Is it because I’m fat?

The year was 1996, and like Judy Blume's Margaret more than 25 years before, I was in seventh grade and waiting for puberty to kick in so I could get breasts. Instead, I became the punchline to a joke about a popular hip-hop song.

The downside to being pear-shaped is that I often am asked: "Are you one of those rap guys girlfriends or something?" by people who think that I probably have never heard that one. (The answer is no. I am one of those software developer guys girlfriends.) At weddings and parties with cheesy DJs, someone always requests the song, "for you, Erin!" and flat-assed women giggle as I shake "a piece of that bubble."

I can deal with well-meaning song requests and ass-jokes with an eye-roll now. During adolescence, I was embarrassed by the idea of sexuality, and every song about fat girls was couched in heavy sexual innuendo.

Retailers are now taking interest in the market for plus-sized kids, according to an article in Salon.  Harris starts off with the question, "Let's say you're too young for Torrid, yet too "husky" for Gap Kids. Where can you get nonlame clothes that actually fit?"

It occurs to me that while my lip may curl and my blood may curdle when I cop a feel on any of those nouveau-paisley, tulle-trimmed poly nightmares they've been trying to sell us fat girls at Torrid for the past few years (are they on an upswing now?  I've long stopped looking), we owe it to Torrid's wild success in tapping an achingly neglected market for a lot of things.  Good things, even if it ain't the clothes.

 Most personally satisfying for me, for instance, is how their success exposes bigots by making them explicitly talk about punishing people for their bodies, which is totally something you want to know about a person.  There are a hundred times as many options for plus-sized clothing now, even (brace yourself) brick and morter stores beyond Lane Bryant, now that all these fat cats see that hip fat people are worth extorting money from, too.  And best of all, it can only inspire retailers to explore other related "niche" fat markets, like our 'pre-teen' set.  That's pretty awesome.

 As bad as getting dressed as a teenager was for me, it could not hold a candle to the angst of the preceding years.  Why?  Because by the time I got to be a teen, I was hardened, angry, and snotty enough to tell them to eat shit if my teachers, for example, tried to send me home with a note saying I was too fat for school.  Those aren't the formative years.  All those adolescent afternoons I spent reading Seventeen Magazine and stewing in self hate because I would never look like anything that was on those pages, not even in something as simple as dress?  That's where the damage was done.

Here's a DIY for you.  Go to google.  Ignore the flashy graphics and the pretty colors, they're not important today.  Type "fat and disability" in the search bar and click enter.  Don't feel lucky, that's for another topic or another day.  Instead, scroll down the list of links that pop up.  Remember what you typed?  Now look at what you've got.

 If you're not game, just click this lil sentence here and see what I see.  Not pictures of curvy crips, fleshy gimps, bulbous blinks, fatties on parade with some disPride, nope.  Instead, we see fat as a disability, ponderings on whether or not the ADA covers fatties as a disability, not where the disabled fatties may be hiding out in the vast corners of the deep, dark internet.

Where have all the fatly disabled gone? 

Functioning as a broadly inclusive (and occasionally contentious) space for discussing the intersections of fat politics and fat fashions, Fatshionista's LiveJournal community has since grown to include over 2500 members.  Fatshionista.com is intended as an extension of that community, meant to recapture the best of the LiveJournal content by presenting smart writing on fat and by engaging a broader web-based community of Fatshionistas to educate themselves, deconstruct cultural assumptions, and demand  respect for their choices and their bodies, as well as fabulous clothing that is well-made, well-fitted, and widely accessible.  Fatshionistas are fat, and loud, and not sorry. 

This site is beginning with the launch of the GroupBlog (which you are reading now), which has some amazing contributors signed on already, but there are Big Plans in the works for many more fat fashion tools and resources as time goes on.

As always, we represent a prickly, political, diverse, fat-positive, anti-racist, disabled-friendly, trans-inclusive, queer-flavored, non-gender-specific community, open to everyone.

Welcome to Fatshionista.com!