Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: You Have the Right to Remain Fat
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 5/19/1982
WEBSITE: https://www.virgietovar.com/
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Video blog, “Virgie Tovar’s Guide to Fat Girl Living.”
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2012028707
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012028707
HEADING: Tovar, Virgie, 1982-
000 00373nz a2200121n 450
001 8976101
005 20120430084356.0
008 120430n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2012028707
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC
100 1_ |a Tovar, Virgie, |d 1982-
670 __ |a Hot & heavy, fierce fat girls on life, love & fashion, c2012: |b t.p. (Virgie Tovar) data view (b. May 19, 1982)
953 __ |a xh92
PERSONAL
Born May 19, 1982.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 2005; holds master’s degree in sexuality studies.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, activist, and public speaker. Babecamp (online course), founder. Has hosted radio program, The Virgie Show.
AWARDS:Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online periodicals, including BuzzFeed.
SIDELIGHTS
Virgie Tovar, author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, is an activist for societal acceptance of fatness and an end to what she calls “diet culture.” The pressure to be thin particularly affects women, according to Tovar. “One of the reasons for me that fat is a feminist issue is because women getting to choose what their body looks like and not spending their life becoming the cultured expectation of themselves is a feminist act,” she told Beth Greenfield in a Yahoo Lifestyle online interview. For fat men, Tovar added, weight is still a feminist issue. “When men are experience fatphobia, they’re being punished for having a feminized body,” she told Greenfield. “In the book, I say the most common anxiety for fat men is about feminization — there’s anxiety about growing breasts, about higher estrogen levels.”
Tovar’s activism is rooted in both her life experience and her scholarly studies. “I got into this work because I was born a fat person into this culture,” she told Katie Morell in an interview for the digital Rebellious Magazine. “When I was in grad school, I wanted to study fat women and how their body size affected their gender over a lifetime.” She continued: “My research led me down the rabbit hole of fat activism. I started meeting people doing this kind of work, and it changed my life. For the first time ever, I was seeing women wearing amazing outfits, eating what they wanted. I was born a fat person into a fat-hating culture. I’d made myself sick trying to lose weight. Even when I was trying my hardest, I wasn’t anywhere near a weight where people would say I was normal. This work felt like the only way I could survive. I wasn’t going to live a life of shame anymore.” In an interview with Mara Altman at the Bitch Media website, Tovar further explained how cultural expectations about body size oppress women. “I was surprised [by] how much the book ended up being about the crisis of women’s joy, which I see as a global phenomenon,” she said. “Why are our economies, workplaces, and ways of relating so dependent on women hating ourselves? For me, the right to remain fat is about the right to not prioritize body conformity; that is, when the chips are down I will not prioritize patriarchal expectations at expense to myself. Period.” Tovar went on: ” I think the book is really about my wish to see a better world for women. I’m eager to see women live better lives. I see dieting as not only evidence of sexism, but also a mechanism used to erode women’s spirits. We deserve to live free from the fear that we need to earn love, respect, and dignity through weight maintenance. I wanted to rip open the myth that dieting is part of ‘self-improvement.’”
You Have the Right to Remain Fat touches on all these points. Tovar tells of being insulted for her size the first time when she was four years old, at the hands of a boy about her age. She chronicles her attempts to lose weight, which were never seen as sufficient by her peers. Weight loss, she writes, has become a measure of individual success or failure, and society encourages women to be obsessed with the pursuit of thinness at the expense of other concerns. When weight loss is portrayed as a matter of health, she adds, that is just another way to control women. She also argues that fat people often received poor health care because doctors blame any and all problems on weight. She rejects the popular language of “body positivity,” considering it a compromise with society’s demands; she prefers a movement for liberation. She further likens the discrimination against fat people to the discrimination her parents faced as immigrants from Mexico.
Several reviewers found Tovar’s book compelling and challenging, even though some were not entirely convinced by her arguments. Bust online contributor Crystal Erickson, however, was persuaded. “You Have the Right to Remain Fat is brief yet packs a punch.” Erickson wrote. “Tovar goes over so many problems with our fatphobic culture that it’s impossible to do anything beyond scratch the surface of these issues.” She continued: “Tovar is convincing in her argument for a stronger movement, one that demands real change to be effective.” A Kirkus Reviews critic expressed a bit of skepticism, saying: “Whether or not Tovar convinces all readers that ignoring diet and exercise is the path to freedom, she offers psychological comfort to those who have been made to feel unworthy.” A Publishers Weekly commentator, though, remarked that the book has a “powerful message that will appeal to anyone eager to uncover and dispel cultural myths about beauty.” Erickson added: “The manifesto is short and sweet like a decadent treat, and cuts right through the BS—the real junk we’re being force-fed. … You Have the Right to Remain Fat dismantles the lies we’ve been told, those lies we tell ourselves—and preaches the importance of making Treat Yo Self Day every day—by living life now, no matter our size.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Tovar, Virgie, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (nonfiction), Feminist Press (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of You Have the Right to Remain Fat.
Publishers Weekly, May 7, 2018, review of You Have the Right to Remain Fat. p. 57.
ONLINE
Bitch Media, https://www.bitchmedia.org/ (August 22, 2018), Mara Altman and Virgie Tovar on Body Acceptance, Fatphobia, and Imagining a New World for Women.
Bust, https://bust.com/ (September 5, 2018), Crystal Erickson, “Virgie Tovar’s ‘You Have the Right to Remain Fat’ Shows the Importance of Fat Activism Over Body Positivity.”
Feministing, http://feministing.com/ (August 14, 2018), Senti Sojwal, interview with Virgie Tovar.
Rebellious Magazine, https://rebelliousmagazine.com/ (September 5, 2018), Katie Morell, “Body Love: Fat Activist Virgie Tovar on How to Feel Better About Your Body Today.”
Virgie Tovar website, https://www.virgietovar.com (September 5, 2018).
