Leith, William (6 page)

Teague didn't look exactly fat; being moderately tall, her minor bulk made her look statuesque. 'Well,' she told me, 'I am a normal-sized woman.' She wore a large, flowing white cotton shirt from the 1647 range, a shirt she'd designed herself. Not fashionable, but certainly stylish. She was planning the launch party for her new designer range, to be held at Liberty. 'In midnight blue and sensual chocolate,' ran the press release, 'a wonderful micro fabric caresses the body. Long slim pants and skirts echo the undercurrents that all women demand, of private pleasures and hidden delights.'

We talked about the prejudices suffered by her potential customers. 'You're still allowed to abuse fat women,' she said. 'Society frowns on racism, but not on abusing fat people.' Then we talked about the broader picture, about how women's magazines have an economic need to make their readers feel insecure, because they are funded by advertising for products that compensate for this insecurity cosmetics, perfumes, hair products. And almost all the magazines advertise liposuction operations. Making women feel fat is sound economic sense.

Teague said she believed that all of this was true. 'But I don't want to say it in public,' she said. 'My views are very radical, but they're incompatible with a consumer attitude.'

Then she told me about the state of the market in fat women's clothes. The market, basically, was there for the taking. `If you look at market research,' said Teague, 'you'll see that slim women buy lots more clothes than larger women. A slim woman might have ten skirts. A large woman of the same age will have three. There's no imagery aimed at big women. The images don't work for them; they're not seduced. They can't buy into it.'

Teague, therefore, wanted to create images which would seduce fat women, images which, as she put it, 'make it acceptable for older and bigger women to send out sexual signals'. And this, of course, is terribly difficult. You have to be subtle. If you want women to buy things, you have to make them feel dissatisfied with what they've already got. You have to play with their insecurity. But you have to be careful with fat women. They're easy to scare off. You mustn't remind them that they're fat.

Then I asked Teague if I could attend the launch party for her new designer range, and bring a photographer with me. `You can come,' she said. 'But I wouldn't want you to bring a photographer. It's a difficult situation. You're writing about fat issues. And I don't really want French and Teague to be associated with all that. I want to keep it separate.'

Hold on, I thought. She wants the world to accept fat women without prejudice. She's designed a range of clothes to make these fat women feel glamorous. But she wants to avoid associating her clothes with fatness. So even here, right at the centre of the world of Fat Acceptance, fat is a dirty word.

Teague said, 'We're trying to sell clothes, not ideas.'

Then she said, 'Leave the arguments to professional intellectuals. I would never contradict them. But what do they come up with? They're not coming up with anything new. I've been hearing these arguments for twenty years.'

Then she said, 'What we need is beautiful images. To get resources, you need to be appealing.'

The Private Pleasures, the Hidden Delights

I went to the French and Teague fashion show at the department store. It was a big enough attraction to fill one floor of the building with people. Many, but not most, were large-sized women. The women drank champagne and talked positively. It was a great thing that, at last, they could have designer clothes. Here, on racks, were the soft, velvety ensembles in midnight blue and sensual chocolate; they looked like a sultan's pyjamas. Here were the long skirts to echo the private pleasures, the hidden delights; a collection, to quote the publicity handout, 'which captures all a woman's emotions the seductress, the feminine, the wife, the lover'.

Helen Teague got up on stage and made a speech. Then Dawn French spoke. French was in the sensual chocolate. She looked roly-poly. She said, 'Big women are not alienated in this store,' which was, at last, true. She went on, 'I hope that ultra-skinny people will be green with envy.' Then the models took to the stage in the brown and blue outfits, the fluffy, huge-collared opera coat, the diaphanous slip dress. But these women were not fat at all. They were oversized models tall, beautiful, shapely. I talked to them afterwards. One of them

was almost as tall as me and weighed 154 lbs. She looked like a fantasy version of Kim Basinger. 'I'm just more woman than people like Kate Moss,' she said. If this was Fat Acceptance in action, I could see what Shelley Bovey was on about.

