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Jun. 13th, 2011 03:06 pm
Random navel gazing: Safety in numbers
Weird contrast when we got off the plane in MN: Suddenly, a heck of a lot more fellow fat folks around.
I loved the trip, of course, but had had quite a few instances in which I felt uncomfortable because I was the largest person in the room. Got more than a few rude stares, etc., unrelated to the tourist thing (we mostly dressed like locals, and this often happened before we spoke) which kinda dampened my mood a time or two.
This happens to me a fair amount in general, of course. The Northwest has its share of chubby folks, but we also have a lot of tree-climbing health nuts who are of the opinion that my ass is going to single-handedly (double-cheekedly?) destroy the planet. So I do get the occasional bit of flak here at home. But it's a trade-off, because every other weirdness I have is generally accepted well enough. We have a high enough geek population that open-mindedness WRT the queer, atheist, gender-non-compliant thing is pretty common, so long as you're West of the mountains.
I did get to thinking in MN, though, about how much more accepted my body might be if I lived somewhere that it weren't so unusual. If I'm 1 in 100, instead of 1 in 1000, I'm not going to stand out as much. Flak would still happen--it always does--but I wouldn't always feel like the sole target of it. For a moment, the lure of being able to walk around in public without always worrying if someone's going to harass me was pretty strong.
The problem, however, is that most of the areas with a higher population of fat folks also have a higher population of anti-queer religious folks. And they're quite often the same people. I won't speculate on why that is (though I have ideas) but the fact remains that while most of the folks I'd run into in, say, Texas might accept my surface existence, once they got past that, it'd be a whole 'nother story.
I do sometimes wish there were a magical land in which I could be a fat, queer, atheist, gender-non-compliant, progressive geek (etc.) without having to constantly worry about whether a given stranger was going to have a problem with one or more of those things. It wouldn't even have to be everyone--as long as I felt like at least half the population had my back for all of those things, I'd feel better As it is now, though, there's no guaranteed place or group of people where I know I'll be safe, so I feel like I have to keep my guard up at all times. And that's a pretty sucky way to live.
I loved the trip, of course, but had had quite a few instances in which I felt uncomfortable because I was the largest person in the room. Got more than a few rude stares, etc., unrelated to the tourist thing (we mostly dressed like locals, and this often happened before we spoke) which kinda dampened my mood a time or two.
This happens to me a fair amount in general, of course. The Northwest has its share of chubby folks, but we also have a lot of tree-climbing health nuts who are of the opinion that my ass is going to single-handedly (double-cheekedly?) destroy the planet. So I do get the occasional bit of flak here at home. But it's a trade-off, because every other weirdness I have is generally accepted well enough. We have a high enough geek population that open-mindedness WRT the queer, atheist, gender-non-compliant thing is pretty common, so long as you're West of the mountains.
I did get to thinking in MN, though, about how much more accepted my body might be if I lived somewhere that it weren't so unusual. If I'm 1 in 100, instead of 1 in 1000, I'm not going to stand out as much. Flak would still happen--it always does--but I wouldn't always feel like the sole target of it. For a moment, the lure of being able to walk around in public without always worrying if someone's going to harass me was pretty strong.
The problem, however, is that most of the areas with a higher population of fat folks also have a higher population of anti-queer religious folks. And they're quite often the same people. I won't speculate on why that is (though I have ideas) but the fact remains that while most of the folks I'd run into in, say, Texas might accept my surface existence, once they got past that, it'd be a whole 'nother story.
I do sometimes wish there were a magical land in which I could be a fat, queer, atheist, gender-non-compliant, progressive geek (etc.) without having to constantly worry about whether a given stranger was going to have a problem with one or more of those things. It wouldn't even have to be everyone--as long as I felt like at least half the population had my back for all of those things, I'd feel better As it is now, though, there's no guaranteed place or group of people where I know I'll be safe, so I feel like I have to keep my guard up at all times. And that's a pretty sucky way to live.
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