Yahoo Lifestyle, https://www.yahoo.com/ (March 28, 2018), Beth Greenfield, “Why This Instagram Influencer Calls Fat a Feminist Issue.”
Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, a 4-week online course designed to help women who are ready to break up with diet culture. She started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight and in 2018 gave a TedX talk on the origins of the campaign. She pens a weekly column called Take the Cake. Tovar edited the ground-breaking anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and The Feminist Press published her book of non-fiction, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August 2018). She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. After teaching "Female Sexuality" at the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2005, she went onto host "The Virgie Show" (CBS Radio) in San Francisco. She is a former plus size style writer for BuzzFeed and was the recipient of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism housed at Yale. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, Yahoo Health and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco and offers workshops and lectures nationwide. For media inquiries and bookings email virgie@virgietovar.com.
BY SENTI SOJWAL • @SENTI_NARWHAL • 3 WEEKS AGO
THE FEMINISTING FIVE: FAT ACTIVIST VIRGIE TOVAR
Legendary fat activist Virgie Tovar has long been on the front lines of our national conversation about fat discrimination and body image. She’s the author of the weekly Ravishly column Take the Cake, founder of Babecamp, an online course designed to help women break up with diet culture, and the creator of the #LoseHateNotWeight campaign. You can read her everywhere from Buzzfeed to the New York Times, and today her first book, personal essay collection You Have the Right to Remain Fat is out from the Feminist Press!
For this week’s Feministing Five, I had the supreme pleasure of catching up with Virgie to talk about the politics of fat activism, radical acceptance, decolonizing our minds, and more! Be sure to grab a copy of her latest must read and catch Virgie on Twitter @virgietovar.
Senti Sojwal: In your book, you write, “Silence is a very gendered and highly racialized tactic. It was the silence in the body positivity movement that allowed traction to be gained.” Can you talk about the political divides you see between the “fat activism” and “body positivity” movements, and the ways you have found the former to be a more productive force for collective liberation?
Virgie Tovar: Body Positivity has prevailed as the language we now use to express ideas and aesthetics that emerged from Fat Liberation/Fat Activism specifically in queer community.
Some of fat activists’ greatest demands are:
freedom from weight-based hatred/bigotry, medical neglect and cultural cruelty
the right to pursue a joyful life at any size on our terms
centering the fattest people in the room when we think about access and advocacy
These are amazing, beautiful dreams for a better, less violent world. That’s what the demand for Fat Liberation is. Body Positivity just isn’t that. Body Positivity is a stripped down version of this politic that emerged to create a sense of inclusivity for people of all sizes. If you’re a feminist history nerd you’ll recognize this argument for “inclusivity” as the same rationalization for many political movements kind of being wrenched away from the people who started them – often acutely marginalized, resilient, creative people – by people who feel that the language or framework alienates or (more often) implicates them. The truth is we could have kept fat liberation as the core ideological tenet and ended up ahead, but “liberation” is a strong political demand. Positivity isn’t. Positivity is generally only valuable or useful in two instances: (1) You are already have a lot of access to the culture (Fat people don’t have that). (2) You wish to assimilate into the culture on its (racist, sexist, transphobic, colonialist) terms. I argue in my new book that this new soft request for positivity is intentionally obscure, and that the obscurity is a gendered and racialized tactic meant to sideline freedom and prioritize assimilation into straight privilege and white supremacy. I’m trying to be a Buddhist about all this, and just observe it in a detached manner. Lulz. Sometimes that’s harder than others.
Senti Sojwal: In the book, you self-identify as a “cyberfeminist” – what does that mean to you and how has online culture been intrinsic to your feminist development?
Virgie Tovar: I’m sure there’s an amazing definition that, like, Judith Butler or Brittany Cooper have come up with, but to me being a cyberfeminist means this: I see information and ideas as public goods, and I see the internet as my primary platform for disseminating those goods.
The people who populate the internet – specifically social media – have given many feminists (including me) a platform that major publishers and TV networks NEVER would have given us. The internet creates a unique opportunity for the hybrid, complex, multi-dimensional ways that I exist as a feminist. I love that you can go to one place online to see me living my best fat brown bohemian lady life getting my rolls tanned at the beach in a fatkini and then in .0325 seconds you can read an essay I wrote on anti-assimilation. I love that I can connect to other feminists online, signal boost them, watch how they’re killing it, and send them heart emojis with total ease. I also incorporate the memes, neologisms, cats and caj nature of the internet into my work. It informs my voice and my style.
Senti Sojwal: What does radical acceptance mean to you and how do you practice it in relationship to yourself and your advocacy?
Virgie Tovar: Oh man. Radical acceptance is cool. I’m working toward freedom now, to be honest. Sometimes I use those ideas/terms interchangeably. To “radically accept” yourself is to stop investing in the war against our bodies, to stop investing in the culturally-mediated lens we see ourselves through. To take all the resources we have and invest them in ourselves, in our communities, rather than into a culture that is honestly not invested in us. This culture puts SOOOO much energy, time, and power into teaching us how to see each other and ourselves. We see ourselves through colonized eyes and hearts. We see ourselves the way capitalism wants us to see ourselves – commodities, not humans with ancient wisdom, universal beauty, staggering complexity and an age-old dream of freedom. Freedom, to me, is about dreaming, it’s about unleashing my ability to connect to myself and others and the universe. I practice these things in a million different ways all the time: taking extra time to soap up my skin in the shower, petting puppies, meditating with my huge chunk of rose quartz, looking at the sky, touching trees, watering my tiny cactus named Lumpy, kissing strangers (with permission!), inviting my lovers to make me cum 7 times and see me naked in the sunlight, wearing tiny pink dresses that let the wind touch my thighs, crying while I listen to Beyonce’s All Night Long on repeat (that’s my mourning song), reading lots of books by visionaries (my fav is James Baldwin), sending thank you cards, taking an extra 7 minutes to pick the exact color of nail polish I want for my pedicure, definitely naked time at hot springs, definitely learning from babies, hanging out with lots of woke fat people, refusing to feel ashamed when someone is a bigot toward me, jiggling for fun, eating what I want, moving by body for fun not for weight loss, writing in my journal, and lots of tiramisu.
