Flying While Fat! So?: This fat girl couldn’t fly home without a fight

This fat girl couldn’t fly home without a fight. 

On Easter Sunday I was flying home after having participated in a National Popular Culture Association Conference in D.C.  I had presented a Fat Studies/Media Studies research paper titled, White Supremacy, Fat Hurdles and Thin Privilege in Media Representation: A Layered Model for Media Hegemony and Effect, as well as attended many Fat Studies division sessions. One of those sessions had been a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop where we improvised and acted out strategies to fight size discrimination.  Perfect preparation for the not so fat-friendly skies…Do you hear the suspense thriller music rising in the background?

I pass most of the time on airplanes, and waiting for airplanes, catching up on important books I’ve bought but haven’t been able to squeeze in the time to turn the pages.   Flying from the PCA conference in DC to Atlanta, I was reading the rather fabulous Fat! So?: Because you DON’T have to APOLOGIZE for your size!, by the incredibly fabulous author, Marilyn Wann (who I had the grand honor to meet for the first time at the conference couple of days earlier).

As the plane docked in Atlanta, I knew I would be lucky to make my connecting flight to Montgomery, at the opposite end of the massive airport, in time.  So I stood as soon as I could to get my overhead bag from where I had to stow it, several rows in front of me.  I ended up standing next to an affable passenger in a Delta pilot uniform who was also standing, prepared to leave. 

The pilot, a Jewish family (the father and son wore yarmulkes) and several mature women and I were joking about the reputed selective hearing of some husbands and fathers.  I told the pilot the story of the time my father stood waiting for a northbound train in Baltimore’s Union Station.  Every other person left the previously crowded platform on which my father stood and moved to another.  My father’s train came, took all the people on the other platform and went to New York.  My father was left to swear repeatedly that no announcement had been made about the train’s platform change.  Everyone else just “intuited” to move to another gate.  Right… The pilot laughed, then a lull in the conversation.

I mentioned how doubly safe I’d felt on the flight with him, a pilot, sitting a few rows ahead and surrounded by a couple dozen young, jovial DC Emergency Medical Technician recruits, headed for an Anniston, Alabama hazmat training.  The smiling Delta Airlines pilot agreed I had nothing to worry about with the EMT recruits sitting near the emergency exits.  And then he decided to go to a nasty, dark place…

“What you really have to worry about is when some big, fat guy is sitting there and if there’s an emergency, you have to get out behind him through a whole about this big,” he said, making a gesture with both his hands about the size of two oranges. 

“The hole’s a lot bigger than that,” I retorted good-naturedly, “And the good thing about fat,” I said laying a loving hand on my own belly roll, "...is that it’s soft and can squeeze through some tight places.”

Now the pilot’s laugh had an indignant tone that hadn’t been there during our jokes about selectively deaf- husbands who couldn’t hear their wives or children when they didn’t want to.  

“Yeah, right…” the pilot continued laughing, “Take a look at those seatbelt extenders.  In big block letters it says, ‘FATSO.’”

With the flash of a French fencing champ, I pulled the Marilyn Wann book from under my arm and held it up to him like a placard (…Here’s your sign…) and said, “Yeah!  Fat! So?”  The look of shock on the fat hating pilot’s face was one I wished I could immortalize in stone.  Eyes wide, staring from the book cover to me, and back again, motioning toward the book with cupped hands, in a begging gesture, he sputtered,

“What the…?”

Perhaps from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed work, my subconscious immediately knew what to do without conscious thought.  I began a mini, righteous rant,

“I’ve just come from a workshop where we’ve worked on healing and protecting ourselves from fat hatred and discrimination that is so prolific in the media and in the airline industry (One of the scenarios we had worked on was about a woman participant, who on the flight to the conference, was manhandled and female strip-searched from the waist up, because the man working the scanner said the woman’s fat was, “too dense” to allow the scanner to make sure she had no hidden weapons on her upper body. Back to my verbal defense…),

“It’s hateful people like you, who despite your talents and friendliness, use your unearned thin privilege to cause so much damage, so much pain, to so many paying customers who are just trying to get from one place to another…And to do that on Easter none-the-less, is even more reprehensible,” I paused, realizing that perhaps I wasn’t being religiously inclusive enough and asked the mother of the Jewish family, “Is it still Passover?  Is he doing this during Passover too?” 

She assured me that Passover was still going on, “We like to suffer a long time,” she said, I corrected her, “Oh it’s not that Jews like to suffer a long time but that they were made to suffer for a long time, just as fat hating people with power like him make the zaftig suffer for a long time.”  She laughed in affirmation.  Did I hear murmurs of, “You tell ‘im,” or was it just my imagination?

The pilot loudly said, “Okay!  Okay!  I’m sorry.”  He said it in a way that made me think he just wanted me to shut up but I said, “I accept your apology.”