I asked French if she would talk to me about the politics, the design of the clothes, the fat issues. French looked cagey. She said she didn't know, and referred me to her publicist.

A few days later, Teague mulled over the show's coverage. She felt piqued. She'd watched a TV clip of the show. The TV station, she said, 'picked the biggest girls they could see, and filmed them. Some of them were size 36 and 40!'

Dawn French's publicist called me a few days later. Would she talk? 'Dawn's done all that now,' said the publicist. 'She wants to steer away from that. She wants to concentrate on the label, rather than the issue of size.'

Staring You in the Face

And that's when I realised that the answer to my question was no. Nobody accepts fat people. Not even fat people. Particularly not fat people. When you are fat, part of you doesn't like yourself, and you wear this self-loathing like an outfit, a clown's suit that tells other people to devalue you. 'Above all in our culture,' writes the Princeton cultural historian Richard Klein, 'being fat means you get no love, because you deserve no love.'

Klein relates a telling story: a man asked a fat woman out on a date. All very well, you might think. But then she discovered that he was a Fat Admirer a 'chubby chaser'.

`She was angry and frustrated,' said Klein. 'It reinforced her dream of having a man who wants her in spite of her build.' She didn't want a man to want her as she was. She was like Groucho Marx, who wouldn't want to belong to a club that would accept him as a member. After all, when you are only pretending to accept yourself, it is unbearable be loved for the very thing you cannot love in yourself: your fat.

Being fat blots out parts of your mind just as it blurs your outline. Sometimes, as Shelley Bovey says, it's hard to know where you end and where your fat begins.

When you are fat, you are lost in an alien territory, and that territory is you. But it's not you. But it is you. It's maddening. And sometimes, you think you can see a way out, and then you look again, and you can't see anything. It feels as if you're searching for something, and you know it's there, it's staring you in the face, and you look again, and it's gone.

Part of the Problem

Reflected in the glass of the newsagent's window, my face looks puffy, ill-defined. Should I buy a stomach magazine? Are stomach magazines the solution? Or are they part of the problem? In her book The Male Body, weight guru Susan Bordo hints that pictures of muscled, bulky men are history; a new, more feminine aesthetic is beginning to rule. In the old style, the engorged muscleman the surrogate penis, according to gay theorist Ron Long stares straight ahead, blank-eyed, ready to fight, unwilling to show weakness. Bordo calls this image 'the rock'. She calls the new, Calvin Klein-inspired

male pin-up 'the leaner' 'because these bodies are almost always reclining, leaning against, or propped up against something in the fashion of women's bodies'.

Leaners are also like female fashion models in another way they are leaner. Like women, they are depicted as objects rather than subjects. They challenge the advertising credo, defined by art historian John Berger in the 1970s, that 'men act and women appear'.

These days, men appear.

Another thing John Berger wrote was, 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.'

We all know what happens when women are encouraged to be self-conscious about their bodies. According to the feminist Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food. According to the feminist Kim Chernin, author of The Obsession, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food. According to the feminist Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food. According to the feminist Caroline Knapp, author of Appetites, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food.

So I'm inclined to think that stomach magazines are not the solution. I think they are part of the problem.

Disaster Movie

I walk past a deli and past a diner and past another deli and past a food store with a picture of a cake in the window, a photograph the size of a billboard, a huge crumby cake with red slop on the top, and I'm asking myself the million-dollar question.

Why do I eat too much?

I walk past a place with a neon sign that says 'Hot Bagel we bake freshly every day', and another place with a sign that says `Ohhh that coffee ... mmmm that bread', and even though it's a bright, crisp morning, a cheerful morning, a toasted bagel sort of morning, I am filled with a nameless dread, a sense that I am in imminent danger, that very soon, any moment now, I will be picked up and hurled into oblivion by terrible, malign forces I cannot control.