Senti Sojwal: So much of the unlearning you explore in the book and in your activism is related to the decolonizing of our minds, relationship to self, and our perceptions of beauty and worthiness. As a fat woman of color, you know intimately the intersections you navigate in our broader culture. How does racial justice inform your fat activism?
Virgie Tovar: Racial justice informs my fat activism often in more subtle, campy ways. Like, I bring woman of color aesthetics and modes of existence into everything I do and how I think. The fact that I’m on the cover of this feminist theory book in a monokini I bought on eBay for $6 is brown AF. Bringing these things into the world, I believe, creates room for a multiplicity of existences (which I see as the work of racial justice). I bring the demand for anti-assimilation – which at its core is about dismantling white supremacy and colonialism – into everything I do and write. The way I talk about sexuality and my love of big ass earrings, and the way I hybridize slang and high theory are woc methods meant to speak to and affirm people who know how to read it. The kind of freedom that I write about in this book cannot be realized without the dismantling of white supremacist ways of thinking and knowing. I prioritize emotion and embodiment, which violently defy the WASP demands for composure, control and mind-over-matter. Refusing to apologize for being fat in a brown body is, like, cultural treason. I’m supposed to be super small and grateful and ashamed of my existence because I’m a woman of color – a sub-human, racialized subject. The reason people hate me for being fat is because fat is considered unruly, ungoverned by morality and undisciplined, which are racist ideas specifically used to control “unruly” brown and black bodies during colonialism and slavery. I am challenging the archive with this work. As I mentioned earlier, freedom is the most radical vision we can have as humans in this fascistic paradigm. And it’s a vision that has been championed by people of color for centuries.
Senti Sojwal: I love that in your book, you talk about the joys of being fat that you experience along with the more painful aspects of your relationship to your body before you were able to fully give yourself “the right to remain fat”. What do you love the most about your body today?
Virgie Tovar: Right now I’m most in awe of my body’s incredible capacity to feel and to heal – especially spiritually and emotionally. My body – like all of our bodies – has been through many wars. It holds intergenerational trauma, memories of pain and poverty and violence. Everything – and I mean everything – is stacked against us. And yet, here I am thriving, here I am loving, here I am crying when I watch the sunrise, here I am doing meditation in Venice Beach with a German dude named Gary who’s telling me to envision that my heart is a big pink rose that’s blooming, here I am wearing a sequin-encrusted Selena-inspired bustier to happy hour, here I am reading self-help books on toxic families so I can become whole, here I am planning the Taco Bell catering for my future wedding reception, here I am laughing at my friends’ farts, here I am loving my back fat and my double chin and my thunder thighs.
Quoted in Sidelights: “I got into this work because I was born a fat person into this culture,” she told Katie Morell in an interview for the digital magazine Rebellious. “When I was in grad school, I wanted to study fat women and how their body size affected their gender over a lifetime.” She continued: “My research led me down the rabbit hole of fat activism. I started meeting people doing this kind of work, and it changed my life. For the first time ever, I was seeing women wearing amazing outfits, eating what they wanted. I was born a fat person into a fat-hating culture. I’d made myself sick trying to lose weight. Even when I was trying my hardest, I wasn’t anywhere near a weight where people would say I was normal. This work felt like the only way I could survive. I wasn’t going to live a life of shame anymore.”
Katie Morell
Body Love: Fat Activist Virgie Tovar on How to Feel Better About Your Body TODAY
Virgie Tovar
447
SHARES
Share
Tweet
Imagine waking up without thinking about your body, and instead looking at yourself in the mirror with nothing but self-love. You put on your favorite outfit and walk outside feeling like the badass you are.
Sounds fabulous, right?
Being someone in search of that feeling for a while, I’ve turned to Instagram to find women living that exact life. Virgie Tovar, a fat activist based in San Francisco, is one of the first women I’ve found, and I’m now obsessed with her feed, especially her messages of body positivity, unapologetic living and phenomenal fashion sense (I need to get one of these bejeweled bustiers).
Upon further investigation, I learned that she is not only a leading expert on body image, but also the author of “Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion,” and writes thought-provoking pieces about fat activism (check out this piece on why it isn’t always a good thing to call someone ‘your inspiration,’ even if its well-meaning).
She speaks all over the country and is also the founder of Babecamp, a four-week online course “designed to help those who are ready to break up with diet culture.” (Next session is scheduled for June 5-30!)
I called her up to hear more about her story and how women—including myself—can feel better about our bodies right now (read until the end!).
KM: How did you get into fat activism?
VT: I got into this work because I was born a fat person into this culture. When I was in grad school, I wanted to study fat women and how their body size affected their gender over a lifetime.
Gender? How do body size and gender intersect?
When I interviewed other fat women, I found that a lot of us have specific gender stories, which is rare for cisgender people. Most cisgender individuals don’t really think about gender.
All of this goes back to my childhood. I grew up watching movies that showed women being treated with desire, like they were delicate flowers. I was never treated like that; I was treated like a boy. My friends who were girls would always position me into the male roles when we would play house. I was expected to be the boy character because of my largeness. It was never discussed, but always understood.
Did you talk to your grad school advisor about your interest in this work?
I did, and got a lot of resistance. I remember going to her and saying that I wanted to study fat women. She responded by telling me it was “career suicide,” that everything about the issue had already been written and that there was no more work to be done on the matter.
Holy crap! What did you do?
I really respected her and took her words to heart, but fortunately, I was dating someone who was fat positive. He was sitting outside the room and overhead her comments. The minute I walked out, he told me I should do whatever I wanted and that I shouldn’t let her fat phobia deter me. Everything became seamless once I changed advisors, and I got a book contract right as I was finishing grad school.