I turned to a chubby African American female flight attendant (I am a fat African American woman too.) who had overhead the entire conversation.  She was beaming with what seemed like relief and thanks.  I raised my book to her in a silent gesture of the famous shout out, “This is for all the fat girls (and guys),” as the 1998 Emmy Winning Actress Cameron Manheim said when she accepted the award for her work on The Practice.

Instead of leaving the plane ahead of me, the tall pilot scurried forward to an emptied row ahead of us, stooped into it to let me pass while he starred directly into my eyes.  Did he fear as I followed him up the aisle, I might hit him in the head with the book literally, after having done so figuratively?  Or was he doing me a favor to make up for his earlier disrespect?

This was certainly not the first time I had to defend against such a verbal assault.  But I think it was the first time I didn’t feel traumatized, frozen, and beat-up afterward.  Perhaps it was because part of me was amazed that the nasty, thin pilot was not directing his venom at plump me personally, but at some composite corpulent man with a seat belt extender, sitting at an emergency exit window.  But I’ve been amazed at Whites who have denigrated Black people while speaking to my obviously African American face, usually followed by the even more insidious, “Oh I don’t mean you…You’re not like other Black people.”  And I left those encounters shaken and in a state of post traumatic shock, no matter how well I may have stood up for myself and “my kind.”

Maybe because of a few days of scholarly and interpersonal support, acceptance, empowerment (Dare I say love?) I received from so many people at the PCA Fat Studies sessions that some part of me was strengthened and no longer stripped by such hatefulness?  I certainly hope so. And I hope to the friendly skies, this feeling is forever.

“Alabama Voices: ‘Just Sayin’’ Column Unfair to Overweight Children,”

• Daufin, E-K. “Alabama Voices: ‘Just Sayin’’ Column Unfair to Overweight Children,” December 16, 2010, p. 3C.

Josh Moon’s “Just Saying” Sunday was “Just Stinking.”  Instead of writing that prejudiced, inaccurate, offensive tripe, Moon ought to shut his big obese mouth.  Moon uses the word “grossly” rather than “very” to indicate the level of heaviness for kids, giving the impression throughout the article that he thinks fat children are gross – period.  He refers to heavy kids as “pudgy” and to how they ought to be sent to “waddle” into school. 

Even the headline says, “Let’s get our obese kids active”… as if we should send them on a death march of shame.  Moon reminds me of a video I was shown as part of a nationally syndicated TV dating program.  The video of one potential suitor showed an average looking guy who said he had no problem dating plus size women because he would get in his car and “run them down to size.”  Ehhh! I passed on him and the Montgomery Advertiser ought to pass on any more of Moon’s columns.

I do agree with Moon that those who want to keep Congress from getting junk food out of school lunches are not playing with a full pack of Skittles.  However ALL kids need to be encouraged to be more active, the ones who have the kind of metabolism that allows them to eat packs of potato chips without packing on the pounds and the ones who eat a banana and blow up.  Don’t assume that skinny kids are healthy, active OR eating well.  Even as adults are forced to do more online for work and in life, all of us, fat and thin could use more physical activity as we struggle more and more to keep an offline life. 

No, weight is NOT just a simple equation of too much food and not enough exercise.  Not all fat people have terrible eating habits and not all thin people are at peace with the food pyramid. Shame on Moon for perpetuating that insulting stereotype.

Moon says when he was in school, “No one turned down that hour of basketball, football or dodge ball.”  He goes on to castigate kids who, “…spend the hour walking around the track or football field.”  He probably just didn’t notice the children who may have been more sensitive than him…the ones who didn’t like getting beat up for a ball or battered by sadistic dodge ball throwing demons.  Or perhaps he was one of the kids teasing the fat children about how they looked in gym shorts or giggled when the fleshy kids jiggled in motion.  

As a Native New Yorker, I know that most urban children don’t have safe or pleasant places in which to be physically active, especially if they don’t get a charge out of combative forms of competitive group sports.  Perhaps Moon doesn’t know the humiliation of everyone treating you like a pariah, a gorilla in a gym suit who is a convenient target to vent any misplaced hostility thinner demons may have. 

Moon’s nasty, ignorant, fataphobia only makes more people of size more ashamed and an easier target for the abominable harassment and battery to which we are already subject.  Fat children are the most likely to be teased.  Fat adults are derided constantly in the media and in the mimicking even supposedly well meaning community.  The prejudice against fat people is often called the only socially acceptable bigotry left in mainstream America, and fat females are usually treated more severely than fat males. 

Also African Americans, American Indians and Latinos are more likely to be fat than Whites and Asians.  So Moon’s little tirade was also indirectly patriarchal and White supremacist.    I’ve applied for a sabbatical from my university to work on a guide for journalists to help them more ethically and accurately cover the king and queen sized of our community.  From Moon’s condescending column, it’s clear there a big fat need for that kind of guidance for journalists here on Earth as well as on the wicked dark side of the Moon.___________________

Rev. Dr. E-K. Daufin is a professor of communication at Alabama State University and a national size equity expert.