I don't know. Why am I getting so fat? Why are we getting so fat? Standing here, panting on these fat streets, in this fat city, having bolted a large plateful of albumen, having passed on the toast, I'm glaring across the street at a mobile bagel cart a bagel chariot. I want a bagel. I am not satisfied. I want more. I want more, even though I know that, by having more, I will want still more. I know that having more will not satisfy me. But still, I want to give it another chance. More is my creed. More is our creed, here in the greedy West. That's all our society has to offer us. More. We are fat, we are getting fatter, and we are not going to stop getting fatter.

I am fat.

I am getting fatter.

Is there any hope for me?

We are, surely, going to get fatter and fatter, until what? I don't know. But the Fat Crisis is already well under way. The Fat Crisis is rolling. Just the other day, in fact, I was talking about it. I was talking about the Fat Crisis because sometimes it seems there's nothing else to talk about. It's been in the newspapers, on the radio, on the TV. People are beginning to talk about an 'epidemic' 'a sudden, widespread occurrence of a particular undesirable phenomenon' (OED). This is how America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refer to the Fat Crisis. It is also the term used by the World Health Organisation, and its younger sibling, the International Obesity Task Force.

Everybody knows the situation is bad, and getting worse. Everybody intends to do something about it. We all have a policy. We all have a diet. The word 'diet', derived from the Greek `diaita', means 'a way of life'. A diet is nothing less than a philosophy.

Oh, everybody has a diet. Dr Atkins has a diet. Catherine Zeta-Jones has a diet. Sophie Dahl has a diet. Renee Zellweger has a diet.

Kirstie Alley from Cheers she has a diet.

And now we have a diet crisis, a diet disaster. That's what somebody was telling me the other day. It's bad, he said so bad, in fact, that sixty-five million Americans are overweight. We shook our heads, appalled. Sixty-five million. That sounds bad, doesn't it? And then somebody else said no, you're wrong, it's not sixty-five million it's 65 per cent. And I checked, and he was right. Now, that really is bad. According to the World Health Organisation, 65 per cent of Americans are overweight. That's 127 million. Thirty per cent are

obese. And get this: ten years ago, 20 per cent were obese. And this: according to Professor Kelly Brownell, the director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, 'The number of people with very high body weights where disease risk is extreme has tripled in the last decade.'

How will this disaster turn out? Will it be like one of those disaster movies in which the terrible threat comes from outside, and can therefore be repelled, like the Triffids in Day of the Triffids, or the birds in The Birds? Or is this more like one of those movies in which the threat comes from inside, where the threat is not plants from outer space, or winged predators, but ... us?

At My Age, Brando Was Slimmer than Me

Well, at least I'm walking, rather than what I'd normally do in this situation, which is go back to my hotel room, bagel-bloated, and order something on room service, possibly just a coffee, possibly not, and loll around my bed, fretting and sweating in front of daytime TV. At this hour, 10 a.m., fat o'clock in the TV schedules, I could watch obese people sitting on sofas, with that anti-poise obese people have, talking about how bad it is to be obese, how unfair, how humiliating.

I like watching obese people it can be a good appetite suppressant. They talk about how they want to get slim, but they can't, they've tried everything, and it keeps going wrong. They try to exercise, but they can't fit it into their daily schedule. They try to stop eating fast food, but they crack on

Day One or Day Two. I saw one show in which a man was frustrated with his obese wife; she said she'd been on a diet, but she hadn't lost a pound, had in fact gained weight, and one day he left the house, got to the station, then realised he'd forgotten his wallet, and walked back to the house, and let himself in, and there she was, sitting at the kitchen table, in flagrante. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Large bucket. Large fries. He looked at her and said how long has this been going on, and she started sobbing. How long, he said. Eventually, she told him. She'd been doing it the whole time. She'd never even started her diet. She didn't know how to stop eating. She was Just so hungry'. She was 'so hungry all the time'. She 'just couldn't trust herself around food'.