Did your grad school research lead you to activism?
Yep. My research led me down the rabbit hole of fat activism. I started meeting people doing this kind of work, and it changed my life. For the first time ever, I was seeing women wearing amazing outfits, eating what they wanted.
I was born a fat person into a fat-hating culture. I’d made myself sick trying to lose weight. Even when I was trying my hardest, I wasn’t anywhere near a weight where people would say I was normal. This work felt like the only way I could survive. I wasn’t going to live a life of shame anymore.
My book was born out of the realization that there was a global network of people doing this work. I wanted to show readers their stories.
Lets talk about this movement. Why do you think body positivity is coming to the forefront right now?
Social media has done a lot to expose communities of individuals who were told not to say anything—like my advisor had told me. The Internet and the democratization of information has brought together amazing people and put them in the spotlight, so we don’t have to be afraid to speak our minds anymore. We don’t have to be afraid to be the first person in our town to feel a certain way and speak out. With the Internet, we may find that we are the 20th person in our community, maybe the 1,000th person, and we don’t feel so alone.
Do you ever feel demoralized by the haters out there?
I do. There is a substantial portion of our economy dependent on women being unhappy with their bodies, but there are a few things that ground me.
First, I’m very aware that this is a cultural problem. It brings me hope to see that we are getting to a tipping point where the majority of people are beginning to recognize that fat phobia and hating is a form of bigotry, and that we simply don’t have room for it in our culture. It grounds me to think of this as an injustice, something bigger than all of us, that we are all paying for.
And second, when I feel upset about this issue, I remember how sad, awful and pathetic my life was when I was dieting. It is that feeling that creates a sense of urgency and compassion for this movement. I feel very clear about where I stand in relationship to this cultural problem, which helps.
For the women reading this article, what can they do today to feel better about their bodies?
First, take time to recognize that you haven’t done anything wrong. You didn’t ask to be taught how to hate your body. You were non-consensually given that information. The problem is our culture; we teach women that our bodies are messed up and wrong.
Try to move the problem from inside of you to outside of you.
If you do this, it means you might get mad, and women have been taught that being angry is not feminine. Trust me: it doesn’t matter. Being taught this for our entire lives is an example of a wrongdoing. Focus on your thoughts first. Change will come once your ideology becomes to change.
Another really important action is to audit the people and media in your lives. Give yourself permission to amplify your time with things and people that make you feel good, and pull back on the things that feel bad. Start with the low hanging fruit. If you have a subscription to a magazine that makes you feel bad about yourself, cancel it. If a TV show makes you feel awful, stop watching it.
But how should women do this with the people in their lives?
I recommend taking a mathematical approach. Figure out the key people in your life creating negative energy and look at your calendar. Set a deadline for three months from now and make the decision to cut back 50 percent on time spent with them during those three months. Once you hit the three-month mark, ask yourself if your life is better without that person. If the answer is yes, cut back another 50 percent over the next three months. Do that until you eventually phase them out.
It’s a really concrete way to do it, and takes the power out of your hands if it feels too tough to cut someone out. With this method, you’re just watching the math.
Want to learn more about Virgie and her activism? Visit www.virgietovar.com.
SPONSORED CONTENT
Quoted in Sidelights: “One of the reasons for me that fat is a feminist issue is because women getting to choose what their body looks like and not spending their life becoming the cultured expectation of themselves is a feminist act,” she told Beth Greenfield in a Yahoo Lifestyle online interview. For fat men, Tovar added, weight is still a feminist issue. “When men are experience fatphobia, they’re being punished for having a feminized body,” she told Greenfield. “In the book, I say the most common anxiety for fat men is about feminization — there’s anxiety about growing breasts, about higher estrogen levels.”
Why this Instagram influencer calls fat a feminist issue
Beth Greenfield
Senior Editor
Yahoo LifestyleMarch 28, 2018
View photos
Virgie Tovar (Photo: Courtesy Virgie Tovar/Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo Lifestyle)
More
To mark the International Day of the Woman on March 8 and Women’s History Month, Yahoo Lifestyle is exploring notions of feminism and the women’s movement through a diverse series of profiles — from transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston to conservative campus leader Karin Agness Lips — that aim to reach across many aisles.
Virgie Tovar is sitting by the pool of her Tucson, Ariz., hotel. She’s wearing a one-piece covered in a print of $100 bills, though she often opts for a “fatkini,” which, she says, “makes me feel sexy, and like I’m disrupting the narrative of what respectably educated women can wear.”
Tovar is speaking to Yahoo Lifestyle by phone as she lounges, in the midst of a road trip through California, Arizona, and New Mexico with the fellow writers and influencers of Sister Spit: QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color), a revolutionary traveling open mic now in its 21st year.
The writer and body-pride activist, known by legions of faithful readers for her impassioned essays, has become a champion of fat pride. Her Instagram feed — followed by 33.8K fans and counting — is full of kitschy, celebratory pics of herself posing cheekily in brightly colored swimsuits and crop tops, as well as eating — doughnuts, ice cream, pomegranates, barbecue, you name it — and just straight-up living, with gusto and pride. That the approach is both revolutionary and feminist is an idea that the 34-year-old Mexicana explores a bit in a recent Ravishly essay and more deeply in her forthcoming book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (August, Feminist Press), and about which she chats easily as she’s sitting by the desert pool.
“One of the reasons for me that fat is a feminist issue is because women getting to choose what their body looks like and not spending their life becoming the cultured expectation of themselves is a feminist act,” she says, distinguishing her own premise from that of British therapist Susie Orbach, whose seminal 1987 work, Fat Is a Feminist Issue, Tovar says “pathologized” fatness. “Any act of women expressing autonomy is, in my opinion, a feminist act. Women expressing desire is a feminist act, particularly around food.”
