A few weeks ago, a person who handles forex for my sister and I posted a meme to their WhatsApp status. This was a phone number that had work contacts on the app, family members and possibly other friends who knew them in real life. The meme read, “Valentine’s Day is for skinny girls, fat girls should wait for New Yam Festival”. With a sigh of disgust, my sister showed me the meme, appalled, as we had just been to see him yesterday for a currency exchange.
Immediately, the usual thoughts went through my head when experiencing fatphobic violence from people I knew very personally. Is this how they saw me when they looked at me? Was there contempt from him, sitting right behind us in my sister’s car, discussing a few options before heading out? After being contacted, he apologized and told my sister that it was just a ‘joke’ then took the image down.
This is not the first time in February that I have encountered conversations surrounding those same opinions on the internet. In fact, even before February, there was a tweet that said that only women with flat tummies were allowed to celebrate Valentine’s Day; and that women who did not should instead feel more comfortable being celebrated on Mother’s Day. At this point I was used to it, having myself and other fat people’s bodies’ being compared to food, being told that we have the same arms as the lady who sells amala in the small shacks around people’s streets. It was not uncommon, having my belly compared to the size of a person who had already been pregnant five times. It was ingrained in me from a young age, that my body was one to be ashamed of, to hide and to ensure I passed through pain to change it.
Society also conditioned me to believe my body is unworthy of experiencing pleasure. For Valentine’s Day – a day that celebrates pleasure – I’ve been deemed unworthy of being celebrated simply because of my size. My body was unworthy of buying gifts for, having romantic experiences or connecting with partners in general unless I lost weight- a value which a lot of fat people understand the world denigrates to us.
When I was younger, I got used to not being wanted or being uncared for. To have no one express sexual (or otherwise) notions of me. I got so used to it that I felt like I had to posture, to beg for the love that is so often denied of us. During Valentine’s Day in primary school, I expected no gifts or cards, except for the occasional one from my best friend. Thankfully, I cared less because I was a child but the void grew even more serious as I approached secondary school.
In university, a whole other dynamic arose and I was certain I would never be ‘chosen’ as other people seemed to be. To say that a whole population of people, women, in this case, are excluded from an entire holiday is a violent notion indeed; so long as we choose to interrogate not only the social but also the cultural implications of that line of thought as a whole.
Valentine’s Day is a popular one where women are majorly expected to be celebrated by the people (read: men) who love them. If a woman does not have a man on that day, there are already societal repercussions concerning that. As people expect fat women to not have romantic partners but also to settle for, and accept the bare minimum, it’s particularly jarring. The assumption is clear: when it comes to desirability, we do not measure up to other women.
In fact, society feels sorry for our partners as people assume one would only deem to have a fat woman because there were no thin women available to them.
Desirability as a core of society is set up to be limiting. It tells the people who do not fit its rigid ideals that they must conform or face exclusion from the benefits awarded to those who do fit these barriers. People chase desirability as a result of these privileges, leading to unhealthy practices and lifestyles overall. However, desirability is most cruel to those who will never be able to fit its standards such as people who are fat, people who are visibly disabled etc. Even people who do fit some societal standards of beauty find themselves chasing the bits they do not have, or stifled because of lost access.
