitions of what is svelte, what's voluptuous, and what is fat is somewhat different from that of the cultural metropolitan centre generically referred to as The West: a wee bit plumper, somewhat better padded rears and fuller bosoms, and overall, a little bit closer to a healthier, survivable weight.

Actually, that bit about me never bothering about my weight is not quite true. When I was 13(ish), I went through a brief period -- maybe an year or so -- of a great deal of dissatisfaction with my plump frame, and at that time I hadn't the honeyed tongues of obliging young men and women to tell me I not was large, merely charmingly voluptuous. And the Reader's Digest then (much the worse for wear, as I recall. We soon stopped taking it) used to carry advertisments for a slimming wonder-drug called Sunova. Now, I was always terribly physically lazy, spending my youth and childhood curled up with a book in a corner, avoiding the shamelessly energetic and their tree-climbing, bicycle-riding, pool-splashing, football-playing, running-around-like-possessed nonsense. Consequently, I had studiously ignored my mother's pleas to actually attend the yoga classes she had signed me up for, or to at least crawl out of my corner and jump around a little bit more, like a healthy young brat. But I did harbour secwet wishes to shed my rather impressive tummy and slim down my thighs a bit, because the pillars of flesh chafed against each other during the summer and made my skin horribly, ultra-painfully raw. I merely refused to exert myself physically to the end.

And then I saw the advert for Sunova, and I thought, "Eureka!" Or not, it was a long time ago and my memory is but a sieve, but I was certainly very enthusiastic about the prospect of losing weight like zat! It was reasonably expensive, but I was sure my mum would buy it for me, because wasn't she always worried I was shoving my health along the plank by becoming progressively rounder? She, however, flatly refused. Slimming meds are the worst possible idea, she said, and what's wrong with going for runs in the morning, or joining a swimming club? She would pay for that, and surely it would be more fun? I was furious. I'd never felt so betrayed and uncared for in my handful of years. I couldn't understand why my mother would refuse to make the hellish pain of red-raw skin go away, to melt the wobbly ungainly tummy magically. Even make my bottom a little more proportional, so that the measurements of my school-skirt wouldn't have to be taken quite so carefully. There was a fair bit of shouting, as I recall, and a few frustrated tears on my part. Perhaps it was the reputation of the manufacturer, or the compelling power of my little demo, but my erstwhile tantrum-inexperienced mother finally agreed to let me do a six-month course of the medicine. As a consequece, I lost maybe a kilo, and my lunar cycle was muddled forever.

But I was thirteen. It was 1996-7, there was no internet, medical information was not easily available, and my mother let sympathy, hope, and the anger of a disappointed child override her vague suspicions. In our family we don't pass the buck much, neither do we look back in wistfulness. We accept things and move on, we're all blessed that way. For almost twelve years I have had a wonky internal clock that has to be coaxed and cooed at, but this is a rather common problem I share with millions of women, and I haven't wasted time blaming myself or, more irrationally, my mother. I certainly have strong opinions about medication like Sunova, but I see this as a good thing, so it's all right. However, when thirty-five year olds proudly proclaim they are going on a three-month diet that seems to consist mainly of lowfat yougurt, celery, and half a cup of boiled dalia-like thing, I really don't know if I should hold their hands and make sympathetic cow-eyes at them, or whether I should let my true sentiments show, and scoff at their idiocy.

Because it is idiotic, attempting to sculpt a 23 inch waist on a frame that needs to get up in the morning, walk the dog, pump in espressos on the way to work, work work work, bring work home, walk the dog, make attempts at socialising, crash. It is very bloody stupid, trying to live on celery and yogurt and making one's entire sense of self contingent on a kilogramme threshold (how do people even manage to do that?). And it's absolutely fucking moronic to create a culture where "fat" is the ultimate insult, and where marking down a dress-size is called "vanity sizing" and not "barefaced lying", which is what it is.

All of you who have been vigorously nodding along with me, however, are now invited to scout around for stones to throw at me, because in this age of broadly etched binary opinions on issues, anyone whose position isn't clearly aligned with either the white camp or the black is roundly condemned by both. "For" or "against" is the only way we prefer to understand people's positions, more fool us.

And I must admit, if I sneer at insecure women who scuttle about trying to emulate the sub-Saharan drought-ravaged emaciated look, I have nothing but exasperated contempt for Fat Activists (or whatever they call themselves). One of them wasted twenty of my precious minutes trying to convince me there is no such things as being too large. She was such a steamroller I could barely get a word in the edgeways, but there were a few things that I owuld have liked to point out to her. One, fatness exists. It isn't a dictatorial/normative capitalist fashion-empire invention, as she would have had me believe. The degree of fatness is what should be considered, not the ridiculous notion that there is no such thing as a fat person. A person is harmfully large when he cannot take the stairs without panting, when she has trouble breathing, and to be perfectly honest, when he look a fair few bites short of a chocolate bar. Because people are allowed to have aesthetic tastes which lean towards the slender, or even the pleasantly plump, and not necessarily the bursting-out-of-their-clothes. No one is obliged to be in love with large frames simply because someone needs constant reassurance that his rather large frame is all right to have.

And above all, I wish I had made it clear to her that thinking one is plump does not imply one wishes to jump off a building and end this miserably ugly life. That mentality is the most twisted internalisation of the "Fat is UGLY!" attitude that seems to dominate America. To some people, "fat" is still just another adjective (although given the sweeping force of American pop culture globally, I don't know for how much longer), meaning only that the person can afford to be smaller, but isn't. And if a waddling little idiot wags a finger at my face and tries to impose a ban on my freedom to think of myself as a large woman because she thinks being fat is the worst fate that can befall a woman, then said idiot's fat fascist face is going to be slapped. Very hard.