It may at first seem like a reach. But, Tovar explains, “why does culture love little girls and hate women so much? It’s because when she expresses sexual desire, she becomes a woman, and she is no longer under the protective wing of the culture.” Tovar sees evidence of the shift over and over again — particularly in sexual assault cases when, if there was any possibility that the girl expressed any desire, she’s no longer protected by the police. “They’re like, ‘Girls need to take care of themselves.’”
And the connection, as she sees it, is that “sexual desire is obviously connected to hunger [in that] women are being asked to exercise self-control and discipline around all these different kinds of desires in order to be considered good, worthy people.”
It’s a pressure that women feel even — if not especially — from other women, Tovar notes, adding that it’s something she’s learned a lot about from the participants in her annual empowering Babecamp, which aims to help women “break up with diet culture.”
When she started asking women where they were experiencing the most fatphobia, Tovar says, she was “absolutely certain” they would say from men, specifically from their relationships. “But it’s the workplace,” Tovar says she was told. “And they weren’t experiencing it as someone calling them a name or something really aggressive … rather, it was the constant, never-ending diet chatter and what they experienced as ‘food surveying,’ where everyone notices every time you’re eating and tells you you’re being ‘good’ if you’re eating a salad. Which is super-patronizing and very invasive.”
So the office, Tovar explains, “has become this venue of fatphobia, but it’s this softer fatphobia — not this aggressive, epithet-hurling experience.”
Much of it isn’t even meant to be hurtful, but “women use diet talk as a way to create intimacy. … They’ve been taught this is a safe discussion topic they can share in order to create friendship.”
But it’s not a new phenomenon, Tovar says. “It’s a way in which women can communicate that they are nonthreatening with one another. It’s a subtle way of saying, ‘I’m playing the game too. I’m not a threat. I’m not interested in destabilizing the culture.’ That’s, like, super-insidious and weird and creepy,” she says. “But if you kind of accept that dieting is symbolic behavior, which I do, then it’s obvious that linguistics would play a role in maintaining that submissive position.”
“I actually feel like, when we’re talking about fatness and men, we’re still talking about feminism,” she says. “Because fundamentally, when women are fat, they’re violating the cultural rule around what is expected of women, which is that we are small, and that we don’t take up a lot of space, both metaphorically and physically,” she explains. “When men are experience fatphobia, they’re being punished for having a feminized body. In the book, I say the most common anxiety for fat men is about feminization — there’s anxiety about growing breasts, about higher estrogen levels.”
And then there’s the mess of issues that come up around fatness in regard to men and women together, and sex and romance.
“These [Babecamp] women — and this is a hetero scenario — understand that a man who expects them to be thin by any means necessary is probably an a**hole. They intellectually know this. But inside, in their bodies, they’ve been taught all they have to do is be thin and they can have love,” she says. So unpacking and dismantling that lifelong belief can be tricky.
“Diet culture is really good at positioning dieting as something as simple as learning how to brush your teeth: All you have to do is learn how to control a fundamental human instinct for the rest of your life,” Tovar notes wryly. “Who can’t do that?”
Quoted in Sidelights: “I was surprised [by] how much the book ended up being about the crisis of women’s joy, which I see as a global phenomenon,” she said. “Why are our economies, workplaces, and ways of relating so dependent on women hating ourselves? For me, the right to remain fat is about the right to not prioritize body conformity; that is, when the chips are down I will not prioritize patriarchal expectations at expense to myself. Period.” Tovar went on: ” I think the book is really about my wish to see a better world for women. I’m eager to see women live better lives. I see dieting as not only evidence of sexism, but also a mechanism used to erode women’s spirits. We deserve to live free from the fear that we need to earn love, respect, and dignity through weight maintenance. I wanted to rip open the myth that dieting is part of ‘self-improvement.’”
Bitch Media
Returning member? Login here
Search formSearch
SUBSCRIBE NOW
give a gift
renew subscription
join the b-hive
make a donation
SUBSCRIBE
ACTIVISM
ART & DESIGN
BOOKS
CULTURE
MUSIC
POLITICS
SCREEN
PODCASTS
ABOUT US
BITCHMART
TOPICS MENU
Read Latest Articles >>
BitchReads Feminist Reading List
Fatphobia
Toxic Masculinity
In Sickness Series
Trending Topics:
HOME › ARTICLES › ACTIVISM › SMASHING BARRIERS
ACTIVISMBOOKSBODY IMAGEFATPHOBIAMARA ALTMANVIRGIE TOVARBODY POSITIVITY
SMASHING BARRIERS
MARA ALTMAN AND VIRGIE TOVAR ON BODY ACCEPTANCE, FATPHOBIA, AND IMAGINING A NEW WORLD FOR WOMEN
by Bitch HQ
Published on August 22, 2018 at 8:45am
Bringing Mara Altman and Virgie Tovar together made perfect sense: Both women are releasing books this month. Both women fundamentally understand that patriarchy is predicated on creating and upholding ideals that control, and in the process, oppress women’s bodies. And both women are using their platforms to encourage women to free themselves. In this conversation, Altman and Tovar get real about everything from stretch marks to diet culture to unlearning fatphobia. We hope you love this conversation as much we’ve enjoyed putting it together.
Virgie Tovar: While preparing for my chat with Mara [Altman], I went to my favorite local coffee place and purchased a sparkling Americano and one of their signature tiny adorable chocolate muffins. I promptly dropped the muffin, and considered asking for a new clean one, but then realized I actually didn’t care that it had been on the dirty ground and shared with Mara my frustration with performing a level of concern for floor food that is simply not merited.
Mara Altman: Hi, so great to get to speak with you.
VT: Hello! I just dropped a muffin on the floor and ate it right before you called. So first and perhaps most important question is: Would you eat a floor muffin?
MA: One hundred percent. I’ve eaten a lot of floor quesadilla myself. Slippery, I guess.
VT: Floor quesadilla sounds next level! So, let’s segue smoothly from floor snacks to your book. Gross Anatomy: Dispatches from the Front (and Back) is about the body—hair, sweat, vaginal smell. What led you to explore these themes?
MA: There are so many parts of our bodies that are not only natural, but essential, and yet we tend to consider them gross and shameful. I wanted to figure out why we’ve come to feel that way about our very own lovely and highly functional parts and, through research, get us to see that maybe they aren’t so awful after all. How about you? How did you come to explore the themes in You Have the Right to Remain Fat?
Vibrator Vixen
FROM OUR SPONSORS
VT: I think the book is really about my wish to see a better world for women. I’m eager to see women live better lives. I see dieting as not only evidence of sexism, but also a mechanism used to erode women’s spirits. We deserve to live free from the fear that we need to earn love, respect, and dignity through weight maintenance. I wanted to rip open the myth that dieting is part of “self-improvement.” Dieting creates anxiety and depression in a lot of women. For many women, dieting is a survival technique; we’ve been taught we have to be small in order to avoid being treated really, really horribly. And that is so fucking unconscionable. I think I also wanted to highlight the beauty and specialness of being a fat babe. It’s pretty rad, actually. Speaking of, I’ve noticed more and more books being published about bodies, specifically women writing about bodies. Why do you think your work is speaking to people right now?
MA: We’re in the middle of an incredible moment. Just like women are no longer willing to accept and hide the harassment they experience in the workplace, I think they’re also no longer willing to [apologize] about their bodies. We’ve got vulvas that don’t always fit into the tiny space allotted in a bathing suit, our anuses don’t always look like sweet little puckers, we’ve got hairs on our chins and rank armpits, and I think it’s just a huge relief, even empowering, to put it out there! We are coming out of the shadows in many facets of our lives and realizing that we’re not alone. There’s power in numbers, but also comfort. As you mentioned, this definitely pertains to your work as well. What do you think is going on?
VT: Rank armpits five-ever, girl. I agree that this is a significant political moment for women, and I think bodies have long been the battleground for our biggest struggles for liberation. I sometimes sit in my 1993 gold Ford Thunderbird and think about the ways social media has created a global community where people who were silenced and abused can talk to each other all day. And how funny it is that the tech industry is so masculine [and] terrible, but every day, as they bro down, they’re creating the networks and channels of communication that made #MeToo possible. In order for oppression to really work it requires a sense of isolation. Social media and digital communities break isolation and silence. Women have been pissed and dissatisfied for a long ass time. What makes this moment different is that we know there are thousands of us who feel the same way.
Get Bitch Media's top 9 reads of the week delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning! Sign up for the Weekly Reader:
Email *
MA: Amen! Was there anything that kept coming up as you were writing this book that surprised you?
VT: I was surprised [by] how much the book ended up being about the crisis of women’s joy, which I see as a global phenomenon. Why are our economies, workplaces, and ways of relating so dependent on women hating ourselves? For me, the right to remain fat is about the right to not prioritize body conformity; that is, when the chips are down I will not prioritize patriarchal expectations at expense to myself. Period. This issue is about women choosing themselves over the rules set forth by men or systems made by men, which is still a punishable offense, as we can see from vitriolic fat hatred [directed at] women. I say in the book, “For years I thought I was afraid of weight gain and food, but I realize now that I was afraid of a culture that did not want me to thrive.”
The book is a culmination of almost 10 years of research, starting from the time I was in grad school. I did my Master’s of Arts in sexuality studies, but ended up studying how race and size affected gender. I’ve always found it weirdmazing [and] terrible that the characters who come up in the history I had to learn as a sexuality scholar were the same people who came up when I started studying fatphobia. Like Reverend Sylvester Graham, who started the Dietary Reform Movement and is credited with the invention of the graham cracker, was a rampant sex hater and essentially believed that you could curb sexual desire through eating crackers. His movement solidified the relationship between morality and eating in the United States. I became a sexuality scholar because I was a horny fat Mexican nerd who thought she’d never get laid, and when I finally did, it was so goddamn miraculous that I had to spend two years of my life studying sex. Studying the history of sex led me to researching fat. It was like a fat girl full-circle moment.
MA: I love that Reverend Graham’s crackers are now best known for being smothered in chocolate and marshmallows. Ha. So, what would you like people who are not fat to know about the fat female experience? Would other body types also get something from your book?
VT: I want people of all sizes to understand that fatphobia is a harmful form of bigotry with real consequences. For example: Fat women are being peddled weight-loss surgery; which is barbaric, surgically-enforced starvation; the efficacy of some important medication is not tested above a certain weight (in Europe, the morning-after pill is literally not effective [if you’re] above 176 pounds); and fat women are routinely denied proper medical care because all symptoms, no matter how seemingly unrelated, are blamed on high weight. These are our friends, parents, neighbors, coworkers, partners, and fellow global citizens. I want people of all sizes to understand that everyone deserves to live a life free from bigotry and discrimination regardless of size or health status.
Dieting is a metaphor for the way our culture forces women to submit or face social punishment. Diet culture is just the newest form of women’s subjugation. Yes, there’s a specific vocabulary around it, but you can substitute diet culture for any number of oppressive historic instances that women have faced. For me, refusing to diet is about the refusal to accept my role as a second-class citizen. I think all women can relate to that.
Dieting is a metaphor for the way our culture forces women to submit or face social punishment. Diet culture is just the newest form of women’s subjugation.
TWEET THIS
MA: Absolutely. It’s similar to many other (often painful) beauty regimens women are expected to practice that I looked at in Gross Anatomy. For example, [you have to] wax your legs and armpits, or you [will] face marginalization. In essence, society tells us that in order to be a complete woman, we need to get rid of parts of ourselves.
Here’s something else that’s been fascinating me recently: I was recently pregnant with twins, and I got stretch marks. Many women kept telling me that the striations were my “warrior markings” and that I “earned” them. I have complicated feelings about the terminology, but I’d be interested to hear about stretch marks from your perspective. When one embraces being fat, what is the viewpoint on stretch marks? How does it make you feel when people say that they are “earned” only if you’ve procreated?
VT: Stretch marks are a human reality for people of all genders! I remember once I was walking past a high school and a young woman began to shriek loudly and scream “STRETCH MARKS!!!” at the top of her lungs, like she was sounding an alarm. I realized she was talking about the stretch marks on my breasts (I do love showing off ye olde cleavage, to be honest). It was both highly absurd and weirdly hurtful. I think I used to be really terrified of my stretch marks, particularly the idea that once you have them you never “recover” from them. They are certainly a source of anxiety for women, but I personally don’t think about them much nowadays. I remember being new to fat activism and I was naked or semi-naked with fat ladies, like, all day. Now that’s just my life. When you’re around other fat people often you start to see the diversity of fat embodiment, and it just rewires the brain. Only one body type is consistently available to us in mass media, and as I’ve gotten deeper into this work, my social world has become populated with more and more people who have body hair, stretch marks, and scars.
MA: For my epilogue, I visited a nudist resort with my mother. It was filled with people of all shapes and sizes. The bodies had all of the human things editors try to cover up in magazines—rolls, sag, cottage cheese, stretch marks, moles, scars, hair, etc.—and each and every person was having a blast. There was even a nude ukulele band jamming near the pool! It just seemed so clear to me in that moment that as a whole, we spend far too much time perseverating on our “imperfections” instead of reveling in the fact that we have bodies at all, bodies that allow us to do incredible things like extract a massive and gratifying ingrown after a warm relaxing bath.
VT: I love love love the image of this nude ukelele band. I want that lifestyle. Okay, what do you want people to do with the information you share in the book? Is the book a call to action?
MA: My book is filled with personal stories—my dog’s obsession with sniffing my crotch, my inability to walk anywhere without pitting out, the bitch narrative surrounding PMS (my husband says I shit into his soul once a month)—but at its core, the book is a journalistic mission filled with studies, research, and interviews. I aimed to get to the bottom of why we feel the way we do about our bodies, but a wonderful bonus has come in the form of feedback from early readers. They’ve felt empowered and liberated by the information. I couldn’t ask for a better outcome. There really is greatness in our grossness! And you?
VT: It’s definitely a call to action. I’m highly invested in women living the lives we deserve, and empowering us to smash the cultural barriers to achieving what I feel is a highly plausible future filled with women’s joy.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Whether or not Tovar convinces all readers that ignoring diet and exercise is the path to freedom, she offers psychological comfort to those who have been made to feel unworthy.”
Print Marked Items
Tovar, Virgie: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN
FAT
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Tovar, Virgie YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN FAT Feminist Press (Adult Nonfiction) $14.95 8, 14 ISBN: 978-1-936932-31-3
A manifesto for fat rights and freedom from the tyranny of diet, exercise, and body-image conformity.
Though Tovar (editor: Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion, 2012) spent two decades dieting to no avail, she has since devoted
her energies to the emerging fields of fat scholarship and fat activism while celebrating her "Ultra Mega Badass Fat Babe Lifestyle," which
features "an anti-assimilationist framework that I [find] both familiar and wonderfully provocative." In a short book filled with flurries of sharp
jabs, the author emphasizes that discrimination against the fat is as insidious and repressive as that based on race, ethnicity, or gender.
"Fatphobia," writes Tovar, "is a bigoted ideology that positions fat people as inferior and as objects of hatred and derision. Fatphobia targets and
scapegoats fat people, but it ends up harming all people....Because of the way fat people are positioned in our culture, people learn to fear
becoming fat." If there can be a healthy balance between diet and exercise on one end and cultural tyranny on the other, the author has no interest
in finding it--or in recommending moderation in any form. Her more radical position is that emphasizing health and diet is just code for thin and
that "diet culture is the marriage of the multi-billion-dollar diet industry (including fitness apps, over-the-counter diet pills, prescription drugs to
suppress appetite, bariatric surgery, gyms, and gym clothiers) and the social and cultural atmosphere that normalizes weight control and fatphobic
bigotry." Thus, campaigns against childhood obesity (a euphemism for "fat") isn't a response to a health crisis but another attempt to perpetuate
the body-image tyranny.
Whether or not Tovar convinces all readers that ignoring diet and exercise is the path to freedom, she offers psychological comfort to those who
have been made to feel unworthy due to their body size and/or shape.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tovar, Virgie: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN FAT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723203/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a6f9c39. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723203
Quoted in Sidelights: “powerful message that will appeal to anyone eager to uncover and dispel cultural myths about beauty.”
You Have the Right to Remain Fat
Publishers Weekly.
265.19 (May 7, 2018): p57.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
You Have the Right to Remain Fat
Virgie Tovar. Feminist Press, $14.95 trade paper (132p) ISBN 978-1-936932-31-3
Tovar's eye-opening debut combines personal narrative and cultural analysis to expose the forces driving "fatphobia" in America. Despite
feminism's progress, "we have been living out woman-hating methods of control via our dinner plates," Tovar insists. She adds that everyone is
influenced by fatphobia's pervasive reach, either through lived experience of fat-related discrimination or through the fear of future rejection.
Tovar dispels myths about obesity by showing how they dovetail with larger cultural assumptions; in the chapter "Dieting, Family, Assimilation,
and Bootstrapping," she explains, "Dieting maps seamlessly onto the preexisting American narrative of failure and success as individual
endeavors," which she compares to her family's experiences emigrating from Mexico. In "Bros Heart Thinness: Heteromasculinity and
Whiteness," Tovar asserts, "controlling women's body size is about controlling women's lives," while she recounts crushing early experiences like
being called fat by her schoolmate at age four. Ultimately, dieting is not the way to freedom, Tovar concludes, self-love is. This short, accessible
book packs a powerful message that will appeal to anyone eager to uncover and dispel cultural myths about beauty. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"You Have the Right to Remain Fat." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 57. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858711/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=44a883eb. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858711
Quoted in Sidelights: “You Have the Right to Remain Fat is brief yet packs a punch.” Erickson wrote. “Tovar goes over so many problems with our fatphobic culture that it’s impossible to do anything beyond scratch the surface of these issues.” She continued: “Tovar is convincing in her argument for a stronger movement, one that demands real change to be effective.”
“The manifesto is short and sweet like a decadent treat, and cuts right through the BS—the real junk we’re being force-fed. … You Have the Right to Remain Fat dismantles the lies we’ve been told, those lies we tell ourselves—and preaches the importance of making Treat Yo Self Day every day—by living life now, no matter our size.”
Virgie Tovar's "You Have The Right To Remain Fat" Shows The Importance Of Fat Activism Over Body Positivity
BY CRYSTAL ERICKSON IN BOOKS
66
tovar 61a2d
Our culture only permits women to be one thing: perfect. And if you have to be perfect, you certainly can’t be fat. Like many women, author and activist Virgie Tovar spent a lifetime hating her body before finding her people and true self. In her manifesto, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Aug. 14, Feminist Press), she discusses her journey from self-hatred to self-love, the effects of diet culture, and the importance of fat activism over the body-positive movement to enable meaningful change from the oppression fat people suffer through in our culture. The manifesto is short and sweet like a decadent treat, and cuts right through the BS—the real junk we’re being force-fed.
Tovar was made aware of her fatness at the wee age of four, from a preschool bully (Joshua, what’s good?) informing her why he wasn’t trying to look up her skirt. Before that, she lived her childhood blissfully ignorant of her difference from the other girls—the way it always should be. Tovar points out how boys and men work as a stand-in for society to punish women for not conforming to the standard. To avoid the banishment that fat people are punished with, women must obey and obsess over their bodies, as being thin and beautiful are simply their jobs. There’s nothing more for them to aspire to, and once they’ve reached that impossible goal, life will be so much easier. While this ideology’s clearly bananas, this is precisely the logic of our thin-obsessed culture, one that brainwashes women into obsessing over their bodies, maintains the status quo and keeps white men in power—and in control of women’s bodies, too.
ADVERTISEMENT
Following that logic, then, the only way to gain such approval from men and society is to diet. In early chapters of the book, Tovar talks about how she dieted for almost 20 years of her life, trying to reinvent herself to get the perfect body. At age eleven, she spent her summer basically starving herself—eating only toast and lettuce—and when she finally lost some weight, no one noticed, because it wasn’t enough. And it’s never enough in our society. Yet we’re taught to believe we can change all that, treating weight loss like the American Dream for all women. Tovar describes the idea of bootstrapping and how it ties to diet culture, in that it reinforces the common notion that you can be anything you set your mind to. Tovar writes, “I didn’t even skip a beat when I was asked to bootstrap with my weight. Dieting maps seamlessly onto the preexisting American narrative of failure and success as individual endeavors.” Through the bootstrapping narrative, being fat becomes a problem that’s solely on the individual to solve. It’s not a problem with our culture, it’s the individual’s failing—one that must be corrected to be allowed back into society, and in order to be worthy of affection. Clearly, it’s a trap.
Luckily, Tovar freed herself from that trap, once she realized just how garbage all the lies fed to her from diet culture were—and realized she needed to rethink how she viewed herself. In the final chapters of the book, Tovar discusses how she found herself by finding her people, when she met BBW fat activists who didn’t give a donut about what other people think, and lived their lives shame-free and happily. Around the same time, she also met body-positive advocates, a movement she describes as playing too nice with the status quo to be effective. For fat activists, having cute clothing in larger sizes and the approval of heteronormative folks isn’t enough. Being fat isn’t a trend; it’s an identity that one can’t shake or change, and that’s met with hatred and bigotry. Having some people approve of larger bodies isn’t enough for a cultural shift, and Tovar is convincing in her argument for a stronger movement, one that demands real change to be effective. Of course, the argument isn’t new here, as it’s a problem fat activists and even body-positive supporters have with the trending movement.
As someone who’s struggled with body image issues forever, perhaps the hardest truth in this book to swallow is the reality of how much time women waste over a lifetime on this obsession with losing weight, an obsession that pushes everything that should matter aside—including a life actually worth living. In the chapter “In the Future, I’m Fat,” Tovar explores why the future is so perfect and full of promise in theory, when the present’s perfectly fine as is. She writes:
The allure of diet culture is a life lived in the future. The future is a hermetically sealed unreality that possesses none of the limits—or the potential for magic—of the present. The present is messy, sweaty, filled with longing and sometimes anger and sometimes sadness. The present holds your body in all the imperfection that makes it real.
Free Download: Great Dames!
Get inspired by some of our favorite interviews, featuring Dolly Parton, Solange, Tina Fey, Jessica Williams, Kathleen Hanna, Laverne Cox, the Broad City gals, and more! Plus, keep up with the latest from BUST.
Enter your email
Download
You Have the Right to Remain Fat is brief yet packs a punch. Tovar goes over so many problems with our fatphobic culture that it’s impossible to do anything beyond scratch the surface of these issues (My further reading recommendations are Tovar’s Ravishly articles and the book she edited, Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion). Tovar’s badass persona shines throughout the book, and she sprinkles in so many fascinating stories from her life—stories we only get tiny glimpses into. I really need to know about the David Lynch-hosted party she attended, because that sounds epic. Tovar is the fab friend everyone needs, and her manifesto is the next best thing. It brings fat activism to a broader audience and demands radical change over baby steps, which is so necessary in countering our image- and diet-obsessed culture, and rightfully questions the watered-down version of fat acceptance: the body-positive movement. You Have the Right to Remain Fat dismantles the lies we’ve been told, those lies we tell ourselves—and preaches the importance of making Treat Yo Self Day every day—by living life now, no matter our size.